While family businesses are playing an important role in the economy and studies have regularly shown that in the long-term they outperform other businesses, there is the continual challenge of succession to the next generation. An estate is built up over the generations and the family grows larger. This source of diversity is not without its challenges: how do you forge a common identity to which everyone can relate? How do you learn to take decisions together while maintaining family harmony?
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There is the age old stigma that wealth can bring or buy happiness. But, we hear it time and time again: money doesn’t buy happiness. The lack thereof may create unhappiness, but the presence of wealth does not necessarily have the opposite effect. Wealth does not create happiness nor does it provide the meaning of life. It may provide opportunities, but that does not guarantee happiness or meaning. Senior Wealth Dynamics Coach Amy Zehnder looks at the prospects of turning wealth into happiness.
Taking time to tell family stories, and finding interesting ways to record them for subsequent generations, can serve as a foundation for family members to bond and identify with each other. Stories can engender in family members an appreciation for their own unique “differentness” of identity from those outside of the family. This shared sense of unique family history can aid the family in their quest to break the curse of the third generation.
Leadership succession is perhaps the most uniquely challenging issue a family faces. It transcends the business of wealth management to touch on personal issues of family dynamics and engagement. It is for this reason that you need a clear, transparent and understandable plan for making a change in leadership, one that helps you balance preserving your legacy with preserving family harmony. In this 2012 FOX Fall Forum session, Karen Neal and Margaret Vaughan Robinson of the Family Office Exchange detailed a roadmap to help create a successful plan.Some key takeaways:
Family leaders are finding that to cultivate family members’ interests, talents, dreams and careers to their fullest potential, they need to constantly develop new strategies, new roles, and new understandings.
The trustee and beneficiary relationship has great potential to be personally rewarding for both parties. It can also be very challenging. The path for success starts with some crucial conversations about what’s involved in the trustee role. This 2012 FOX Fall Forum session looked at the critical steps grantors, beneficiaries and trustees must take to ensure each party is educated, engaged and accountable.Some key takeaways:
When a company loses it CEO or owner due to death or incapacitation and that person is still involved in the operations of the business, it results in what is defined as an unplanned or emergency succession. Unplanned and emergency succession have a unique set of challenging dynamics most of which adversely affect the business. The second of a two-part series on leadership during unexpected or emergency successions, this article lays out some possible courses of action a successor CEO can take to manage the challenges and mitigate the negative consequences.
As the baby boomers retire, many family office and multi-family office executives in key roles who have served the same clients for years will be leaving their roles. This change has significant implications for family members who lean on these leaders for insight and comprehensive knowledge of the family’s interests, advisors who look to them to coordinate services and the staff who rely on their leadership. In this 2012 FOX Fall Forum session, Jill Barber of CYMI, Ltd.
Putting together an “operating” succession plan is just one step in the business succession process. The rubber really meets the road in its execution and when the operating leadership is successfully transitioned. In a perfect world the management transition is planned and occurs over time. However, when the CEO or businesses owner unexpectedly dies or faces a terminal illness, succession is far more likely to fail. This increased likelihood of failure is often directly the result of the almost impossible position the successor CEO is put into.
Are you doing everything you can to sustain your family relationships and your wealth? This study provides a look at the 15 best practices that 192 members of the world's most successful multi-generational families - members of Family Office Exchange and the Family Business Network - rely on and view as important for the future. A copy of the survey is included so that you can benchmark your family's use of these practices relative to your peers.