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 Governance
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Supporting Entrepreneurs in Your Family
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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:
Succession Planning for Family Office Management
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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.
Three Pathways to Evolutionary Survival: Best Practices of Successful, Global, Multi-Generational Family Enterprises
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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.
Family Governance: A Best Practice Framework for Maintaining Family Connectivity, Collaboration, and Continuity
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When it comes to reaching your family’s financial objectives and perpetuating its wealth, integrated family wealth planning is critical. A family governance system can significantly facilitate that process. This evergreen guide offers best practices and key elements of an effective family governance system, one that can be instrumental and flexible enough in equipping your family to navigate the challenges associated with family, business, financial, and legacy continuity.
Family Foundations: Building the Family Vision
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One of the most important aspects of a family’s legacy planning can be philanthropy. Family philanthropy can be thought of as the organized charitable giving by several members of a family to achieve a unified goal. It is more than the annual giving of one individual or married couple, though such giving is critically important in its own right. Perhaps the key distinguishing feature of family philanthropy is the presence of a larger collective vision.
Continuity planning requires a comprehensive and thoughtful process that should be utilized and extended beyond the family to a broader group of enterprises that will potentially impact the family for generations to come, including the family office, family business, and family foundation.
Every family has stories of success and failure, hardships and recovery, lessons learned and long forgotten, and it is these stories that enable members of the family to gain a sense of the family's uniqueness, connect with the source of the family's financial wealth, and deal with losses and transitions. The author suggests three ways to begin preserving these valuable stories.