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 Learning
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Understanding what drives behaviors is a starting point for establishing acceptable family norms as well as addressing the unacceptable. It also may provide insight that can help reduce conflict, establish better communication patterns, and increase levels of trust among family members.
This 2011 FOX Fall Forum session explored the link between family engagement and emotional stewardship. It also examined the role of education and communication in enhancing emotional ownership.
Preparing the Next Generation
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Families that successfully manage generational planning actively foster communication and trust within the family, identify shared values that define the family, take time to establish a thoughtful family governance system and give younger members the opportunity to have an impact through active participation in family affairs.
Destabilizing Excessive Trust in a Wealth Creator
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In a series of articles, the author has written about problems of trust and distrust in family enterprises. In the third in the series, he discusses a fictionalized case of an owner who resists forming, or even learning about, professional family offices. The article analyzes ways advisors can persist (without being fired) in raising the issues a founder needs to address for the family's long-term health.
Addressing Family Conflicts in Wealth Planning
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Suggestions for how to preserve a family legacy across generations include not letting shared assets become liabilities, recognizing that family businesses are businesses, communicating in the way that works best for family members, acknowledging family dynamics and choosing trustees carefully.
The New Family Website: Communication Without Worry
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A growing number of families use social networking sites to stay connected and share personal and business information. For ultra-wealthy families, however, the risks involved with public websites can be significant. In this 2010 FOX Financial Executives Forum session, Mr. Thijssen reviews how advancements in technology make the creation of a family website easier and provide greater security and confidentiality for data sharing.
A paper from The Madison Group says the ability of family members to meet, discuss and make decisions about issues is a critical component of long-term harmony in the family. Discussion begins with the individual members learning the skills to "show up" in a positive way and is carried through in a process that can be trusted and honored.
In addition to having an external mission, many family foundations create an internal one specifying how the foundation will function in family-building, education and the transfer of family values from one generation to the next. Foundation Source offers concrete examples of how some families are using their foundations to make a difference within the family as well as in the external world.
At its best, family philanthropy provides families with an opportunity to reinvigorate their grantmaking, inviting the contribution of fresh and original ideas and approaches from younger generations, and bringing families together in pursuit of a mission inspired by common values. Research conducted for Credit Suisse shows the diversity of experience of family philanthropists around the globe.