Posts Tagged ‘leaders’

Losing in the family business – be right but have no team

business-man-big-jumpMany of the family business entrepreneurs we work with are very strong minded individuals who have had a lot of success in the business.  Their success further strengthens their position that their way is the right way.

The problem is there’s been an ongoing trend over the past several years of people wanting to have autonomy – the ability to make their own decisions and add their own individual fingerprints to their work.

For the stubborn family business entrepreneur this seems like a bad direction.  I hear things like “Why fix it if it isn’t broken?  Why would we possibly want to do things differently when we’ve had such success with our current way of doing it?”

I have a client right now I’m working with who has been struggling with this dilemma for quite some time.  He continues to “be right” and continues to run off talented and hard-working people who would love to help the company move forward.

And truthfully, this guy is extremely smart and knows the business well.  Many of his ideas are great ideas.

I keep reminding him that if he wants it all to be done with his ideas he may be a leadership team of one.  He knows he wants to someday successfully transition the business and I have to give him a dose of reality with the fact that if he doesn’t start letting other people do things in their own unique way they will never stick around.

We’re a bit of a victim of the way we have raised the up and coming generation. We have encouraged them to be strong minded, confident and willing to speak their mind.

So the successful family business entrepreneur needs to find a way to gently straddle that line of letting people have a say in the matter but not allowing them to make decisions that will put the company at undue risk.

In family business coaching we teach the entrepreneurs how to use the Socratic method of teaching, mentoring and coaching to use their experience and expertise to ask better questions and do a better job of developing the younger generation.  When we teach the family business to create a coaching culture it accelerates development and communication and improves business results.

I know how hard it is to watch people make mistakes but ultimately it’s one of the best ways they really learn the lessons.  Remember you have a decision – you can be right and be a one man band or you can learn how to be a better mentor and build a great team and have a successful transition! Choose wisely!

5 lessons from the family business looking back 15 years later

looking_backLife doesn’t always go the way you think it will.

I spent most of my childhood thinking that I would spend my entire career in our family business and hopefully someday run the family business.  It didn’t quite turn out that way and, when it’s all said and done, I love the way it turned out.  Don’t think that you can know the way life will turn out.  Stay open and optimistic and flexible about your life.

You can be miserable in the family business or any career for that matter.

I was so convinced a lot of my professional frustration was because of family dynamics.  When I got out and started doing business coaching in the business world I realized frustration happens because of style differences, value differences and being in the wrong       j-o-b.  It’s not always about a family member mistreating you.  It’s about you figuring out how to get along with lots of different types of people in lots of different kinds of situations.

If you’re unhappy do something about it or move on don’t just stay and be miserable.

I haven’t come across any family member in the family business that is physically chained to their desk.  Yet I work with a lot of family business participants that act like they don’t have a choice in the matter.  Get to work figuring out how to make yourself happy, change the situation or Move On life’s too short to SUFFER in a family business!

Make the most of your situation.

I spent 16 years in our family business and took it upon myself to learn how to be a strong business professional and leader.  I was fortunate that we had a very professionally run family business and it gave me the opportunity to build a strong identity and confidence as a business professional.  Every family business situation has its problems.  Find a way to make the most out of your situation and use it to make the most out of your career and your personal happiness.  I took my experience and decided to start a new career that built upon all the great experience I acquired.

Keep learning how to separate family and business.

This was something we were pretty good at as a family.  People often say to me, how can you possibly separate personal from business, you can’t.  Like many things that we teach it’s all about mindset.  Business owners and leaders make business decisions.  They don’t always sit perfectly with you from a personal standpoint and not accepting that is doing yourself, your family and your family business a disservice.  Sure if you think people are making decisions to cause you harm, I guess you should take it personally.  In the majority of cases I’ve seen, business owners are trying to make what they believe are good business decisions and other family members refuse to see that.

At the end of the day, get outside advisers and trusted business professionals to help you have objectivity about what’s going on.  You need to get further away than just your old family cronies that had been helping you for years.  You need new sets of eyes that have not been related to your family forever.

In conclusion, life’s too short to suffer in your family business.  Do whatever you can to begin to make the situation better or build your path to leaving the business.

Great coaches are coaching ALL of the time!

One of the most common mistakes I see leaders make is sitting down with some of their key performers infrequently and sporadically to discuss performance issues either positive or negative.

Great Coaches are Coaching all of the time!

Let me say that again – Great Coaches are Coaching all of the time!

If you’re going to be the kind of leader that inspires great levels of effort, performance and results, you have to be Coaching all of the time.  Frequency, consistency in your tone, message energy, and attention to detail – all of those things are going to add up to a great Coaching and great performance.