What is family business consulting and coaching?
Running a company with family members brings unique challenges for many business owners. Finding a coach who can advise on all the usual business topics AND apply the special blend of diplomacy and directness required between family members can be difficult.
Family business coaching and consulting requires a different approach that blends the skills of a regular business coach with the more advanced mediation and diplomacy skills of a Police Officer!
Fortunately, at UK Growth Coach, the founding director Tim Rylatt has those skill sets; having been a Police Officer and Police trainer before a business coach and business owner.
Using his rather unique experience, Tim has shared some of the key issues that he has experienced during his time coaching families in business together.
What are the challenges that family businesses face?
In television production, they say it’s never wise to work with children or animals. In business, they say it’s dangerous to work with friends or family.
This is true on both counts but from the business perspective, it is doubly so.
Whilst in television there may be an embarrassment on the horizon; in business, it’s your livelihood and reputation on the line.
Working with family members or close friends brings a delicate balance that simply does not exist in other working relationships. The boundaries between professional and personal can become more blurred, and emotions and language displayed are often less guarded or professional than would ever be accepted in an employer/employee relationship.
Worse than that, the impact of a damaged relationship for family members and friends can have long-lasting, and significant personal implications. It is not unheard of for divorce, and feudal outcomes to result from business ventures resulting in conflict.
When this break-down happens, the dissolved relationship can lead to a dissolved business which can have major difficulties for employed staff who are not related to the business owners.
This is why an external, third party to provide family business consulting and coaching is really valuable. It takes the personal aspect out of the equation and allows for an objective look at things.
All in all, it’s a setting that can bring major headaches… but also can provide some amazing advantages…when done right!
Common family business topics
Whilst I’ve explained above that the impacts can be significant and long-lasting when it all goes very wrong, the truth is that most family businesses don’t result in disaster.
1. Tolerating poor performance
Rather than all-out disaster, one of the most common issues is that family-run businesses tend to cruise a little.
Where colleagues are family members, there can be a tendency for leaders and managers to not be as demanding as they should be. Often this is a result of tolerating underperformance for longer than should be the case.
2. Lack of professional structure
Another common issue is a lack of professional formality. This appears in a lack of contracts, proper job definition, support management, absence of development meetings, and so on.
This can be lead to mismanaged underperformance, but it also can lead to unreasonable and somewhat despotic leadership where truly unreasonable expectations are brought to bear where this would never be the case for an independent employee.
3. Assumed succession plan
One really common situation arises when the older family members start to look at retirement and exit planning.
At this point, the owners often realise or at least believe that their succession path relies upon their employed family members.
The expectation that the younger family members will automatically want to take over, or that they will be acceptant of a purely dictated future role for them can be a real source of fear, resentment, and delay.
4. Divergent views on the future
Even when the future leadership team is in agreement with the goal, there can be trust issues, lack of development training, and arguments over remuneration, ownership rights, roles, future direction and more.
This can be further complicated when loyal, capable, and enthusiastic non-familial staff feel cut out of their next potential career step when a perceived to be less capable family member gets the nod based on relationship.
How does family business coaching help?
The great thing about a professional coach for a family business is that they are independent. They are hired to work WITH the business, not work for the owner.
This might seem a trivial distinction, but when the rules of the game are set and agreed at the outset to be that way, it means that the family members can look to the coach for advice as well as often permitting them to behave similarly to an arbiter for the more basic issues that need diplomatic resolution.
Of course, when it comes to legal wranglings over ownership and HR issues, the coach will defer to qualified specialists in those sectors – although they may well help to ‘grease the wheels’ of resolution!
Family business consulting and coaching means that the owners can speak with someone neutral to the family issues, and professional in relation to the business issues. This sounding board, advisor and guide can really accelerate the rate at which businesses, families, and individuals reach their goals.
