Family Matters

As a part of a succession planning project, I spent four hours with a client and his family helping them better understand one another. We used assessment data to highlight the different personalities around the table. We talked about why he could appear scattered while his wife appeared rigid. We talked about the fact that when their daughter was stressed out, she got expressive and aggressive while their son retreated to his room.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.This is an incredibly well-crafted 10-word quote attributed to Gandhi. I don’t know if he opened his mouth and that fine sentence just slithered out or if it was thoughtfully designed and dropped delicately into a conversation that is now memorialized. Either way, these words, hanging out together, are brilliant and carry a meaning that few other words strung together could ever hope to achieve.

My kids love to play “make-believe”. They create fantasy worlds, allowing their imaginations to run wild with endless possibilities. It is beautiful to watch them transform a couch into a fort to be defended or turn an empty paper towel roll into a weapon to slay mythical beasts. Unfortunately, the older we get, the less we play make-believe and our ability to expand our thinking beyond the present lessens with age. However, we haven’t lost the ability to pretend – we simply forgot that the here and now is not the only way to look at life.

Putting your clothes away each day is oddly important, with ramifications that act like all-encompassing tentacles enveloping every aspect of your life. I never realized this until the other day when I had a chat with my son. Let me play back the talk…"Henry, we need to chat. I’ve noticed that most of your toys, books, and clothes are scattered all over the room. You have a pile over here, a pile over there… you literally have underwear hanging from a lamp. You’re the epitome of a college kid and you’re only five.”

That little star is synonymous with parents and their children. Rarely has a father or mother raised a child without singing that song at least a handful of times. The six illustrious notes of the song could be played almost anywhere, and odds are most people could snag that tune from thin air in under four fingers on the keys. However, a Stanford study shows us that when you tap your finger to the tune without striking a key, only 2.5% of people are able to identify the song. That tune you’re humming in your head as you tap your finger is just that, a tune in your head. You hear it perfectly as you tap and cannot fathom someone not knowing the song, but the reality is, the listener just hears tap, tap, tap.

While it may not seem obvious, employees and potted plants are similar. Staggeringly so. Let me explain. First, their presence can sometimes go unnoticed. Second, if exposed to harsh conditions, they suffer. Third, you need to be measured and consistent in the way you interact with them, or again, they suffer. Fourth, the more attention you give them, the healthier they become.

For all my finance friends, please forgive me while I bastardize the definitions of Market Makers (“Makers”) and Market Takers (“Takers”), I’m using these terms loosely to make a point, a point I hope will make an impact.Let’s be honest, the world feels pretty messed up right now. Masks on or off (or maybe just hanging loosely around the mouth to catch bits of food)? COVID; seriously, where to begin? To vaccinate or not? Putin, strategic or insane? The great resignation or aspiration? Zelensky, hero or…well, never mind, just hero. The fact is things are not normal, and we’re all taking in an inordinate amount of data that is outside our control.

Last Thursday when I got home from work my five-year-old son, Henry, wanted to learn about the deep sea. He’s enamored by fish, the ocean, the midnight and abyssal zones (yes, those are real layers within the ocean), space, animals, snakes (argh) and anything else mother universe can throw at us. Yesterday afternoon: the ocean. After watching some educational videos on what lies beneath the sea, we naturally ended up finding a video about the Titanic and whether a kraken was actually the source of its sinking. I kid you not. For those of you without a five-year-old son, a kraken is a legendary sea monster of epic proportions. It also happens to be a Bitcoin trading platform and a very mediocre hockey team based in Seattle, but we’re more interested in the sea monster kraken for now. Anyhow, a quick flick of the finger sent that rubbish back to where it belonged, but we did end up learning quite a bit about the Titanic and its true demise, the infamous iceberg.

With an emphasis on teams and inclusion, there has recently been a push to use language that includes we and us to demonstrate the focus on teams, collaboration, and inclusion. For example, “we need to do a better job at x, y or z.” However, this drive for inclusive, collective language has a time and place, and its overuse comes at the detriment of individual performance.

Imagine for a minute that you decide to manage your kids like you manage your employees, providing a performance review once a year.Let’s play out the script…Well, Patrick, it’s been a year. For starters, I’d like to point out a couple things you’ve done well. First, you passed your exams and are on to the next grade, congratulations! Second, we love that you and your sister are getting along so well. It is great to see, and we can’t thank you enough for being so sweet to her.

In 1996, the musical Rent won the Tony Award for Best Musical. Its creator won Best Book of a Musical as well as Best Original Score. Cast members were nominated for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical, Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical, Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical, Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, Best Direction of a Musical, Best Choreography, and Best Lighting Design. It was also nominated for 10 Drama Desk Awards, the highest honors for a New York theater production, and won six of them. And perhaps most notably, Rent also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, only one of four Pulitzer’s awarded that year. Rent was one of the longest-running productions on Broadway, grossing over $280,000,000.

We were sitting around a large, custom-designed table in a beautifully appointed boardroom. You could see the cold autumn wind blowing the trees outside the office as a single, well-placed comment heated up the room. The topic was one individual’s decision related to his family business and the remark came from a member of the peer group comprised of family business executives whose storied family companies are staples of their industries in the US and around the world. The group meets quarterly to discuss topics germane to family businesses – family dynamics, succession planning, estate planning, etc. – as well as topics germane to any organization – how to grow, how to inspire teams and leaders, and how to build cultures that will last. This group of family leaders has been meeting for years with a single aim: support one another through family and organizational dynamics with the goal of sharing knowl