Consulting with family businesses: What to look for, what to look out for

Abstract

In summary, consultants should be wary of consultation with family businesses. Here's some other advice for consultants, with implicit interest of course to family members and others who work with them. 1. Expect contact by people who have pain but no power, and expect only one out of ten of those contacts to turn into a more formal consultation activity. 2. Recognize the deep complexities of the family business, the multiple rivalries, the difficulties of family secrets, and the displacements of hostilities from generation to generation; be especially careful about establishing individual trusting ties before trying to bring the family together, as in a family therapy model. 3. Recognize that many of the people caught up in the conflict have only minimal commitment to each other, to the family, and to the organization; they are held together by some expected gain for their own children or because they can't give up an advantage they already have. This makes it difficult to establish a sense of common purpose, except in the narrowest sense. 4. Weigh family ties carefully. A sufficiently intense wish on the part of the family to remain together as a family with a strong sense of family pride is an optimum condition for inviting them to consider how to go about resolving some of their differences. Where commitments are weak, it may be wiser to appeal to methods that should loosen the painful ties that bind the family members together and allow them to go their respective ways free of those burdens. 5. The Gordian knot in such situations is usually the pain of the single dominant son, who most often can resolve that pain only with psychotherapeutic help. With that, it may be possible also to bring son and father — or sons and father — together to resolve some of their other differences, but as long as one or more of the sons is in a double-bind situation, movement is unlikely. 6. Don't be overoptimistic about your chances for success. It is easier for the family members to split and run than to sit together to resolve their problems. In most instances there are many outside distractions and not enough centripetal force to hold them together for problem-solving efforts. Issues of intense rivalry over years cannot be surmounted unless somehow the consultant finds' leverage that makes it most important for all involved to resolve the problems at hand. 7. Don't be disappointed if you fail.