THE DEATH OF A FAMILY BUSINESS Much has been said about the impact of family on our values. It’s equally instructive to look at the family’s impact on our habits. We’re not talking here about habits of diet, gestures or use of language. Rather, when we look at family businesses that thrive, or die, we can find unconscious patterns of business conduct that are the root cause of that success or failure. This is a natural dynamic in all businesses…of course…because the patterns of work have brought success in the past. But markets evolve, customer needs change, and the economy ebbs and flows. All businesses have habits that slow their adaptation to change. In family firms, however, family dynamics typically make newly unproductive habits harder to break. Long-term businesses of all types, including family firms, succeed because they have ingrained a productive habit of regular, focused and undistracted planning. The problem is that many family businesses start in the minds of one or two individuals, and it is in those mind that most of the planning occurs. As the business transitions to a larger scale, or to the next generation, so too must there be a transition to a thoughtful, undistracted planning process. But now, a structure needs to be adopted to insure effectiveness where multiple personalities are involved. The unfortunate habit that too many family firms have is to leave that planning process to the mind of one individual, or to the unstructured, informal conversations of a few. Follow the money. Those businesses die…unless they break the habit. The most effective “death prevention” method currently available is what has become known as the Family Business Planning Retreat where professional facilitators, coaches, and business advisors skilled in the dynamics of family firms, work with the key business leaders to map strategy, seek opportunities, and overcome problems of the business. BUILDING INNOVATIVE TEAMS (Introduction: Prelude to Greatness) Is your family business consciously involved in the process of building and supporting teams? Probably. We hope. You better be…Unless your family business is you and your wife and a vending cart, teamwork needs to be right to keep up with the pace of change and the need to grow the firm. So Congratulations! You’ve just been appointed to the team to carry out your dream project: the one project that means more to you than anything in the world. The passion you have for seeing the project through to its successful conclusion is unparalleled. Nothing is more critical to you. It’s your business and you couldn’t be happier to have more than you involved. And you’re excited about working with a team rather than by yourself, because you know the team will generate more creative and innovative solutions, thus increasing the likelihood of success. Uh-hum… So, what kind of team are you hoping to work with – a bunch of arrogant, self-righteous types? Children who can’t get past their sibling rivalry to make sound business decisions? People who try to blame everything that goes wrong on someone else? Team members who don’t let anybody know what is going on and never listen to you when you try to talk to them? How about people who won’t try anything new because they’d rather stick with the tried and true, even if it doesn’t work? Or perhaps you’d rather spend your time working with people who insist on always being the winner, even if it means the rest of the team loses. Better yet, maybe you’d rather work with people who don’t try to make things work as well as they can…once something’s in place, leave it alone, no matter how poorly it works. Maybe your preference is to be surrounded by people who suck up to you to make themselves look better and cause you to feel like the supreme emperor. Or possibly you’d like to work with people who won’t start anything important and, worse yet, won’t finish it… Team-schmeam…what, are you crazy?! Why would you willingly or knowingly subject yourself to working with such a bunch of jerks? You wouldn’t. Not willingly or knowingly…at least not if you have a choice. And you do. It’s your business. It’s your family’s firm. Unfortunately, we subject ourselves to these unproductive patterns ALL THE TIME! What’s wrong with us? Why do we sabotage our projects and our functionality by working with people who just don’t get it?! Well, there are lots of reasons. Usually it’s because we don’t have a choice of the people with whom we work. Sometimes we’re assigned to the team at work or we’re a part of a group of volunteers or that’s just the nature of the group we find ourselves in. And besides, your mother insisted that you hire your brother in laws high school kid… Darn…there just aren’t enough perfect people to go around… So, it’s true…we don’t always have a choice of the people with WHOM we work, but we do have a choice of HOW we work with them. Unfortunately, you don’t have a choice of how the other people behave…but that’s no reason to stop being a great team member yourself. “Not fair” you say. We know. Bear with us for a bit. What we’ve come to understand about groups and teams and families and innovation could fill a book (this is an excerpt…). We’ve been working with groups to make creativity happen for years, and we’ve worked with a broad range of organizations, from Fortune 10’s to family businesses to not-for-profit organizations to human service to government to healthcare to churches, to our most qualifying credential, toddlers on the playground. We find that all organizations and groups are the same in some respects, because they depend on people. And people (get ready for a radical notion here) are predictable. We bring our histories and herstories to every interaction we have. Some things we have “learned” help our interactions. Other things hurt them. There are common things that seem to get in the way of organizational greatness, and we want to address those things here. There are also common, learnable, human qualities that make individuals, groups and organizations great. We’re going to talk about those as well. And Guess what. Once we let go of the notion that we must play by the usual (uh-um…dysfunctional…) group rules-norms-practices, amazing things happen. Namely, we do great things, move (figuratively, of course…) mountains, achieve innovative results, succeed like never before, and enjoy what we’re doing! Get outta town! No, really: It’s true. We read about it in the Enquirer. Can you believe it?! Sound like something worth pursuing? We think so. So here, then, is a quick overview of our seven guidelines for working together, our rules for creating an Innovation Team. Each of these guidelines will be explored in depth in our upcoming newsletters. SURRENDER TO YOUR HUMANITY Let’s face it – nobody’s perfect. Yet, amazingly, we expect perfection of ourselves and everyone else we deal with (be honest, now…). And we’re unwilling to settle for anything less. This would be fine except that IT HAS NO BASIS IN REALITY! You’re human…so are your team members, family members (even the ones you raised) and our non-family employees; human beings make mistakes. Unrealistic expectation creates an unworkable group attitude of resentment. In the words of the Anti-Martha Stewart…this is NOT a good thing. And we’re so good at excusing our own mistakes while finding it impossible to understand how other people could do such idiotic things. The Mott We’re all human…we all make mistakes. That’s just the way it is. UNDERSTAND RESPONSIBILITY We really have only one responsibility: to choose how we react to everything that happens around us. We can rarely control the events that occur in our lives, just how we choose to interpret what it means for us, and how we react. A bus hit you? Yikes! Nothing you can do about that but choose your reaction: • Ouch! Life sucks! • Whoops! I should’ve been more careful. • The bus driver is a moron! I’m calling my lawyer! • Whoopee! I don’t have to go to work for the next three months – I’ll be in traction! • Clearly the universe is trying to tell me something; look both ways before crossing the street How you react to ANY situation is your choice. And only yours. Did the bus hit you? Yes! Is there anything you can do to change that? No! Can you control how you react/feel about it? Yes, you can! And in fact, you do, whether you realize it consciously or not. Do you really have any other options? Well, now, that depends on your healthcare coverage. The Mott You can react to “life” however you want, so make the reaction a positive one! CONSCIOUS LISTENING/CLEAR SPEAKING Communication is hard. Though we here at Adiroindack Business Consultants have been doing it all our lives, studying it, teaching it, we still blow it (c’est impossible!!). Not occasionally. Regularly. Don’t believe it? Ask our clients (ask our spouses and kids…). Especially when we’re sure we “already know what they’re going to say.” So how do we manage to get it right when we do? Focus on a) listening and only listening. Forget about responding. Forget about trying to solve it. Just listen. Then focus on b) clearly expressing yourself in a way that makes it possible for you to be heard. That means communicating clearly, crisply, and then checking to make sure you were understood. The Mott We need to LISTEN to UNDERSTAND, then SPEAK so we can be understood. Then we need to make sure everybody got it right! CULTIVATE RISK-TAKING Playing it safe doesn’t accomplish innovation and creativity. It breeds the status quo. Not quite what we’re going for is it? More important than just tolerating mistakes (see Rule #1 above…) is encouraging them and, in fact, striving for them! Setting a quota of mistakes (we use a quota of 30 mistakes per hour…) that you not only CAN make but in fact WILL make, will get you closer to new discoveries, new ways of doing things, reinventing how to be, and learning anew. When you go in multiple directions, all but one of them is “wrong”, but you can’t find the “right” one unless you move. The Mott If we do not risk, we do not evolve. When we cease evolving, we cannot meet the new challenges of an evolving world. When we cannot meet those challenges, we die. EXPECT WIN/WIN You’ll notice that these don’t get any easier. Here it’s simple. Really, really hard, but simple. Don’t try to win at all costs. Unless you’re trying for EVERYONE to win at all costs. So that no one loses. Not you, not the other person, not the buyer, not the seller, not even your enemies. Make life and work about trying to set up an environment where people are in it for everyone to be successful. So that everybody wins and so that today’s loser doesn’t become tomorrow’s mean-and-vindictive-out-to-get-you-bastard-from-hell-on-wheels. Hey, you never know what situation you’ll be in tomorrow and with whom you’ll have to work. The Mott In order for us to be successful, everybody has to be the big winner (unlike the lottery…). STRIVE FOR CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT The proverbial ball never stops moving. You want your spouse to grow, grow yourself. Your competitor’s quality level never stays the same. Your need to serve your customers never diminishes. The budget almost never goes up. And resources usually shrink. Need more reasons to keep trying to make things better? How about one more: being satisfied with the way things are has NEVER MADE THIS PLACE A BETTER WORLD. This was written on a Boeing 757 – thank heaven nobody decided that Wilbur and Orville’s original Wright Flyer was good enough. Now if only someone can invent a bag of peanuts that’s easier to open… The Mott It’s never perfect: it can always be better. START…FINISH…START AGAIN So, does that make sense? Think you’ve got it? Happy with where you are? Great. You’re done! Hah! ‘Fraid not…the world doesn’t stay the same, and you’re never done growing, learning, and moving forward. There are two kinds of people in the world: people who are growing up and people who are stuck. There are no “grown ups.” So, celebrate when you’ve accomplished your goals (that’s important!), and then set new ones and begin again. Overcome the new found arrogance precipitated by your recent improvements. The world keeps advancing (see Rule #6 above) and you need to as well. Or be left in the dust, pardner! Imagine that family legacy: a value system that keeps people focused on developing themselves, growing, till the day they die. Leaving a legacy of wisdom, seeking of knowledge, value of elders…that’s a nice bottom line to pursue as well. The Mott You’re never perfect: you can always be better. These basic tenets are what working together for innovation is all about. They’re just that simple and basic. And just so incredibly difficult that we all have to spend our entire lives working on them. If these things were easy, we woulnd’t find ourselves so frustrated at other people and beating our (figurative) heads against the wall when trying to work in groups. These things take work, but it’s worth it. Cleverly concealed in these guidelines are all the things that we know are important. All the"motherhoods” that we all aspire to like trust, teamwork, communication, openness, creativity, patience, loyalty, yada, yada, yada. These are the things that build great families as well as great businesses. These are things that everybody talks about and puts in their mission statements and vision statements and values statements, but these are the things that few of us consistently put to action. Why? Because they’re hard and, more to the point, because we never really get it. Because we’re never done! The second we all think we understand it and really know how to do it, we’re stuck in the trap. And that means we don’t know how to do it. Damn! Curses! Foiled again! This doesn’t mean it’s hopeless, just that we SHOULD be continually deepening our understanding of how to make these things happen for ourselves. So, want to know more? The next article is on the way… Call us at 1-800-254-5567 for a no-charge, no-obligation conference where we can discuss your business and family planning needs. We will help you determine where you can profit from our assistance.