Step 3 Cont’d: Improve your Familiness Advantage
Many family businesses begin informally, when one or more of the children enter the business to help after school and during summers. Time moves on, and before you know it, your adult child has been working in the business for several years. At this stage, they may have even made it their career path … selected intentionally or by default. This is happening at the very same time you are grappling with what’s next for you and the business …
Do you sell?
Do you pass off to your child – do they even want it?
Are they ready to handle ownership responsibilities? Do they even know what this looks like and the responsibilities that come with this?
Why would you burden your child with all of its responsibilities, struggles, stressors and uncertainties that you are currently navigating?
Legacy In Motion - Step 3 “Build upon what’s working”
In my previous article here, you learned that small tweaks create momentum and progress, rather than implementing large scale changes abruptly. We presented a few tips to improve your meeting structures, plan for special projects that build your team’s core skills and provided a tool you can use during your next meeting to make sure important but difficult conversations are taking place.
In this article we outline a few more tools that help to reduce the friction and tensions your family business is facing, while you navigate the questions above that stem from the lack of clarity over the future. In fact, unclear expectations, roles and decision-making are often silent killers of your Familiness Advantage that happen slowly, then all of a sudden. When does this friction reach a point of action for you?
Here are a two areas to help reduce the friction and tensions. I provide templates for each you can use right away with your team to get started.
Roles & Responsibilities: RACI Worksheet
For each key category of your operations, you can create a document that will outline who has: Responsibility, Accountability, Who should be Consulted, Who needs to be Informed? You can create a “Current State”, then introduce options for crafting a “Future State”. See below for a simple template you can use to get a good start.
Decision Making: Decision-making Framework
Your group co-creates a process that answers the following questions: Which decisions will we make together? How will we arrive at these decisions? How will we make these decisions stick and learn from the process for next time?
Example template for RACI Worksheet
Example Decision-making Process
I know what you might be thinking: simple, yet not very easy to apply, given your team or your family dynamic.
Consider starting slowly, with smaller roles / categories, and smaller, less impactful decisions. By doing so, you are building your team’s collective capabilities and boosting trust levels needed for larger role categories and decisions.
Consider it a win if you can:
Visualize how these two documents could be put to use right away
Get ahead of important decisions AND you gain important buy-in from the very people that will implement it
You can anticipate potential challenges in using the RACI worksheet with your team - and are willing to address these head-on
Still uneasy about getting started? Have no fear! I am hear to help you navigate these so you make even the slightest progress on these or the other tools mentioned in the previous article. Please reach out anytime to chat by clicking here.