Family businesses can use transparency to make their business successful!
As happens so many times, many of us start in business with a partner or partners—usually consisting of trusted friends or family members.
We do that for good reasons—we often need the financial resources and capital that one or more people can bring to the business. In addition, we often need certain skill sets and expertise family members can bring into the business. It is not uncommon for one person to have skill in accounting or finance while the other has just the seemingly opposite skill set in sales or people management. Just like marriage, we find that opposite personalities and skill sets attract each other.
Family members are also trusted confidants and act, importantly so, as reservoirs for emotional support. Starting a small business is stressful, full of risk and fraught with multiple important decisions. It feels good, and frankly is good, to have a family member in which a person can confide and in whom he or she can lean upon when the stress levels start pushing over capacity.
Finally, family members are also great people to have around when things are good. What makes life better than to share stories and journeys of success with people that we love?
However, and predicable even as we read here, many partnerships, even those among close family members, can become distant, sour or even hateful. There are many stories of brothers or siblings or married couples who will no longer speak to each other because of heated business disputes.
How does that happen? How does a once loved sibling turn into a hated, or at the very least, disliked, business partner?
There are hundreds of answers to that question but one thing seems, at least for the scope of this writing, clear which is that many of these relationships fail because of unmet expectations or under performance by one or all of the parties involved.
How does a family business fix performance issues when real personal relationships are involved. How does a father or mother tell a child or grandchild that his performance is lacking without damaging a wonder (out of the business) relationship?
The answer to this question is tricky, tricky, tricky, but one concept to consider is what we like to call transparent management.
What is transparent management? In short, it includes coming up with key performance goals and then making those goals transparent. To make the game fair, everyone’s performance goals—fathers, mothers, siblings, cousins, grandchildren, etc.—must be transparent.
There is much more to discuss here of course but consider how this might change everything. Ponder how this might help and contact us for more explanation—we want to help.
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