Archive for January 21, 2015

| January 21, 2015
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Parents in a new context

Viewing your parents through the world’s eyes

 

Do you remember when you were a kid and the way you looked at your parents? Your dad maybe was the strongest man in the world, invincible. Your mom could make anything delicious and no matter how badly you got hurt she made everything better. Slowly but surely as you grew up you may have become disillusioned to the mystique your parents possessed in your life. Perhaps even as you got older you began to grow annoyed at the little things your parents would or would not do.

Personally when I was a teenager I grew exhausted with my dad’s incessant life lessons and coaching when I didn’t ask for it. His apparent need to share the details of my life with random people as if he had no care for my feelings what so ever or the embarrassment he caused. As kids we laughed at him when we’d get lost in the car and he’d say: “we’re not lost we’re just meandering our way there”. Despite the perception that he had at home it never occurred to me to think about how he was perceived in his professional life.

Allow me for a moment to provide a little back-story. My dad is a former Presbyterian minister; he eventually transitioned from this line of work into an educational and consultative role where he worked with family businesses. When we were kids we were all for the most part too young to ever really see him preach, all we ever heard was that he was incredibly long winded. Only two of us ever really got to see him teach, my sister and I had the pleasure to take an elective course that he guest taught while we were in college.

I’ve said in a previous blog post that when I transitioned into this field the first articles I read my dad was cited eight different times. What I came to find out is that in my dad’s professional world he wasn’t a joke, or a family punch line. In fact people paid him for those life lessons I’d been receiving for free, and the stories he was telling about my life were a means to convey his personal trials as a parent to the families he worked with. In all honesty I never saw the man my dad truly was until I started working with him and watched him teach his graduate students. I sat in the back of a classroom captivated by the person in front of me, I couldn’t stop smiling. This wasn’t the same man at all that raised me, this man had a presence about him, this man was eloquent, and every word this man said was respected.

I saw my dad in a new context, I saw my dad on his stage and in his world. Some parents allow their kids to only see one side of them, some kids just get dad; sadly other kids only get the CEO or President. My challenge is to any kid that only ever saw dad, try as hard as you can to experience your parents in their other context. Revel in the experience and take in their presence as if you’re that little kid again and everything they do is magnificent and new. You may get the rare opportunity to see a wild animal in their natural habitat; it can be truly exhilarating.

I hope that I get the opportunity to continue doing this line of work forever. But if for some odd reason I was forced to change careers tomorrow, the few years that I’ve had to watch my dad work on his professional stage have been worth their weight in gold. I feel like I’ve gotten a glimpse into his life that was missing before this time. I cannot encourage you enough to open that door with an open mind and the same sense of wonderment you one possessed.

Enjoy

 

Productive Summary

 

  • Remember that how you see your mom or dad may not be how their professional world sees them.
  • Seek out opportunities to see them in another context, specifically as you may start working with them.
  • Enjoy the new side of them you see, get excited to alter the course of your relationship as you connect on a different level or in a new way
Category: At Work, Family Dynamics, Personal Identity |
| January 14, 2015
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Degrees of Entrepreneurial Flexibility

Balancing Personal and Professional Choices

 

After starting with decision and then exploring peership it was tough to decide which topic to cover next. I thought that if you have now decided to dive into the family business or even if you didn’t it might be a good idea to explore Degrees of Entrepreneurial Flexibility. This topic is actually one of my favorites because it is one that I’ve had many comical interactions with. I haven’t mentioned yet that my current business venture is not my first attempt to be an entrepreneur. At one time I attempted to start a construction management company; obviously I was not successful. At the outset of the project my dad was acting as an advisor and he was kind enough to have a very direct and honest conversation with me. The conversation we had was concerning degrees of entrepreneurial flexibility.

He said that if you dive into a new venture you have to consider how you limit your degrees of entrepreneurial flexibility. If you decided to get married, that’s a limitation. If you decide to buy a house, that’s a limitation. If you decide to get a dog, that’s a limitation. If you decide to have kids, that’s a limitation. He wasn’t saying don’t do any of those things just remember that each responsibility you add to your life is another thing you’re putting on the line with your new venture. You see at that point in my life I was a year out of college, I quickly paid of my debt, got engaged, got married, bought a car, bought a house, and got a dog. He was a dad and a smart business mind watching me make two paths of decisions and at some point I would come to a crossroad. In that moment I had to be prepared for the fact that what I wanted professionally may not be possible because of what I had decided personally and I might have to give something up. Thankfully that wasn’t my moment to be a wildly successful entrepreneur and I didn’t have to make that hard decision.

I’m not saying, like my dad wasn’t saying; don’t put your life on hold in order to take a leap for your career. The message here is to remember to enter each stage of life and each major decision with honest expectations. Imagine for a moment my business did start to take off, but the only place I could get the money to make that dream happen was to sell my house. If my wife isn’t okay with selling the house then I’ve got a pretty big problem don’t I? Monitoring your degrees of entrepreneurial flexibility in life will always be important, learn to weigh your options both personally and professionally. This might seem obvious to some but to others like me that believe they can always have their cake and eat it too it is an important life lesson.

 

Practical Summary

 

  • Listen to your elders with gracious humility, they have more years of experience than you could ever buy
  • Don’t be afraid to take a professional leap, just make sure your expectations are in line with your choices
Category: At Work, Personal Identity |
| January 7, 2015
Comments Off on Peership

Peership

Learning to engage your parents as a peer

The concept of Peership seems like gibberish and as I define it, it will seem unattainable to some readers. Peership is the relationship process where two individuals that are not technically peers (typically parents and children) learn to act and eventually function as peers. This concept to some seems totally foreign, you know where you stand with your parents and you are not a peer. Others are thinking, easy peasy, I got this, no problem, my parents are like my best friends and we communicate perfectly.

I can tell you from personal experience that for those who view this concept as unattainable there’s a solution for you, and for anyone that thinks they already have it together there’s always more to learn. Let me start first with those that think I’m bringing a concept from Mars; peership is hard to achieve and takes a lot of work. In fact in order to achieve a peership relationship you and your counterpart, have to both work as hard as you’ve worked towards anything else in your life. I have a peership relationship with my father, but it has taken us roughly 20 years to get there. My mother on the other hand thinks the concept of peership is “hogwash”; parents and children should always function as parents and children. She will never stop being my mother according to her. Her point is valid; at one level she will not stop being my mom. On another level though your parents should not treat you the same when you’re 5, 13, 18, 25, 30, 45, and 50 the relationship has to evolve and sometimes unfortunately they don’t.

I think in some ways my father and I working together has fast tracked our peership relationship, but even going into our professional agreement we were talking and treating one another with the mutual respect of peers. The conversations we’re capable of having as a father and son have baffled many people we’ve worked with. Even though we’ve managed to make this transition for the most part successfully we are still not perfect and require constant work on our relationship. This weekend for example we have a conversation scheduled to discuss his mentoring successes and failures towards me, our future working relationship, and future strategies for my business model and how it will impact his work. I know going into this conversation that we’ll walk out with a mutual understanding and a future game plan that we both agree on. I KNOW this, not I hope for this, or I wish for this, I KNOW 100% that our conversation will be a success for both of us. I know this because we have worked very hard on our relationship and our communication. He can give me feedback and stop me when I start to get overbearing and dogmatic. I can give him feedback and stop him when he gets dismissive and controlling. I can honestly say of the relationships where I don’t view myself as a peer, or I’m not viewed as a peer the only outcome I can predict is a negative one, other than that everything is an unknown.

The future posts here will describe in greater detail the ways that you achieve a peership relationship with the family that you work with. Practical application for today is simply this: if you want to be treated as a peer start acting like a peer.   Think of a hypothetical situation for a moment. If you’re working for your dad and you’re not being treated as a peer (according to you) have you done the things necessary to command the respect that comes with being a peer? Do you show up late? Do you dress professionally, and not professionally for Justin Bieber I mean professionally for Warren Buffet? Do you complain when you’re given dirty work? Do you ever volunteer to do the dirty work? The reason why I list these questions is not because I know that this is the work ethic that every parent values, I ask these questions because these are things that anyone would do to get ahead in their job if they weren’t working for their parents. I cannot change my mother’s view of peership, or force her to treat me as a peer. But if I still act like a 12 year old boy asking her to do my laundry, schedule appointments for me, and tell me how to do everything then what choice does she have but to treat me like a 12 year old boy. Instead I choose to act like a grown man, I accept her advice based upon years of life experience and include that data with all other data I have collected to make my decisions. I treat my mother’s advice as if I were receiving it from a more seasoned friend and give it no more power over my life than that.

I cannot emphasize enough that the concept of peership is critical to your success working with your parents or anyone that has had cause to view you not as a peer in the past. In order to reach a peership relationship with someone you both will have to work incredibly hard. The work starts with you though, and your commitment to act like a peer. If you don’t know what that looks like just ask the person who you’re trying to have that type of relationship with. Identify a peer in their life and ask what that person has done to earn the respect of your desired peer relationship. Try to avoid the question of “what do I have to do to be a peer”, I think you’ll find the response could be dismissive. Instead try and model your behavior after someone you’ve seen be successful at becoming a peer, the relationship will start to evolve on it’s own from there.

Best of Luck

 

Practical Summary

  • Peership takes a lot of work and effort from both parties
  • Peership requires constant communication and honesty to maintain a high level of mutual respect
  • If you want to be treated like a peer, start by acting like a peer
Category: Communication, Family Dynamics |