Archive for March 25, 2015

| March 25, 2015
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Power of The Name

The access and respect given to you with your name

 

I have three related topics; one I’ll cover this week and the others over the next two weeks. The topic for this week is The Power of Your Family Name. If your last name is Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Ford, or Firestone chances are you’ve had a conversation about the power of your family name. Growing up I always wanted to have an epic family name, as if one day someone would pull up and tell us we were some long lost descendent of some powerful King or something along those lines. But having worked in this industry for a little while now I’ve come to see that you don’t have to have an epic family name, or be of noble descent in order to have power in your family name.

In most circles the name Habbershon is not interesting or meaningful in anyway. But in the family-business coaching world it garners enough respect that I need to tread lightly in those circles. I’ve had multiple encounters with people connecting with me here and there trying to get connected to my father. I have had experiences professionally that I wouldn’t otherwise have if it weren’t for my last name. I’ve also been given respect that I haven’t earned because of my last name.

For those Spiderman fans out there you know that with great power comes great responsibility. At some point in time someone in your family did something to warrant an abundance of respect associated with your family name. In my case, in my professional circle it is my father. I have, and you have an obligation to respect their hard work and act responsibly around that family name. When I started this blog I had two intentions, the first was to offer a different perspective on topics I hear taught regularly. The second reason is this represents an opportunity for me to make a name for myself. However, because I share the same name as my father, I showed him the necessary respect of him and our name and discussed this with him first. I may be (I’m not by the way) infringing upon his name with the topics I choose to write about or the things that I say.

I recently had a friend talk to me about how he wished he had a family connection like mine in his own professional setting. He kept talking about how he would take advantage of that opportunity if it were presented to him. You may recall from the Decision post when I talked around the thought process of taking the easy road and just following in your parent’s footsteps. If you remember what I said, there’s nothing easy about deciding to follow in your family’s footsteps. I said it then, and I’ll repeat it here; I used to think I had to do something on my own, separate from the work my father did. But that idea would mean I’d be passing up a foundation that my father laid through his own hard work. Rather than start totally new making a name for myself, why not build off of the powerful name that has already been created. Understand though that this is not an easy task. You will be weighed, and you will be measured against that name always. Expectations will be heaped upon you. In addition to that, there will be some around you that discount anything you do because “your name is the only reason you’re here.”

To anyone brave enough to walk this road and brave the expectations, to carry the weight of responsibility, and to endure foundationless ridicule I say: “good for you, let’s talk.” For anyone that chose a different path from their parents, and maybe want to blaze their own trail I say: “good for you, we should still talk.” There is an alternative perspective to mine, and it’s the person that decides to not enter the arena of their family name. There will still be times when you cannot escape your name, and that is okay. Don’t always feel like you have to. The one thing I wanted to convey with this post more than anything is that your family name is exciting and unique. Maybe it has a terrible reputation, maybe you are a Rockefeller, and maybe no one knows who you are. No matter what the case learn to be excited for your family history and whatever power comes with that.

 

Practical Summary

  • Your name has power, sometimes more than you may be aware of.
  • Respect the power of your name and act responsibly when using it.
  • It is not easy to follow in the family name, know that you are making a difficult choice for a tough road.
Category: Family Dynamics, Legacy, Personal Identity |
| March 18, 2015
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Communication

How to have effective conversations

 

Human beings learn to communicate literally the moment they are born. My son that was just recently born knows how to get his diaper changed and get food. He may not directly associate his 3 AM squawking to food, but when he’s hungry all he does is cry and someone gives him milk. My daughter who is a little over two can communicate a much broader range of desires, even emotions and feelings. At two she can already tell me she’s sad, she wants “somey” milk, or she can ask: “what’s that daddy?” to the large noise she heard outside. No wonder why we think we are communication experts, because we’ve been doing it our entire lives. And yet, despite our years of experience we take on challenging conversations or communication problems with the same skill my two year old might, and for some as skillfully as my newborn would.

My favorite analogy is this: a novice golfer getting out of his car, putting his bag on a cart, pulling up to the first tee box, gives his body a stretch here and a stretch there, and then swinging at the tiny infuriating ball at his feet and expecting the ball to travel with the same velocity and accuracy that Tiger Woods would expect (prior to his career melting down). The fact is Tiger Woods has spent years of his life dedicated to that single shot you just hit into the woods. Not only that but he would never get out of his car and walk right up to a tee box Thursday morning of The Masters. He will have regulated his meals for a week prior, his sleep, his outfit, and how much swinging he’s done. Everything about that shot is calculated down to the finest variable. When you think about how you communicate, and the conversations you have surrounding your family business or your inheritance I DO NOT want you to treat them as if you’re deciding to go to Dairy Queen or not. I want you to treat them with the same level of commitment and calculation that Tiger Woods puts into one shot. I also want you to understand that you are as much of a novice at communicating, as my daughter would be at golf. What I am about to walk through may seem obvious, but in practice, in the moment it’s no more obvious than how to hit a perfect draw 230 yards into the wind.

The first thing to practice in these conversations is how we communicate. Your tone, facial expression, gestures, and conversational context are all communicating just as much as your words. If I say “I Love You” to my wife, but scream it at her after we’ve just fought, the sentiment probably isn’t hitting home. Notice though that I didn’t just say tone, your body language and especially the context of conversation implies a lot as well. I have had multiple frustrating strategy and business development conversations with my father while driving him to the airport. From the context I just provided, what impressions would you take away? Personally, my first impression is that what I find to be critically important to my professional career is not that important to him. If something is important, you make time for it. I understand that utilizing my dad as a resource and sounding board for my business development doesn’t stack up against his actual job in importance. But it is the highest level of importance to me, so I would hope it would land higher on his list of priorities than a 45 min car ride to the airport. There’s a heap of emotional baggage from my own life wrapped up there, but you can see how even the slightest detail can alter the meaning and intentions behind a statement or action. Schedule time to have the important conversations the right way.

The next point is harder to grasp. I understand that once I say this there will be a million “what if” questions floating around. For the moment ignore them and take this point at face value. Be as transparent and honest as possible. I know, sometimes you’re talking with someone and they shouldn’t know all of the details. That is not what I’m talking about here. I’m referring to your thoughts and feelings. Coupled with kind language, tone, and atmosphere an honest and transparent statement about what you are feeling or thinking is an incredibly powerful tool for building trust in relationships. If you have all of your cards on the table, there is no room for assumptions to be made and no room for miscommunication. The other dynamic to this strategy is you are placing yourself in an exposed and humble state. In that moment you aren’t aggressive, there isn’t negative energy swirling around the room, and the other person is forced to choose what position they will take. They could go on the offensive and strike, or they could choose to respond in kind and meet you in a non-aggressive position. At that point you will have built a platform for productive conversation. Is this always easy: heck no! Is it always effective: most of the time.

My family has major intimacy issues; some would deny that statement but the facts are on the table. I have to constantly work at transparency and honesty with my wife, because growing up our household of four kids it was every man for himself. Our family dinners have been described as verbal combat or verbal karate. If you mix that with two parents who have their own historical family intimacy issues you’ve got a mixed cocktail of some pretty hardened people.   So I have to work at this with my wife, when I’m working with my dad, and when I’m dealing with my children. One of the most powerful moments of my childhood was when my dad sat my older sister and I down after we’d been battling with one another. I can’t remember the exact details, but all I remember is this. My dad sat both of us down and looked us straight in the eyes and said: “I have no idea what I’m doing here. I have never been a parent of multiple teenagers before, just like you’ve never been teenagers before. I have a thought of what I should do to handle this, but honestly I’m doing the best I can to make it through.” What a powerful statement. He was placing all of the emotional energy in our court, he was giving us a choice with how we should respond, and he was telling us that he might make a bad decision because he’s never made this kind of decision before. He went on to ask us to offer one another and him a great deal of grace in our lives. I can honestly say that moment brought the three of us closer, and in many ways began the peership leveling process we now get to enjoy.

My final point for communication success is to ask questions. Ask a ton of questions before you pass judgment on a person or their actions. Professionally, we would require an individual to ask their family member three questions before they can make a judgment or statement. If I said to you: “your brother got to the mall in my car.” What would you first response be? It would probably start with a couple of questions as to why he was driving my car and not his own. Why did he drive by himself, and why did he need to go to the mall so badly that he had to borrow my car? So when your parents say, I’d like you to work on the production line as your first job in the family company, or we’re giving you X amount of dollars over Y amount of years, shouldn’t you lead with questions? These questions should be framed in a context that satisfies my first two points here today. Feel free to express your true feelings about what you might have just heard. Say something like: “mom/dad I’m feeling a little anxious and frustrated that I have to work on the production line when I just spent four years at college. Can you tell me a little more about your thinking behind this decision?” You have hopefully phrased all of this kindly, but that statement and question brings them into your emotional framework as well as offers an open ended question for them to bring you into their thinking process. Don’t just stop there; ask three or four levels of clarifying questions after that. Remember, with questions the deeper you go the more you know.

None of the principles I’ve discussed here today are easy. All of them require a great deal of practice and dedication from all parties. As I said at the beginning, these are professional level skills you’re learning here for serious and challenging conversations. If I were in your shoes, I’d take each piece and try them in a more casual setting. Ask your friends some deeper level questions while you’re grabbing a beer. Try being totally honest and transparent with someone you know is safe. In all areas of your life, become aware or your tone, body language, and the context in which you’re having a conversation. Have you been giving serious matters the proper forum for discussion, or have you been only giving them airport-driving time? I hope that this post will be helpful on your journey with your family, if nothing else hopefully it’s given you something to think about.

Good Luck

 

Productive Summary

  • What is your tone, body language, and context saying in addition to your words?
  • Be honest and as transparent as possible.
  • Ask questions…a lot of questions.
Category: Communication, Family Dynamics |
| March 11, 2015
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Voice Not Vote

Empowering the Next Generation to learn how to use their voice without expecting a vote

 

This concept probably should have been my first post because it is where I draw the title of the blog from, but some of those early concepts I thought were more important for people to think about prior to this one. In addition to that there is a conceptual flow that I’m following and now would be an appropriate time to explore the concept of Voice Not Vote.

The title of the blog is not to connote the idea that I want to Next Generation to rise up in protest and find their voice. I am in no way suggesting that the concepts of this blog are a battle between the young and old, and the next generation needs to find their voice in that battle. Actually the concept of Voice Not Vote is an empowerment offered by the senior generation to the next generation. We encourage the senior generation to offer the next generation a voice in decision making for the family, the business, or wealth transfers but not a vote. If you recall the Entitlement blog, my father gave my brother a voice around ownership of their business venture, but ultimately the vote belonged to my father because he owned the capital. There are multiple nuances at play for when a person get’s a vote, but we should explore first the need for a voice.

Let’s look at an analogy for a moment. Say you have a father and son driving in the car together; they drive together every day all day but the father always drives. The son has never driven the car; in fact he’s never driven any car because his father has always insisted on driving. Not only has the son never driven, but also the father doesn’t tolerate a backseat driver so he accepts no input from the son. One day the father says to the son: “I’m tired of driving, it’s your turn now.” The father hands the son the keys and simply wishes him well. Would you feel safe driving on the roads knowing this son was out there operating a vehicle…probably not. Interestingly enough, we’re not fine driving on the road with this person, but more often than not family businesses transfer from one generation to the next in this exact fashion.

In some ways this is a post for both generations. I’m not trying to upset the hierarchy of your household, so please don’t show this to your parents and say: “ha, I told you someone else thinks you need to listen to me.” What I’m saying here is that we have seen repeatedly this concept provide families with less anxiety, closer relationships, more productive dialogue, and a smoother transition of business or transfer of wealth. Recently my dad sent an email to the four of us (his kids) asking for time to do a conference call. None of us knew the topic (a conference call for our family is not weird) but we were all intrigued why he’d want to talk now. He was calling to discuss his estate because he had just started his estate planning. He wasn’t asking us what we wanted to inherit or even necessarily how we wanted to inherit things. He simply opened the conversation up to us to gather our opinions. The collective opinion was simply: “Dad we are grateful you’d even consider us, it’s your stuff and none of us expects anything in anyway, do what you want.” Now before you assume that our family is the Brady Bunch because our dad is a family business specialist that deals with family conflict on the regular, let me just tell you we are more like the Osbornes than the Brady Bunch. I tell this story to illustrate how a senior generation can invite the next generation into the conversation. My dad could have just told his attorney exactly how he wanted things to work, and on the day of his death we would find out how his estate transferred. But in that scenario, where is the opportunity for dialogue to promote closeness, and where is the opportunity for the four kids to learn how to plan an estate? Also in our family conversation my dad got to learn about his own children, the way we think, and our expectations around any inheritance we would ever see. Without a dialogue none of that information is unearthed.

For the next generation, once you’ve been given a voice don’t suddenly expect a vote. You MUST act with humility and grace; you have been given an opportunity to learn from your parents. You have been given an opportunity to grow closer to your parents. You have been given an opportunity to be heard and contribute value to the conversation. Do not take this for granted. I can remember growing up getting frustrated with every level of my education. I hated being treated like a child and still do. I remember the amazing feeling to have an adult value my opinion, to actually ask me what I thought. It didn’t mean they were going to do exactly what I said, but it was a data point they wanted to collect to inform their decision. That’s all your voice is here, but your voice is still an incredibly valuable piece of information.

Finally, I said you have an opportunity to learn from your parents. You’ve been given a voice, you’re allowed to be in the room to hear everything your parents hear. But you also get to watch them act. You get to ask questions about why they made THAT decision instead of doing something else. All I can say for the stage where you only get a voice is to learn EVERYTHING you possibly can from your parents. Some things will be valuable; others may dictate how you don’t act in the future. Either way learn all you can while you can. This concept of getting a voice and not a vote, like all of our concepts is a tricky skill based sport with a high potential for error. I don’t want anyone to read what I’m saying and to use this as a guidebook for how to transfer their family business or their wealth. All I want is for these concepts to raise conversation points. Next week we’ll deal with Communication, and how to communicate. What I’d like you to take away from this post is that there are options available to every family to successfully transfer wealth, transition a business, and remain an intact family. These decisions do not have to end in pain.

Good Luck

 

Practical Summary

 

  • Empower the voice of the next generation.
  • Don’t expect a vote when you’re in “the room”.
  • Until you’re given a vote learn all you can.
Category: At Work, Communication, Family Dynamics |
| March 4, 2015
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Expectations

What is expected of you if you work for your family, or you inherit wealth?

 

Have you ever had a conversation with your parents about their expectations for you? What was it like? Did they just come out and tell you what they expected, and there was zero negotiation? Did they describe a wish for you? Maybe they were really vague and only insinuated some of their desires. We will touch on the importance of the method later, but for now the important question is what are their expectations and how do you interact around them?

In order to illustrate my question allow me to first apologize for my absence from posting for the past two weeks. My wife and I welcomed into the world our second child and I took some time away from work in order to be with my family and aide in our transition from a three-person household to a four-person household.   I knew that when this child was born there wouldn’t be any expectation that I hurry back to work, even though we’re in the middle of a massive system of work. My father knows that my family is my utmost priority. Needing to return to work immediately was never an expectation I had to adhere to. However, getting an MBA, working for an outside company, and being willing to talk business at almost any moment (including while you’re in the hospital visiting with friends and family after the birth of your second child) are all expectations that I have lived with. The first two we actively discussed, the third we didn’t.

I remember back in college talking with my dad about working with him one day, never as a true reality but just a hypothetical. He said he wouldn’t hire me right away even if I wanted to work with him. As he put it, I needed to work somewhere else to learn corporate discipline before I tried working in a fragmented industry. He was right; in my first job I learned how to answer to a hierarchy of bosses, I learned corporate politics, and I learned how to be a small cog in a big system. If I started working for him right away I would have adopted all of the his bad habits that he’s accumulated over the years, and to be honest some of them would have seriously hurt me professionally. The MBA was a conversation we had after I started working with him. He said it seemed like a good idea, and it was something he really wanted to see me pursue. In dad lingo that’s his way of saying: “hey you’re getting an MBA.” I chose the school and style of program I wanted to pursue, but he was involved in the approval process to be sure I was getting what I needed from the degree. Finally, we never discussed the expectation that we could and would discuss business matters at any moment, it just happened. My dad and I don’t see one another very often, so when we do see one another we try and catch up on anything that needs to be settled in person. We have had work conversations in the hospital, at family dinners in restaurants, and even at my brother’s bachelor party. In this regard we have not done a great job creating boundaries around certain events, and this should have been a point of discussion from the beginning.

So why bring all of this up, what’s the point? The point is that unless you have a conversation about expectations at some point someone is going to violate what you expected and there is a place for friction and resentment to grow. If you’re dad expects you to arrive at work every day at 7, and you show up at 9 with the rest of the staff, in his mind you’re late to work everyday. All of the sudden he sees you as always being late to everything and has now created an attribution for you. That sounds absurd to some, but it’s happened with families that don’t communicate well. If your parents aren’t going to have a conversation about expectations prior to you working in the family business, or before you inherit a large sum of money then you need to initiate the conversation.

I mentioned earlier that we would get to the how your parents communicate expectations. This topic will be explored in great depth in a separate blog, but in this moment we have to talk about communication styles and principles. More often than not, when a child enters the family business or they’re given a large sum of money the parents TELL their kids what they want to see happen. This has several outcomes. The first is an inflexible linear pathway. If a discussion were opened around the expectations, perhaps multiple alternatives could be explored and a greater degree of performance achieved. The second outcome is possible resentment. Children seem to be born to resent their parents for something, and being told what to do and how to do it is typically a list topper. But there is a sure fire way to manage the communication environment; if you as the child initiate the conversation, you’ve already won points by showing you can take initiative for serious matters. You also have the opportunity to dictate the flow of conversation, and if you lead with questions like: “What is your wish?” “What is your optimal outcome?” and “Is our current path leading to that optimal outcome?” then you can get at the heart of real insightful concerns for your parents. You have also allowed yourself to avoid any personal resentment.

The purpose of this post is to start a dialogue. I can honestly tell you it’s so sad to see families arguing over personal items that actually could have been avoided with a transparent conversation around expectations. This conversation should always be focused on wishes and opportunities, and never on fears or worst-case scenarios. If you plan through fear all you will get is exactly what you’re afraid of. But if you plan through wishes, you will get what you hope for. My wish for anyone that reads this blog that you will be able to have conversations around wish and opportunity, and hopefully avoid some dangerous pitfalls as you enter your family business, or receive a large amount of money. Both situations have the potential for incredible success and family closeness, or disastrous splitting and cutting off. Hopefully you will work to achieve the former.

Good Luck

 

Practical Summary

  • If the conversation hasn’t been had about your parent’s expectations, it’s time for you to initiate.
  • Lead with questions; ask multi-level questions that get deeper each time to get to the heart of your parent’s fears and concerns.
  • Always stay focused on wishes and opportunities
Category: At Work, Communication, Family Dynamics |