Archive for Family Dynamics

| 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 7, 2015
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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 |
| December 31, 2014
Comments Off on Decision

Decision

Deciding to join the family business

The decision to enter your family business or industry can be incredibly difficult. No matter what you do everyone around you will have an opinion and very few will shy away from offering it. I remember at a very early age my mom saying to me: “I don’t want you to work for your dad, I want you to make your own career path.” I think she was afraid I would choose the easy route and my dad would just hand me an opportunity, I think she was and is afraid I will become just like him. Not that becoming my dad would be a bad thing, but he was always incredibly busy and he traveled a lot, that’s the nature of the beast when you’re a consultant. I think my mom also wanted her kids to make their own path, to find their own interests and pursue them whole-heartedly.

This decision is more complicated than simply choosing a career path. You have to weigh all of the concerns my mother was expressing in her fearful statement, as well as your own fears. What if I take over the business and totally screw it up? Will everyone around me look at me as the bosses kid, am I only here because of my last name? My dad is pretty tough on me when I don’t work for him, what in the world will it be like in the office? I want to be my own person and blaze my own trail, am I really doing that by just working in the family business? These questions and so many more run through your mind over and over and over again when you’re making this decision. At the same time there are so many positives to consider. I get to carry the torch after my dad moves on. I’m apart of a larger family legacy. I’ll finally understand what my dad does which is a large part of who he is (this one was huge for me). This business has given me so many opportunities in life, now I get to protect that legacy and pass it on to my kids. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the various nuances at play in this decision and you can already see that there’s more to it than anyone outside of you can understand. Most people around you will see that you went to work for dad as what you had to do, or what was easy to do. But there’s nothing that says you have to, and nothing easy about deciding to.

Personally I ran from the “family business” as often as I could, my actions didn’t show it but in my head I never wanted to do what my dad did. It seems looking back as if I was destined to be here. I started as a Psychology major (actually a perfect starting point for Family Business Consulting); then transferred to Entrepreneurship (again another great launching point). I worked as a property manager for a large real estate company for a while and tried starting my owner construction management company and when all else failed turned to good ole D. A. D. Even when I felt out of options I still never wanted to do this. I simply called one day asking if he knew of any job openings; he did. I won’t get into all of the gory details here, there are many more posts to come for that, but the transition wasn’t easy and even now years later it still isn’t easy. Remember, when I started out I still had my mother’s words ringing in my ear: “make your own way and don’t become your father.” While researching family businesses and family dynamics the first article I read quoted my dad 8 different times. How in the world was I supposed to make my own way following his legacy? Even if I wanted to, there was no way I could become my father.

Before I even started I let fear rule my decision. How can you ever expect to be good at anything if you’re being driven by fear? If my new opportunity weren’t better than my current situation (at that time) I probably would have never left. You cannot let fear rule your decision. You have to be all in or all out and ready to take the good with the bad. You also have to leave behind the idea that you will be or could be your father, mother, grandparent, uncle or whoever you are stepping in for. At the end of the day you have to still be you no matter what. If you can’t be, or people don’t want you to be then you already have your answer. Personally my mother was wrong, going into the family business has been one of my greatest decisions I’ve ever made and it’s something I’m truly good at; to miss this opportunity would have been a bad decision.

 

Practical Summary

  • Hear the fears of your parents, don’t own them
  • Don’t allow fear to rule your decision, learn to see opportunities and no pressure to make one choice vs. another
  • Joining the family business does not mean you won’t be making your own path, and won’t create your own legacy
Category: Family Dynamics, Personal Identity |
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