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Part I: Relationships in Business-Owning Families
Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by the spirit of love which goes beyond justice.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Chapter 1
The Past and the Present Merge
As a member of the fifth generation, I often wonder how my family has made it through the challenges of family business. I believe it is because everybodyâs voice counted. My great-grandfather and his father before him always said that the key to success was to talk, talk, talk ⌠and keep it positive.
A client
All relationships need repair at some time or anotherâespecially in the complex family business relational environment where there can be a strong pull toward regression, emotionality, and internecine warfare. Both individual problems and interpersonal conflicts easily find breeding places within family businesses, which are extremely fertile fields for inhibiting individual freedom and developing hostile-dependent systems.
In a nutshell, we maintain that positive and enduring change will occur when the relational difficulties in the presentâthe observable here and nowâare reconciled. The focus of the reconciliation effort is to take what is, to consider rather than forget what has been, and to use the familyâs resources to seek out internal strengths that can be highlighted and developed for what will be: the future good of both the family and its business. Thus, an improved understanding of the past when combined with both acceptance and a willingness to change, promises a beneficent and collaborative future among discordant family members.
Our Reconciliation Model offers an additional way of thinking about the individuals and relationships in business-owning families. The model is firmly grounded in established theory regarding both individual development and systems operations. It acknowledges and respects reciprocity: how each individual impacts and shapes the family and how the family impacts and shapes each individual. Our emphasis is on providing a clear, coherent theory along with practical application techniques that are particularly suited to the unique circumstance of families in family business together.
The Past: Individual Development
Understanding the particularities of relationships is the key to comprehending the dynamics of any family in business. Life is begun and lived in relationships, and in family businesses that condition is more intensified and complicated than in any other circumstance. The quality of family business relationships has a great deal to do with how life for the family and the health of its joint enterprise turn out. Disputes, especially among key family members in a business, inevitably create and sustain stress, and can even trigger depression and self-destructive maneuvers in individuals, while for the business itself disputes can cause failure if allowed to go on without resolution.
The road to reconciling troubled or ruptured relationships within a family-owned business often involves a long and arduous journey. Many families have struggled to come to terms with their past, and have then proceeded with their current and future agendas. Many others, however, have chosen to avoid, ignore, or even deny this shared past. All have found that, in the long run, it is not possible simply to discount or forget whatever happened that has caused deeply held resentment, hurts, and anger among family membersâpeople who ideally love, trust, and support one another throughout their lifetimes, come what may.
The extraordinary work of South Africaâs Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 1998) has helped us learn this lesson. It is necessary to turn the page of history and move on, but first we need to read that page and learn from it. The reform process in South Africa stressed that the past could not be ignored, and that accountability was a prerequisite for establishing trust. The questions then became what form that accountability should take, and whether the elusive search for reconciliation could ever be ended. Of course, if a country is to be whole and healthy rather than divided against itself, the process that seeks truth and reconciliation must be ongoing; it can never really stop being vigilant.
The situation in a family-owned business in turmoil can be strikingly similar to a nation wracked by internal strife. In family business the past, present, and future intersect and are mutually interdependent. Both a nation and a business-owning family have a primary commitment to the welfare of the upcoming generations, so that great attention is usually given to offspringâto the children and grandchildren who embody great hope for biological, cultural, and economic continuance over time.
Similar to a nation consisting of diverse groups of people, the family enterprise may be extremely and perpetually vulnerable to divisions among its participants. As with a beleaguered nation, families can and will become split into warring factions. Ultimately, only a rational approach and a patient, conciliatory attitude cultivated consciously and carefully among family members can resolve intense interpersonal problems that have invaded and infected both home and workplace.
In working with troubled relationships in family business, our focus is on meeting the challenges of the present by finding ways whereby relationships can heal. We strive to discover how family members came to be the way they are in the present. We then work with people to alert them to their prescribed roles in the family discord, roles which usually have roots in past traumas and misunderstandings. Through understanding the past, the present and future can be changed.
In past years, when considering the psychology of the family and its individual members, the field of family business has largely relied on the family-of-origin approach of Murray Bowen (Bowen, 1978; Friedman, 1991). This approach, which focuses on the developmental processes of separation and individuation and the nature of trans-generational patterns and bonds, has proven extremely useful. Yet it still leaves some seeking additional ways of understanding current relationship problems and interventions, additional ways that will lead more directly to effective and concrete change in the present.
In this section we briefly describe the theoretical underpinnings which support the reconciliation approach. We want to point out, however, that the particular choice of a theory is not as important to successful change as is a solid grounding and belief in some coherent theory. A theory both prescribes and proscribes the way advisors see things, say things, and structure interventions. It therefore can offer both advisors and clients a stable and dependable framework for positive change.
Back in the early 1960s, Eric Berne (1964) developed a theory of human personality and social behavior called Transactional Analysis. In the following years Bob and Mary Goulding developed redecision therapy as an outgrowth of Transactional Analysis (Goulding and Goulding, 1995). Underlying both Berneâs theory and the Gouldingsâ work is the concept that individuals start off in an autonomous state. In this view, each child has the power to make unique choices about himself or herself, and about how to think, feel, and be in the world. Over time and through the constant repetition of the parent-child-family interaction, these choices become what are called early decisions. This concept of early decisions has profound implications for those of us who work with family business relationships.
To be more specific, various key factors create the environment to which the child must adapt: the young childâs inner needs and the intensity with which they are experienced; the availability of the parents and family to respond to the child, along with the quality and consistency (or unpredictability) of this response; and the time period over which the responses are made. Parents, the world in which a child grows up, and his or her own inner processes deliver messages to that child about how to think, feel, and behave. Many of these messages, hopefully, are caring and nurturing, instructive, and supportive. Inevitably, of course, constricting or negative messages are also given.
At the most basic level, the child must adapt to the family environment in order to survive; at the next level, to feel the least pain; and at the highest level, to feel actual pleasure. Through this process of adapting, individuals build an internal model of the self that is based on relationships with parents or parenting persons, and later with people in the outside world. The early established model is then carried by each person throughout lifeâinto every room, every experience, and every relationship, unless, of course, some intervention occurs and there is a need to alter oneâs way of thinking of self and others, and therefore oneâs behavior.
Furthermore, when parents are raising a family, the messages given to their children about how to think, feel, and behave are both congruent with their own early decisionsâand therefore, aimed toward continuing to make life predictable for themâand also related to their current circumstances and emotional well-being. The negative messages that constrain children, and sometimes result in their need to confine or hide who they really are, arise when a seemingly well-functioning and caring but susceptible adult is plummeted emotionally back into a distant past by some shock or stressful period in the here and now.
To understand the power of negative messages it is essential to understand something about âshame affect.â As used by Nathanson (1992), shame affect is a primitive reflex that makes us feel as if the floor is falling out from under us. When the negative messages are paired with a childâs naturally wired shame affect, the childâs attentions are so focused on the parent and the particular âdonâtâ message that he or she is driven to decide to change themselves. In other words, the young child has two tasks: he or she must learn to minimize the impact of the shame affect in order to continue functioning, yet at the same time learn to avoid or minimize the painful parental or environmental consequences of the âdonâtâ prohibitions. With time and repetition, the childâs defensive maneuvers against both the shame affect and parental injunctions become ingrained and reified as early decisions.
For a moment now, letâs turn to a brief example. Jenny and Connie are co-owners and comanagers of a local market and deli founded some years earlier by their parents. They were recently thrust into these positions when their widowed mother was diagnosed with cancer and decided to turn everything over to her girls. Jenny saw herself as âjust like her motherâ; she was highly visible within the store and aggressive about getting things done her way. As the oldest daughter she had always believed herself responsible for taking care of her familyâs domestic needs and that she would never receive any help because her parents always seemed to be away, working at their store. Connie, in contrast, was someone who accommodatesâalways willing to adjust her views; so whenever she tried to assert herself, Jenny argued her down. Now, more than ever, Connie felt like an outsider and thought there was no place or use for her in the business. This relationship patternâassert and accommodateâbetween the two sisters had been playing out for years, almost since Connie was born. However, the quiet conflict had escalated now with the stress of their motherâs illness and taking over the business.
Our job as advisors was to help both Jenny and Connie identify their own particular parts in the relationship problem; recognize their early decisions; and understand that their beliefs and behaviors, important in childhood, were no longer necessary for their present adult family and business situations, and in fact were impediments. Through choosing to change their early decisions, which were driving their current relationship patterns, Jenny and Connie were able to mutually support each other in both their grief and the new challenge of running the family business.
Two more important points should be made about early decisions as the basis for the plan of how adults manage both their internal and external environments:
All early decisions are made as a result of the childâs perception of the best way to manage or survive in the here and now.
All early decisions are individual and unique productions of the person making them.
We can reasonably conclude that current behavior observed in patterns of interaction and personal history in the form of early decisions operate in a reciprocal relationship. Problems are apt to occur whenever two discordant behavior styles, based on early decisions, collide. They are apt to worsen if there is already an unhappy relational history involved. This information has an enormous implication for our work with families who manage and own businesses together. It gives advisors a direction for change, and it gives family members the power to change.
The theory of early decisions and early decision making, grounded in self-preservation and manifested in self-presentation, is closely akin to many other current psychological theories based on the idea of the creation of core beliefs about the self and others. An individualâs core beliefs act as a template for the perception of the rest of lifeâs decisions and interactions. Early decisions serve as templates, too.
Since in this conceptual framework people are considered to be actually in charge of making their own early decisions in life, they are also perceived as capable of making redecisions for themselves in the present. Redecisions are revised beliefs about the self. They occur with the here-and-now incorporation of updated and current information about oneâs self and circumstances. Jenny redecided that she did not always have to go it alone, while her sister Connie redecided that there was a place for her in the business and she could speak up for herself. Through redeciding Jenny and Connie took steps to free themselves to think, feel, and behave differently in their current lives: in other words, to make free choices in the present rather than to react with the resounding echoes of the past.
Since people can redecide and change certain entrenched attitudes and behaviors, they are positioned to reconcile conflicted relationships. The implications and applications of this redecision capability to family business environments are profound, because daily family interactions often replicate negative situations and scenarios of the past.
Relationships: Making the Past Present
Definitions are important. Websterâs Dictionary records seventeen uses for the word ârelationship.â Most commonly, it refers to a connection between people. However, even âconnectionâ doesnât fully express why the relationship concept is so important to thinking about family business dynamics. To understand the heart of the matter, we need only to observe the interactions between a mother and her newborn child. As infant and mother focus on each other, their facial expressions change to match each otherâs. The close interplay does not allow an observer to know for certain where one identity begins and the other leaves off.
This attachment/bonding cycle is a chief element in human development. This experience of bonding with another person is a primary motivation in all human relationships, regardless of the context, because this bond affirms oneâs very existence. It begins with the mother-child bond, which serves as an experiential model for all future bonding. That does not mean we all are still looking for our mother. What it does mean is that we all seek the recognition and security implicit in that first secure relationship.
Many theorists have suggested that this primal bonding of mother and baby is the essential transaction in human interaction: the recognition of the self by the other. Martin Buber (1974) speaks of the space between two intimately connected persons, calling it the âI-Thou.â Eric Berne (1964) addresses the need for âstrokesâ and the efforts humans will make to be acknowledged, to be recognized as worthy, by a fellow being. These relationship factors that foster bonding and self-acceptance are as follows:
Each person is recognized as an individual.
Their unique contributions are acknowledged and valued, even when there may be some disagreement about them.
Each person accepts the obligation to listen to the others, to be patient, attentive, and sensitive to gradual revelations of whatever deep feelings and hidden truths may lie beneath the surface of othersâ words and actions, in both the present and the past.
This ideal bonding state, however, is just that: ideal. This earliest of bonds will inevitably be broken and mothers are never perfect. Though useful as a goal, ideal bonding is never, of course, always achieved. Later, mentors may fail us in many ways, management is not primarily concerned about our well-being, and the business-owning parent who must choose and anoint a successor may pass over u...
