Corporate training day · People
Professionalizing without splitting the family
The role is inherited, no one is ever reviewed, and the hard conversation keeps getting postponed because everyone will be at dinner on Sunday.
- Duration
- 7 hours
- Delivery
- On site · Virtual
- Participants
- From 8 to 25 participants
- Investment
- Request a quote
Investment depends on scope, number of participants and delivery mode. We prepare a proposal at no obligation.
The problem it solves
In a good many family businesses the role arrives before the job description. Someone comes in to help for a summer, stays, and ten years later runs a department without anyone ever having written down what is expected of that department or of the person leading it. There was no bad decision. There was an absence of decision, repeated for a decade.
From the outside it shows up first in what goes unsaid. A relative's pay cannot be explained to the rest of the team, so it is not explained. The performance conversation is postponed because everyone will be at their mother's house on Sunday. An understanding reached at the dinner table reaches the company as a rumour before it arrives as an instruction. And the staff who are not family learn to read two rulebooks: the written one and the other one.
Held long enough, that arrangement is paid for twice. Non-family managers with options leave first, because they read the ceiling most clearly, and the ones who stay stop raising any problem attached to a surname. Inside the family, affection between its members starts being mistaken for agreement about the business, and succession ends up settled by who happened to be present rather than by anything ever agreed.
What it covers
The day begins from a separation most family businesses make only halfway: the family conversation, the ownership conversation and the operating conversation are three different things, and they become a problem when they happen at once in the same room. The first block is a mapping exercise in which each company locates where each kind of decision is currently taken, and the discomfort tends to arrive unassisted once everyone sees how many are taken at home.
The second block works on roles. Participants write descriptions for the positions relatives hold, with responsibility, limits and a reporting line, without softening any of it for kinship. From that material they define entry criteria for a relative, what is expected before a promotion, and a pay rule that can be explained in front of the whole team without a change of tone. A self-assessment then sets those criteria against what is actually practised today.
The third block is about conversation. Participants rehearse a performance review with a relative: who holds it, in what setting, with what record, and what to do when the relative answers as a son or daughter rather than as a manager. The version that goes off the rails is rehearsed too, because it is the one everyone fears, along with an explicit agreement about what does not travel to the dinner table.
The closing block settles the decision settings. When the family meets and when the company meets, what information is shared and with whom, and how a disagreement is resolved when there is no consensus, including who decides in that case. Each company leaves with its own decision calendar and with the rules it agreed, written in language that can be read out loud in front of people who are not family.
What participants learn
- Design separate settings and separate times for family matters and company matters.
- Define roles by function and responsibility rather than by position within the family.
- Develop entry, performance and pay criteria that apply to relatives and non-relatives alike.
- Apply a performance conversation with a relative without carrying it home.
- Implement a decision rule for the disagreements where the family reaches no consensus.
Agenda
- Three conversations that get confused: family, ownership and operations
- Roles defined by function, with written responsibility and limits
- Entry criteria for relatives, and what is expected before a promotion
- Pay set by a rule that can be explained to the whole team
- Reviewing a relative's performance: who does it and where
- Decision settings: when the family meets and when the company meets
- What information is shared, and with whom
- Disagreement: resolving it without stopping the business
What the organisation leaves with
- Written descriptions of the roles relatives hold, with responsibility, limits and a reporting line.
- Entry criteria for relatives and what is expected before a promotion, written for the whole company.
- A decision calendar that separates the family meeting from the company meeting.
- A written rule for how a disagreement is resolved and who decides when there is no consensus.
Programme details
- Format
- Corporate training day
- Also available as
- Intensive workshop · Executive programme
- Languages
- Español · English
- Includes
- Participant workbook
- Action plan
- Post-training resources
- Facilitation
- ALUD Consulting LLC — Global Business Transformation.
Who it is for
- Owners of family businesses with children, siblings or spouses in the operation.
- Second-generation members who took a role whose scope was never defined.
- Non-family managers working inside a family-owned company.
Frequently asked questions
- Should the whole family attend, or only those who work in the business?
- Those who work in the business and those who influence its decisions without working in it, which is usually the same set of surnames. With one caution: where there is an open and untreated conflict, a training day is the wrong instrument and can make things worse. That situation needs a different process first.
- Should non-family managers take part?
- We strongly recommend it, and it is usually the hardest part to accept. They are the ones who live with the rules nobody wrote down, and their presence keeps the day from ending in an agreement the family understands perfectly and the rest of the company never gets to see.
- Does this settle succession or the division of ownership?
- No. Ownership structure, shareholder agreements and succession planning belong to your legal and tax advisors. The day works on the management side, which can be put in order without waiting for those decisions, and which frequently makes them easier to take afterwards.
- Seven hours in one sitting, or can it be split across two days?
- It can be split, and there is a cost worth knowing about. A single day lets the difficult conversation happen while the criteria are still fresh and people are still willing. Split in two, that conversation tends to be pushed to the second date, and sometimes it never arrives.
Request this programme
Tell us the context and we will prepare a proposal tailored to your organisation. No obligation.
Working this inside the organisation
If this challenge will not be settled in one session, ALUD Consulting LLC works it as consulting: management consulting, human resources, strategy, organisational design, leadership development and business transformation.