Family Leadership Strategies

Observations • Families who successfully navigate transitions invest in well-defined leadership development, focus on communication and understanding motivations, and acknowledge and correct mistakes. • You cannot anticipate fromwhere future family leaders will emerge in an extended family, or the roles they may play. Families should cast the net wide, set high expectations, and encourage all to aspire to the wide range of leadership roles. • Not every family member actually wants to lead or even be involved in family endeavors. The key is to embrace open communication, make no assumptions, be flexible, and encourage a range of options while making the family’s needs clear. Tasks • Assess where the family stands with respect to each of the six best practices. Are there areas of strength or weakness? Discuss where and how the family will work toward adopting some form of the best practices. • After identifying current and potential future family leadership roles necessary to achieve agreed upon ‘success’ outcomes in the future, begin to craft development programs for each of the key roles. • Identify the education, mentoring, work experience, skill, emotional development, and other steps necessary to develop a well-formed leader. The scope, timing, and intensity may vary by the nature of the leadership role. For example, leadership of a family’s arts and cultural assets or family foundation will call for different contextual settings than business leadership, however the common elements of education, work experience, skill development remain the same. • Identify the core educational and experiential development and training that you wish all next generation members have. Similarly, do not overlook the opportunity to create further leadership development opportunities for the current senior generation. • Identify the people and resources who can be called upon to implement the various leadership programs, and create a plan that will be used for execution and periodic evaluation. • Introduce the plan in ‘draft’ formand invite input fromnext generationmembers and extended family. Make agreed uponmodifications and work toward implementation. • Communicate the plans more widely — to extended family, management teams, and key external relationships — cultural, community, and other groups.