Family Leadership Strategies

95 Methodology overview Phase: Acknowledgment • Create a dialogue regarding long-term thinking around transition planning, succession, and governance issues. Thismay be a top down dialogue, initiated by the senior, family, enterprise stakeholders, or next generation family members. Proceed slowly, respectfully, and avoid making assumptions. • Where necessary, create a committee to define success; identify key roles necessary to achieve success; articulate key leadership attributes for each role; and create a developmental process to for next generation family members to develop key skills, attributes, and life and work experience. • If possible, formalize the outcome of discussions with a document that sets out agreed upon roles, principles, timetable, preparations, rules, and action steps. • Objective: open the discussion about leadership transition with key family members in a way that forms a healthy foundation for future progress. Phase: Well-articulated process • Identify key family leadership roles and the relevant family enterprise entities that will be affected by succession plans. • Create a process that clarifies what the short-term and long-term elements of a successful transition will be for the family and the various entities — business, foundation, investment company, etc. This should touch upon more than financial outcomes. • Articulate the qualifications, rough timetable, desire for family and/or external candidate eligibility, education and experiential requirements, mentoring, selection process, and governance practices that will guide key decisions. Agreeing to disagree on some of these points may be required to move the process forward. At the end of the day, the family leader or enterprise leader must endorse and support, as he or she has responsibility over the fate of the outcome. Appendix