What Corporates could learn from Family Business about the power of disagreement

When the stakes are high, connection is a secret weapon...

Two polar bears play fighting - Louise Brown Coaching

An imperative for high-performing leadership

There is an important requirement in high-performing teams, which is so fundamental that when it isn’t met it creates misalignment, holds up important and decisions, and creates countless workarounds that consume precious energy.

That requirement is the need to be able to say what we think and feel.

For families the stakes are high

There are unique reasons why this requirement is sometimes not met in the family business context. In contrast to their corporate counterparts, in family teams what one says can have ripple effects that reach far beyond the remit of the professional and spill over into the personal. It might not just be your Monday to Friday that’s affected, Sunday lunch could also be awkward if you left the office on a Friday having had a blazing row about the business strategy. It also has the potential to affect life-long relationships that are (regardless of their specific nature) fixed and irreplicable. Leaving your role because of a difference of perspective with your mother or sibling might mean forever damaging those relationships. Or it might mean losing your relationship with your immediate family altogether: either way, the stakes are high.

Like all humans, each family member forms a narrative

In my work with clients I’ve seen family members whose voice at the leadership table is limited by past experiences that go back a long way. Sometimes those experiences have never been discussed; almost always there are different versions of the reality that each member has created for themselves to integrate their experience so they can operate in the current dynamic. It’s in our nature as humans to ascribe meaning to our experiences so in the absence of conversation and shared experience, we fill in the gaps and create our own narrative. If our experiences were negative, we instinctively add a healthy dose of scepticism into our narrative to protect ourselves, in case we are too optimistic and put ourselves at further risk.

So we end up with a negative story. This can be buried so deep that it's often unconscious, and so is its effect on our role in the business, our relationships with our family members, and the day-to-day operations of which we’re part.

The impact of a negative story

Two leopards tussling - Louise Brown Coaching

The negativity that underpins our view may not manifest as a visibly negative attitude. But the separation and guardedness that we've applied can spill over into the way we work with other family members. We might keep information to ourselves; we might hold back from sharing problems that we’re struggling with; we might invest less effort generally having decided the return we'll get is limited.

In any of these scenarios, we aren’t fully present, and we’re unable to freely contribute our expertise. To achieve that, we must all be in it together. So the lack of togetherness, manifests a lack of collective leadership and ultimately a weaker decision-making capability leading the firm. This is not unique to family businesses, it happens across the board (hence the reason that team coaching is used in multiple contexts), but the integration can run deeper in a family context because our relationship to our role goes beyond the professional.

The advantage of the family 'tribe'

Although this situation can at first seem more difficult to resolve than its equivalent in a corporate environment, there is one aspect of the family business structure that gives families a unique advantage in resolving these misalignments, and that’s the very depth and breadth of connection to one another that may have deepened the problem in the first place; this connection is often the key to resolving it.

Since the beginning of time, conflict and misunderstandings, on whatever scale, have been part of family life. No one expects members within a family unit to be on the same page, all the time. It’s simply unrealistic, and an acceptance of that, is where the family advantage lies.

A more holistic view of business

Unlike some corporates, family businesses are rarely in denial that differing perspectives exist. In the corporate world, the human side of working together is often minimalised when viewed next to profit. Interpersonal relationships at leadership level are generally secondary to commercial outcomes, particularly when there is explicit accountability to shareholders for performance. In some corporates this manifests as a denial of the necessary conditions to run a business within which humans work. That reality includes the fact that different realities always exist; there is human fallibility no matter what; and at times there is misalignment between humans. Great business performance relies on embracing different realities and perspectives to strengthen resilience and build new routes to growth, the acceptance of fallibility (the need to fail and learn to improve and grow), and a careful maintenance of the ‘togetherness’ of leadership to ensure that the wider firm is clear and focused on the right activities and outcomes.

When businesses are operating without an acceptance of these things, they enter day to day life ill-equipped for long-term survival. Family businesses might not always get it right, but by their very nature they are more aware there are and always will be differences of perspective. In my experience, their innate recognition of this fact puts them in the driving seat to deal with the reality of leading collectively. Rather than denying its existence, they have more tolerance for dissonance. That is a powerful place to be - given a variety of different perspectives is a precondition for strong collective leadership and essential for long-term togetherness and survival. This is the strength of diversity in it's earliest form.

A shortcut that aids transition to new territory

3 birds flying in sync - Louise Brown Coaching

In practice, navigating multiple realities often requires a third party to facilitate a safe conversation so a new collective reality can be born. Such progress is near impossible to make when there's no one in the room who doesn’t have skin in the game. In my experience though, with support, the innately deeper and wider-reaching connection between family members, can create a shortcut to empathy and kindness that helps family business leadership teams transition more quickly away from a place of stagnant inaction or workarounds into new fruitful territory, where members can speak freely, and the business can reap the rewards.

Photo credits: Polar bears - Han Jurgen Mager / Leopards - Frida Lannerstrom