When Family Company Flexibility Goes Too Far
Podcast Episode 9 is now Live! Featuring Melissa Mitchell-Blitch
Episode 9 of the podcast may be my favorite one yet. Click below to listen; please Follow the show to get new episodes:
Here is a preview:
Who Stole Your Starlink?
A natural disaster hit a family company I know.
Their headquarters was in the middle of recovery mode. Staff showed up. But they could not get online. So the IT director went up to the roof to check on the Starlink satellite — and it was gone.
One of the family owners, who also worked in the company, had quietly taken it to their house. The internet was out there, and they needed it. So they just…took it. Knocked the entire company offline.
From the outside, that sounds pretty ludicrous. How could someone do that?
Too much flexibility, bit by bit
But behavior like that doesn’t come from nowhere. It usually comes from years of ambiguity. Years of family employees and owners not sitting down and drawing a line around what “flexibility” means and what it doesn’t.
When there are no rules for when a family employee can make an exception for themselves, people fill in the blanks.
The satellite wasn’t really about a satellite. It resulted from a long chain of small, unchecked moments where family employees and owners learned: I do as I wish, because it’s our company, I cannot imagine a negative consequence.
Boundaries without enforcement aren’t real boundaries. They’re customs. And in a family company, customs have a way of disappearing. Without governance, we open the door to inconsistency, frustration, and a missing internet.
Episode 9 and Family ACTion Meetings
This is one of several stories Melissa Mitchell-Blitch and I tackle in the podcast. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Try this: If you work in or own a family company, ask yourself: do your family members know where the lines are? Are they written? How often do you all look at them together? For example, can you bring your dog to work, even though no one else does?
This is one of a host of issues you can workshop and review in a Family ACTion Meeting — a meeting specifically intended to build alignment, communication and trust (ACT) amongst your family employees, owners and other members.
I have worked with families to clarify whether family compensation is flexible, or the PTO policy, or work from home rules, or who gets to make what decisions.
Family company flexibility is all but inevitable and you cannot drift into clear flexibility. It is instead an issue tailor-made for your next family meeting, one to work through together.
Till the next episode…
I hope you enjoy the podcast. As my grandfather would have said, thank you so very, very much for listening.
- Adam Hatcher, for Twenty One Clear
