7 Tips for Managing a Successful Family Business
Working alongside family can be enjoyable for a variety of reasons, but it can also be challenging to keep your personal and professional lives distinct. Here are some crucial best practices and abilities that will aid you in maintaining a conflict-free workplace and preventing family strife.
The phrase "there's no business like show business" has been used. Although I do not doubt that Hollywood is in a league of its own, from my experience, family-owned enterprises are the best type of business, and the fact that there are 32.4 million of them in the US serves as proof.
According to data by Family Enterprise USA, family-owned businesses are the backbone of the American economy, creating $80 million in jobs and responsible for 78% of all new jobs. Approximately 35% of Fortune 500 companies are family-controlled, according to studies. The majority of our nation's wealth, or $7.7 trillion, is held by family-owned enterprises, which account for 54% of the private sector GDP.
Working with family can be pleasant for many reasons, but it also presents a special set of difficulties, such as the need to be able to distinguish between personal and professional lives. Separating the two is essential to achieving harmony between home and work, but it takes time and a lot of effort. When my wife, Blanca, and I, together with my brother, Tom, founded SOS Hydration, we were aware that the success of both our business and our personal life depended on our ability to adapt from our traditional familial responsibilities to those of our company.
Recognizing your leadership strengths and shortcomings is crucial to the success of any business, and finding partners with the skills to fill in the gaps can help lay the groundwork for developing a solid team. We considered our various personalities and learning preferences when determining the responsibilities in our family-run firm. These factors were simple to evaluate given the nature of our connections.
As a result, we successfully manage a profitable company jointly without letting our emotions influence our decision-making. Here's how you can do it, too.
must-have abilities
To keep a workplace free of conflict and retain objectivity, family members who have become coworkers should be proficient in three specific competencies.
1. Embrace openness. Have an honest conversation about the collaborative dynamic you each want before starting a business with your family, and establish clear expectations to assist in achieving those goals. Make a sincere effort to always be respectfully honest in all of your professional dealings, regardless of successes, setbacks, or uncertainty.
2. Maintain an unbiased ear. It's crucial to leave your family dynamic at home because the ego has no place in a family-owned firm. Related coworkers should treat each other with the utmost respect and fairness in all business contacts, and they should make an effort to listen impartially regardless of the subject.
3. Respect one another. You must have entire faith in each other's skills, judgment, and intentions when conducting business with your family. Because they foster confidence, transparency and impartiality are extremely valuable. Likewise, self-confidence is crucial, and true leadership means accepting responsibility for your actions.
Though it is not for the weak of heart, working with family has many wonderful advantages. Family-owned businesses can realize their full potential and leave a lasting impression when family members continually employ transparency, nonpartisanship, and trust as the guiding principles of their enterprise.
Guidelines for a positive dynamic
I've implemented what I believe to be the four fundamental best practices for a thriving family business in addition to the essential abilities for sustaining a good and conflict-free work environment.
1. Establish distinct limits. Work should be done at the office. After each business day, discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the work, and then let it go. When situations happen that call for business discussions outside of normal working hours, set a 30-minute time limit for talking before committing to revisiting at a suitable time. The weekends are set aside for the quality family time, and business conversation is limited.
2. Maintain your lane. Everyone is aware of their obligations and knows how to fulfill them. Trusting each other's process (and progress) at this point helps to avoid conflicts and competing viewpoints.
3. Take part in extracurricular activities as a family. We used to be great runners, and my brother and I still enjoy going for runs whenever we get the chance. We are reminded that we are family when we enjoy one another's a company outside of the workplace.
4. Learn from your mistakes. Allow yourself to experience the human emotions associated with a loss or failure that has an impact on the business, discuss it as a team, and then move on. Don't let a bad business day compromise your connections.
Last but not least, celebrate business successes in all of their forms to promote loyalty, team cohesion, and leadership. No matter how big or little the victories are in your family-owned business, celebrating them fosters motivation and strengthens ties among those family members who have a stake in its success.
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