Family enterprise advisors are often well equipped to handle the structural side of a transition, from governance design to succession plans to defining leadership roles. What gets missed, more often than not, is the person who has to live inside those structures once they’re built.
A new white paper co-authored by Institute member Perry Gladstone (Perry Gladstone Consulting) and faculty members Anna Nichols (Altair Advisors), Meredith Straight (Renkert Thomas Consulting, LLC) and Bryn Monahan (Relative Solutions) examines what happens when that individual layer goes unaddressed.
The paper walks through four cases where a dispute that looked like a governance failure or a hiring disagreement turned out to be rooted in something else: a family member who felt marginalized, a founder with no sense of who he was outside the business he had just left, a sibling group whose governance redesign stalled over questions of status and belonging and a daughter whose request for a distribution was, at its core, a request to be seen.
The authors offer three questions advisors can use to determine whether the individual layer is active in a given engagement, along with guidance on what to do when it is. Their point isn’t that the structural work is wrong, but rather that the structures only hold when the people inside them are ready to occupy them.
Access the full report here.
Members can also view the paper in the resource library here.
Meet the Authors:
Perry Gladstone
Family Enterprise Leadership Specialist
Perry Gladstone Consulting
Anna E. Nichols
Managing Director, Head of Client Education
Altair Advisers LLC
Meredith Straight
Consultant
Renkert Thomas Consulting, LLC
Bryn Monahan
Senior Consultant
Relative Solutions
