A family business is made up of multiple parts of family and business, mixed together to form a perfect entity that is both profitable and fun. If run properly, the legacy of your family business will last for generations to come. One key aspect to make sure this well-tuned machine continues to operate as a profitable entity is remembering that it is still a business and requires team building, just like any other business. As a matter of fact, as a family owned business, you may need more team building than other businesses, as part of the process of managing the balance between home and work.
The Team Leader
As the team leader, you have an obligation to make sure your team and you share the same Common Family Vision and have a blueprint of how to achieve that vision. When it comes to a family, the best parents (or leaders) are the ones who help their children find themselves and teach them how to be a leader, not hold their hand and micromanage their every move. These families become cohesive family units full of respect, love, and admiration for one another and produce successful contributing members of society.
This philosophy and dynamic, especially in a family business, should be transferred to the office and the conference room table. Instead of the leader being a parent, the leader is the owner of the business and/or the manager of a department. The key to being a successful leader who creates successful employees that may, one day, take over the family business or the role of leader for a department is to allow your subordinates to learn, make mistakes, get up, and brush the dirt off to start again, in a new direction. This will allow the employee to build confidence and build trust between all parties. This is not just your role as the team leader, this is your responsibility.
This philosophy and dynamic, especially in a family business, should be transferred to the office and the conference room table. Instead of the leader being a parent, the leader is the owner of the business and/or the manager of a department. The key to being a successful leader who creates successful employees that may, one day, take over the family business or the role of leader for a department is to allow your subordinates to learn, make mistakes, get up, and brush the dirt off to start again, in a new direction. This will allow the employee to build confidence and build trust between all parties. This is not just your role as the team leader, this is your responsibility.
The Benefits
The benefits of team building for your family owned business are much like the benefits of family counseling for your family. You will ultimately learn how to better communicate with your team and they with you, as their leader. Communication skills can be the single most important skill set any business can have and if they go awry, you can experience an entire breakdown of your business from the inside out. Team building can help eradicate this problem. Other issues addressed in team building are concepts like allowing for differences to function together within a unit, like a ying yang type of system. You do not always have to agree, but in circumstances where you cannot agree, you must always agree to disagree. Finally, team building allows you to help you and your team determine each other’s roles and responsibilities in the workplace, which may be quite opposite from the roles and responsibilities of these same individuals within the family dynamic.
If you are part of a family owned business that could benefit from team building exercises, contact the experts at Hubler for Business Families at 612.375.0640.
If you are part of a family owned business that could benefit from team building exercises, contact the experts at Hubler for Business Families at 612.375.0640.
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