If you have been concerned only about your child’s readiness to run your business, start to consider your readiness: Are you prepared to do what you need to do to help your child succeed as an owner? Here are 4 Ways To Prepare Your Child To Become Your Successor:
- Build a Curriculum
It is not at all uncommon for owners to get stuck when they think about teaching a successor how to do what they do “naturally.” Doing something well and teaching it well are not the same. Let’s look at how one owner “Janine” taught what she did naturally. (While Janine wanted her employees to run the company during her absence, the process she used is the same one we use to help owners prepare their successors for ownership.)
When Janine was four months pregnant with her second child, she asked us to design a plan that would prepare the employees of her retail business so well that they would not need to call her during her maternity leave.
Once we helped her develop a comprehensive list of all the tasks that she performed to run her company day to day, we created a timeline and strategy to transfer each process/task to a designated employee or group of employees.
She started teaching and transferring the least complex items on her list and moved to increasingly complex tasks until she reached the last: merchandising. When we asked her which employee was best suited to take it over, Janine said, “I can’t transition it.” If that was true, Janine had a choice: give up her interruption-free maternity leave or allow the store to run out of merchandise until she returned.
Janine rejected both options and argued that even if she could give up merchandising, she couldn’t tell anyone how she did it.
She had a problem, but hardly an insurmountable one. We asked Janine to observe herself making purchasing decisions over the next 10 days. When she returned, she had gained insight into a task she did so naturally that she’d never considered how she did it. We built a step-by-step decision matrix that Janine used to teach two employees how to merchandise. Four weeks later, she delivered her second child and began her relaxing, uninterrupted special time with her family.
- Learn to Dance
Building a curriculum is a big part of readying your child for ownership, but so too is gracefully “dancing” through the three phases of successor development. In the first phase, you are the leader who teaches your child the steps of the dance. In the second, you and your child alternate the lead until, in the last phase, your child leads, and you follow. Whether your successor is your child or someone else, a successful transition requires you to become a good teacher as you transition from leading to following.
- Follow a Few Rules
Communicating about an issue as important as a business transition can be difficult and communicating about succession with children can create “hat confusion” for you and your child. Children can hear even the most carefully crafted and delivered messages through filters that they’ve had in place for years. For example, if you have to tell a daughter who wanted to be CEO that you’ve chosen her brother instead, her filter causes this type of reaction, “Of course, my brother gets to be CEO! He always got the new bike, and I always got his hand-me-downs.”
To assist with communication, we offer four rules:
Rule 1: Prepare. Understand what information you seek and decide what you will and will not share. Try to anticipate what the other person may think or feel and consider possible responses.
Rule 2: Be honest and appropriately transparent.
Rule 3: Make no promises.
Rule 4: Do not try to persuade anyone to do something they don’t want to do.
Of course, if you suspect that even adhering to these rules is not an adequate defense against long-forgotten choices made years ago, recruit a pinch hitter. Take yourself out of the batter’s box, and bring in a person who doesn’t have a long-standing relationship with the other players.
- Make Sure They’re Ready
The question of whether your child is ready yet to succeed you in ownership is one that only you can answer, but there is a process that will help:
- Assess your child’s abilities.
- Create a curriculum to teach your child how you do what you do.
- Learn the dance of successor development.
- Communicate with everyone involved in the business transition in a way that keeps your important relationships healthy.
That process is called The Transition Roadmap Developer Process™ and we invite you to learn more about it at www.TransitionStrategists.com.
Inviting a successor to become a business owner is an exciting and wonderful part of the business transition process. Inviting your child into that process can be the ultimate capstone to your successful career and one of the most fulfilling experiences you can have as a parent.
Read our book: It’s A Journey – The MUST-HAVE Roadmap for Successful Succession Planning. Contact us today for a consultation.
Elizabeth Ledoux is a co-author of the award-winning It’s A Journey: The MUST-HAVE Roadmap to Successful Succession Planning, as well as Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Flight and Understanding the Growth of the Entrepreneur. She frequently speaks to organizations and business owners about challenges and opportunities in private and family business transitions, business and individual growth, and the business succession journey.
