Episode Description:
In this episode, Elizabeth Ledoux and Andrea Carpenter explore the intersection of family gatherings and business transitions, offering advice on how to navigate sensitive conversations, maintain family harmony, and ensure a smooth transition process. Tap or click the play button below to listen to Navigate Family Gatherings with Grace & Purpose.
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The hosts emphasize the importance of setting boundaries, communicating effectively, and being intentional about creating a shared vision for the future of the business. They also share practical tips for making the most of family gatherings while addressing important business matters.
Download our free guide, “The Family Connection Guide: Holiday Edition”: https://transitionstrategists.com/holiday-connection-guide
Chapters in this episode:
(01:08) Family and the Holidays
(03:21) Navigating Conversations with Family Members In and Out of the Business
(05:11) Advice for Successors
(08:39) Clear Expectations and Communication
(09:54) Advice for the Matriarchs and Patriarchs
(12:12) Success Stories and Family Traditions
Connect with Elizabeth Ledoux, Andrea Carpenter, and the Transition Strategists:
Website: https://transitionstrategists.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thetransitionstrategists
Elizabeth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethledoux/
Andrea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreashaver
Transition Strategists on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/transitionstrategists/
Transition Strategists on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@transitionstrategists
Subscribe to “The Business Transition Roadmap with Elizabeth Ledoux” on your favorite podcast player:
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3MxSYA2
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3IhMMux
Get Elizabeth Ledoux and Laura Chiesman’s latest book, “It’s A Journey: The MUST-HAVE Roadmap to Successful Succession Planning”: https://amzn.to/3oq2LQv
This episode was produced by Story On Media & Marketing: https://www.successwithstories.com.
Navigate Family Gatherings with Grace & Purpose Transcript
Elizabeth Ledoux: My hope for people is that they will pay attention to the people around them, keep the idea of people first in mind, and also the purpose. There’s a lady by the name of Priya Parker who talks about the reason for gatherings, and she’s written quite a few books.
Andrea Carpenter: The Art of Gatherings. Yes, The Art of Gathering is a great book.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Highly recommend it. It is, and yeah, but I think, you know, deciding and understanding what’s the purpose of this gathering, whether it’s a business gathering or a family gathering. So I think that that’s great.
Know your purpose.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Welcome to the Business Transition Roadmap. My name is Elizabeth Ledoux, and through my years, I have seen how communities thrive when business succession and transition are done well. Me and my team at the Transition Strategists have been helping business owners develop and implement transition strategies for over 30 years.
And on this show, we want to help you by giving you the roadmap to a healthy business transition. Let’s get started.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Business Transition Roadmap. Today, I’m again so fortunate to have Andrea Carpenter with us, and she and I are just going to do a quick conversation about family and the holidays. What are some of the best practices?
What’s it like? And what are some of the things to keep in mind as you enter into time together? So, Andrea, thanks for being here.
Yeah, super excited.
Andrea Carpenter: I just it’s always it’s a running trope that like the family gets together and there’s some type of blow up or break apart. And I’m super fortunate that’s never been the case in my family. I’ve watched my parents be really intentional with this and the way that we gather.
And there’s definitely a way to do it right to honor everyone, but to also have important conversations when the time is right. So excited to jump into this with you today. Yeah, thank you.
Elizabeth Ledoux: So I know, yeah, to your point that we all have had experiences one way or the other and heard stories about how family gatherings get shifted and how they change based on what’s happening in the family business and what’s going on. And it could be as simple as, you know, family members are not involved in the business and dad or mom are completely involved. Maybe there are stressful times that are happening during the family.
Times like Christmas, you know, might not be the way that it used to be because there might not be as much business or as much cash flow. And then there are also times when you’ve got family members in and they’re stressed due to trying to figure out transition. Who’s the one?
Everybody wants to know who’s included, who’s excluded. What are we going to do? And, you know, what does equality and fairness really mean?
And that so oftentimes just kind of infiltrates the family and the fun, right? It just sort of is there. And you could call it an elephant in the room, maybe.
But really, it’s actually some of the fabric, I think, sometimes in the room.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Yeah.
Andrea Carpenter: I think maybe first we jump into just talking about what do we do when there is some family in the room who’s actively in a business and some family that’s not? Is it even appropriate to have a conversation about business things in that type of situation?
Elizabeth Ledoux: You know, that’s a really great question. And I believe – so I think that it depends. There’s no yes or no answer to that.
I think that it truly depends. But here’s – this is just some of my philosophy when you’re thinking about family and family business. When you’re going through a transition and you’re bringing in family members, you really need to think about the culture of each one of them.
So one is like, hey, the family has a culture, and it’s very inclusive. The business typically needs a different culture, and it has inclusion and exclusion in it. So when you try to mix those two cultures and have conversations at the dinner table with people who are included and also need to be excluded, I think it just is really messy.
It just doesn’t fit together. So my initial thought is no. It’s probably not the best use of family time to have business conversations at a dinner table.
At a family gathering, sometimes you’ll see people kind of disappear off into the side, you know, over to the side, and they’ll go and chat over there. And I think those are fine, but those are sort of off-the-cuff chats that really shouldn’t have a lot of bearing on the direction of the business. They shouldn’t be serious conversations.
Yeah.
Andrea Carpenter: That’s an interesting point, too. My dad is a big let’s, like, chat over a beer kind of person, and we have a lot of really good, like, forward-moving, like, deep discussions that can happen when we’re together in person. Since our family is a little bit spread apart.
So there’s definitely something about me, as I’ll call myself a successor in this scenario within my family, thinking about, okay, the holidays are coming up. I have something that’s really important. I know I want to address this at some point.
Like, this is so important to me, and if I leave and I haven’t talked about it or I get ignored, like, I’m going to feel really unheard, really unseen, and that’s going to be super frustrating to me. What advice do you have for someone like that that’s going in and really wanting to have a conversation while everyone’s together?
Elizabeth Ledoux: You know, and I think that we wrote about this a little bit in our blog also, but the advice is that you want to take advantage of being together. So you absolutely want to take advantage of the opportunity because everybody’s there, and it is so hard today to get people together when you’re not on Zoom, right? And the in-person is a big deal because body language and all of that is very, very important to some of the communication.
So I think you want to take advantage of it. I think the key to it is to carve out some time, have some great communication, and say, hey, you know, in this, like that example, I’ve got something that really is interesting that I want to talk about or is of interest to me, and do you think we could carve out a little bit of time for that? So it could be 15 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour even, but can we carve out the time?
Then do we invite the right people into that conversation so it’s more intentional? And then we can talk about how we, you know, it becomes a meeting. So what’s the result and what are we looking for and who needs to be heard?
Because it might be you, but it might be a few other people that have some of those thoughts on their minds too, and a great time to do that. I think by carving the time also, it helps to keep the inclusion and exclusion of the business because, you know, many families decide, especially as it goes into multigenerational type, the multigenerational situation, many families feel that inclusion of spouses or even inclusion of young children is just not, it’s not what they want to do at that time. It’s going to be like unproductive.
So it helps to keep those boundaries and not create confusion. Oh, I was included in this conversation. Am I going to be included now?
And also, so many times spouses, they’re all important to us. And also young children are important to us. And it’s hard for them sometimes to be included partially because they get part of the information.
They don’t get all of the information. And it creates this vision in their heads that may not be true because it’s not complete.
Andrea Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
From my experience, I could see how that would be definitely a problem. Something I appreciate about my parents was they made a really clear cut expectation that everyone in the family had the same understanding of when you were going to start to get certain information, what that looked like, when we were going to meet, what was going to be included, and what your expectation of participation, should you choose to do that, is after that point in time. And that definitely just, it just helps all the rest of the time for people to know where they stand and how they fit in.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Yeah. And I think that that’s, again, a great example of by doing that, you knew when you were going to be included in that side of the family business, right? You also knew where you stood in the family.
So you weren’t, it was just very clear and a great practice. So great. Lucky to have that experience, Andrea, because most people do not.
Yeah. Those parents don’t know what they want.
Andrea Carpenter: Yeah. On that note, what other advice do you have for the parents, the matriarchs and patriarchs of a family who are maybe bringing everyone together?
Elizabeth Ledoux: I guess the best one is to really engage in knowing what you want, then understanding that you’re not going to have a clear picture of it, but you might have a near-term picture of it. Because if you can figure out what you want, and you can keep, you know, as a couple, I just had a meeting earlier this morning with a couple that’s thinking about bringing in their kids, but one of them is moving a little bit faster than the other one is comfortable with. So with them doing that, it’s starting to create a little bit of a stress on their marital relationship, right?
They’re not in sync with each other. They’re not aligned. So I think it’s important to engage and know what you want.
And to the best of your ability, and then invite people into whatever that is, being very vulnerable and transparent that there’s no, you know, magic wand here. There’s no easy way, and you don’t know what the future holds. You just know what you want to do today.
So then you can invite people in and be clear. I think most of the time I’m thinking of my family because we’re very, very, very good at talking about business at almost every single gathering that we have. And it’s been that way since I was really young.
My grandparents did that. My parents did that. Now we do it with our children, too.
And it’s just a part of the way that we operate. I can tell you how frustrated some of the spouses get. And some of the other kids, while they’re just rolling their eyes looking at us, like, are you done yet?
So I think we’re starting to be much more intentional about setting that time aside and doing it. We had a big, big, big family gathering. It was last July.
And we had people here for about five days, and we carved out with our partners only in the business just a great annual kind of partner meeting. Took a couple of hours away from the family and did that. And it really worked out well for us.
And that was a big shift for my parents.
Andrea Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. Any other success stories from your family or clients that you’ve seen?
And then I’m happy to share one as well.
Elizabeth Ledoux: I don’t know that I have any others. We have plenty of examples. My hope for people is that they will pay attention to the people around them, keep the idea of people first in mind.
And also the purpose. There’s a lady by the name of Priya Parker who talks about the reason for gatherings. And she’s written quite a few books.
Andrea Carpenter: Yes.
Elizabeth Ledoux: The Art of Gathering is a great book. Highly recommend it. It is.
But I think deciding and understanding what’s the purpose of this gathering, whether it’s a business gathering or a family gathering. So I think that that’s great. Know your purpose.
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Andrea Carpenter: One of my favorite family traditions that we do every year is called completing and remembering. We got the set of questions from a family friend. And at the end of the year, right as we get towards New Year’s Eve, sometimes it’s a little earlier, sometimes it’s a little later.
But we all gather and we run through kind of our completion of the last year and then looking forward to the next year. What does that look like? How can we support each other?
And that is just such a beautiful. I think it aligns with our value of people first, because it’s really where does everyone stand? Where are they excited about?
How can we support each other as a family unit? And that is just such a beautiful way that we kind of ground ourselves going into the next year. So I’m super grateful for that.
And like you said, we have a really strong like our purpose is clearly defined around why we do that activity. And so it’s very special.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Very special. Yeah. And that keeps that keeps you aligned and keeps the family together.
And it keeps you together as business partners, too, because, you know, what I had in the same meeting this morning, you know, we’re so fortunate as business owners to have the opportunity to make choices in our lives. And and sometimes. I think it’s so important.
There’s no reason why you can’t use and work through things with the business so that you can support everybody’s dreams. And so in your in that exercise, you’re so fortunate to be able to understand what everybody wants from the family perspective, also the business perspective, and then support each other in doing that. It’s beautiful.
Andrea Carpenter: Yeah. And on that note, I would love to make those questions available for anyone who wants to use them. So we’ll put a link in the show notes for you to download a copy of those completing and creating questions.
They’re super special. Yeah. Awesome.
Any other wisdom for the holidays? I know we’re getting close. Everyone’s time is busy this time of year.
So we wanted to make this a short and sweet one.
Elizabeth Ledoux: That’s right. That’s right. My thought is just enjoy, have fun, engage with people and pay attention to everybody being heard and listened to.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Thanks, everyone, and happy holidays. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Business Transition Roadmap. If you are listening to this and you find yourself wanting to go deeper into these topics and start the process of putting together your transition strategy, I’d love to offer you a free initial strategy session with my team, where we’ll help you to explore the future transition of your business.
Head over to www.transitionstrategists.com to schedule a call. Thank you again for listening, and I’ll see you on the next episode of the Business Transition Roadmap.
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The Business Transition Roadmap with Elizabeth Ledoux
How do communities thrive? When businesses experience healthy growth and transition. Join CEO of The Transition Strategists, Elizabeth Ledoux as she and her guests identify what makes a successful business transition roadmap. If you know you want to transition or exit your business “one day”, today is the right day to start planning. This show will give you the roadmap.
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