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By Wayne Rivers

I was participating recently in a CEO Performance Roundtable for a firm near Atlanta. During the employee interview phase of the analysis, I walked one employee out of the room in order to welcome the next one. In a relatively small firm with a reputation for good service and good teamwork, the first employee put her head down and walked briskly past the other employee without so much as eye contact, a nod, a hand gesture, or a syllable. She walked within a foot of the other person without any sort of acknowledgement whatsoever of the presence of another human being. I was, to say the least, flabbergasted. I reported the observation to the peer group, and we began to probe more deeply for dysfunction among the staff in this highly profitable family business.

How is it that the woman entrepreneur, who had been producing extremely strong financial results in their company and who had known about the dysfunctional employee relations for some time, tolerated and, in effect, condoned it for such a long period of time?

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By Wayne Rivers, CEO Family Business Institute

Conflict is a fact of life in family and closely-held businesses.  This research paper deals with definitions of conflict, suppression and avoidance of conflict, keys to successful family business conflict resolution, and tips for those occasions where you find yourself as a third party intermediary in a dispute situation.

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By Wayne Rivers, CEO Family Business Institute

There’s a fair amount of discussion among family business commentators on the almost obsessive focus on exit strategy and succession planning for the family firm. Having a successful family business is a powerful force in family life. It is often the focus of conversation around the family dinner table or at family gatherings. The family business even captures extended family in its gravitational field; many times after the parent generation has died, the family business transfers to the next generation in line.

When family business owners do their estate planning, the family company and the succession of the business is the single most important topic of discussion. All other estate and tax planning concepts are secondary. The family business, in short, has been the focus (if not the obsession) of the entrepreneur’s daily life 24 hours a day for perhaps 30 or 40 years. Tom Campbell of The Family Business Institute says that creating a successful family business is the closest that a man can come to giving birth.

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