Family businesses are often value-driven. However, professional management requires concrete goals and expectations. Therefore, the key is to make family and corporate values explicit and translate them into a tangible strategy and concrete goals at every level of the company.

That way, the direction and focus is clear to everyone. And employees can actively contribute to the realization of strategy and continuity with focused energy.

Letting go is a lever for entrepreneurship and growth throughout the company. At the same time, it is perhaps one of the most difficult competencies for family businesses to learn. Letting go of ownership and transferring authority and responsibilities. 

Letting go requires trust in each other. Do employees take ownership and start acting entrepreneurially? Everyone will have to learn new leadership styles, competencies and roles.

In the ever faster changing world, continuous innovation is a must. Don’t you? Then competitors walk past you in no time. By focusing on collective innovation, you actually make your company a leader.

Collective innovation involves engaging and challenging talents at all levels of the organization. It takes guts to experiment and collaborate with other disciplines or even with other parties. But it is precisely this collectivity and collaboration that leads to more energy and the necessary innovation. 

The organizational structure in family businesses has often grown organically. This can be detrimental to effectiveness in the long run.

Do you want to keep a growing organization manageable and working together optimally? Then it is important to define clear roles, responsibilities and consultation structures. Both within the organization and between family and organization.

Advantages:

• Everyone knows what can and should be expected of each other.
• Alignment and decision-making no longer take place “upstairs,” but “horizontally.
• Meetings have a clean structure aimed at effective and action-oriented decision-making.
• Employees are consistently and clearly informed.
• You create a safe and trusted environment where employees seek out and address each other.

Family businesses often steer by intuition, and that is definitely a strength. Moreover, it becomes even stronger if you can back up intuition with figures and objective facts. Because when you know where you stand from established goals, management and staff can intervene and act proactively.

Also important: make implicit knowledge in the minds of the family and senior staff explicit. So that employees can act on both fact and collective knowledge.

The result is a more decisive company. People make quicker and better decisions and take the right actions.