Family Business

Family businesses are unique because of their unconscious power dynamics, which includes highly emotionally charged ‘artifacts’ which are passed down through the generations from the family’s history.  These lie latent and hidden in the ‘space between’, felt at an energetic level, but rarely brought into consciousness.  Due to underlying anxieties and fears, family members will often do anything that they can to avoid revisiting the past and dealing with situations which they have tried to ignore and bury. This is not a conscious process, but rather an unconscious avoidance of things which have caused pain, grief, sadness, and anger. 

In order for family businesses to become more agile, innovative, sustainable, and at the same time to handle the internal dynamics of succession and leadership, complexity of relationships, there must be a more conscious, reflective process about its emotional history. We need to be able to talk about betrayals, which ask for apologies and forgiveness, rather than just going about business and pushing it under the surface. When experts are brought in from the outside to help family businesses work through their challenges, little attention is paid to the ‘softer’ dimensions of love, belonging, and need for purpose and meaning.  Although emotions are often ‘thrown around’ during meetings, heated discussions and patterns of interaction mimicking how it was as a child growing up, no one openly acknowledges this. So rather than using the family business environment as a source of growing consciousness and evolving ourselves, we suppress the emotional information which surfaces hoping instead that it will just go away.

While it isn’t easy to unpack the baggage of the past, it is necessary if the family business wants to bring into harmony who it wants to be in the future with who it is today. With the past repaired and even honored, family members feel freer to be authentic leaders in the company, rather than still trying to please their mothers or fathers.  They can begin to express themselves without fear of being reprimanded or hurt again by the same unconscious patterns. This process brings consciousness and a deeper sense of purpose, to not only the family business as a whole, but to each individual member.