The Family Business Pre-Succession Planning Checklist

Don’t Leave Your Family’s Future to Chance! As the leader in a family business, you already know that succession planning or eventual transition is somewhere on your horizon. There’s no getting around it. It may be looming directly in front of you. It may be somewhere far enough down the road that you haven’t given it much thought. If either are true for you, keep reading.  The truth is, ensuring a smooth transition of leadership is a long-term project. Preserving the legacy of your company for future generations and stakeholders begins long before most families think it does. Beginning your pre-succession plan even five to ten years before the transition of leadership is ideal. Yes… five to ten+ years early.  …

Why Company Culture Work Stalls at the Top

There’s a lot of talk these days about company culture and the need for change in order to improve organizational health and retention. Many progressive organizations are doing company culture work in an effort to increase engagement, fulfillment, and work-life balance. We’ve had quite a few clients come to us who have already done company culture work. They have even utilized Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” . Still, they have not been able to implement permanent changes. Despite their effort, they slide back to old patterns or find themselves stuck in the same place they were before. The reason for this lies at the top – company culture only changes to the level of its leaders. Let’s …

How to Manage Conflict in Your Family Business: Building Empathy

Conflict is a natural and inevitable part of family businesses. It is a top reason that families come to me looking for help. Conflict can arise due to disagreements about business decisions, unresolved tensions and dysfunctions between family members. Sometimes it is simply because the close quarters of a family business can be breeding grounds for conflict. People in conflict tend to lock themselves into their own position.  They repeat pattens and are unwilling to compromise. However, if not managed effectively, conflict can cause serious damage to the business and relationships within it. In this blog post, we will discuss how to build empathy in order to manage conflict more effectively in your family business. What is true empathy? We …

The Big Illusion: Things Will Work Out on Their Own. How to Break the Habit of Procrastination and Make Critical Decisions

In our work at The Center for Conscious Living and Fulfillment, clients often come to us after months or years of putting off critical decisions. Many of them are now standing right in the middle of a crossroads and need to make a decision about their business and their life– and fast. Some of these decisions may be about transferring and/or exiting their business, letting a long-time leader go, having a difficult conversation with a family member in the business, working on succession and estate planning, etc. All these things that get labeled as “important but not urgent” but have been put off for so long, that the consequences of putting them off have started to show. They may be …

A True Compass: How to Navigate Life’s Crossroads

We all come to crossroads in our lives. Consequential life decisions that– no matter their size– always have the potential to have long-term impact on our personal life, professional life, and even our family life. Many people try to navigate these crossroads without a true compass, without a true sense of purpose. We would never try to navigate a new city without knowing where we were going or which direction we were heading, yet when it comes to something as important as the precious time we have left in our lives, we can go in circles. In our work at The Center for Conscious Living and Fulfillment TM, we realized that most of the people we helped came to us …