For an entrepreneur who realizes that a family member is not up to the role assigned, it’s a bad awakening.
Children who are not up to taking the corporate helm, relatives in important coordination roles are just 2 examples of a difficult organizational change: how to handle the situation by ensuring the good of the company and that of the family?
In these cases a decision is made, sooner or later: but how timely is it? is it the right one?
Being timely is crucial, as these situations become visible to the entire company very quickly, with consequences for the company’s climate and people motivation.
There are several factors to consider, often interconnected, difficult to recognize and manage for those involved.
The coach is the person who can best help the actors involved to find a balance between rational and emotional factors without one having the upper hand over others, while at the same time ensuring a timely decision.
Let’s see how I helped manage a real case.
Two entrepreneurs have entrusted their daughter with a co-ordination role in the company’s operational management, but their daughter uses a management style that is generating tensions between departments involved in managing the business process.
Corrective actions on their daughter’s leadership style have failed; the situation is having a negative impact on company performance and employees motivation.
The first action was a team coaching activity with the main actors of the process run by their daughter, to review the process in order to improve its performance.
The next step was an individual coaching session with the entrepreneurs’ daughter: this session showed the person’s dissatisfaction in that role, her attachment to the company, and it achieved the definition of the ideal features of the job she wanted, and her decision to accept the change of role.
The final step was a team coaching session where parents and daughter shared business and personal needs and jointly found a new role for the daughter in the company.
The model I applied involved the following steps:
- Team coaching: Is the operational process efficient? What are the factors that affect its performance?
- Individual coaching: are the actors in the process the right people in the right job? what is their ideal role?
- Team coaching: how to combine business needs with personal ones?
Coaching then helped entrepreneurs to speed up a decision they knew they had to take but they did not quite know when and how: thanks to coaching, the decision was shared and guaranteed the good both of the company and the family.