When Anna graduated from high school her parents wanted her to go off to college but she convinced them to let her work during the day and take evening classes at the local technical school. She never finished a degree. She didn’t see why she should be wasting her time studying when she knew what she wanted to do with her life.

Anna knew the business. She had rotated through every department, had worn every hat, and everyone of them fit. She had as much grit as any man and plenty more than her brother,Tom.

Tom never seemed to care as much or work as hard as she. Yet she knew he’d take over the business. Her father was old school and her mother wasn’t about to take him on: Tom would inherit the company and if she wanted , she’d have a job working for him. Anna challenged her father’s resolve only once, and regretted the toll it took on all of them. It would all belong to Tom, that was it.  Her father died before he had time to reconsider or retire,  and her mother followed soon after.

Anna stepped aside and let her brother take the helm. She figured Tom would let her run the operation and he’d run the front office. Tom had different plans. He told her he didn’t like the business and wouldn’t spend his life anchored to it. He sold it. Just like that. He pocketed the profits and moved away.  Other than a Christmas card or two, Anna never heard from him again.

The new owners asked her to stay on through the transition. She knew it was only a matter of time before they’d let her go but she was afraid to leave on her own. After a year they gave her notice. In three years the company went belly-up.

Her grandparents were midwesterners who were newlyweds when they moved south. They spent all they had on a small parcel of land and did what farmers do. When grandma started having babies, she had to stay home to tend them.  To make ends meet, she opened a small business she could run from the house. It wasn’t long before they were making more money from the store than they were from the farm.

Their children followed them into the business that began as a roadside stop and became the town’s biggest employer. Their son (Anna and Tom’s father) took it to the next level. Tom did it in.

It’s a cautionary tale of basic yet flawed assumptions that deal with family businesses and the roles that children play within them. It challenges the misguided notions that what was, will always be.

Most owner-parents wrestle with  the same concerns: Should we sell the business or turn it over to the children? The problem is riddled with complexity. If it’s one you struggle with, you need a starting place for your discussion. You’ll find it when you tell the truth, first to yourself and then to your family members. What are your plans for the business, now and into the future? What role do you intend your children to have in its future? Equally important: What do they want? What are their aspirations and expectations?

It’s not usual for business owning parents to project a larger than life presence. They can look controlling, intimidating, all knowing, unforgiving, enabling, take your pick.  If you want your grown kids to be honest with you, give them a fair chance. (You might benefit from coaching on this subject).

Whatever the direction or outcome of your discussion, always encourage your children to expand their education, work, and life experience beyond the boundaries they’ve grown to know and expect.

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Yes! You may use this article by Executive and Career Coach, Joyce Richman, in your blog, article in your blog, newsletter or website as long as you include the following bio box:

Joyce Richman (www.richmanresources.com) has been specializing in executive and career coaching since she started her own practice in 1982. She works in a variety of environments including: higher education, manufacturing, sales, marketing, media, technology, pharmaceuticals, medicine, banking and finance, service, IT, and non-profit sectors. A member of the adjunct faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership, Joyce is certified to administer a number of feedback and psychological instruments. Joyce is a weekly guest on WFMY-TV and the career columnist for The Greensboro News & Record. She is the author of Roads, Routes and Ruts: A Guidebook to Career Success and co-author of Getting Your Kid Out of the House and Into a Job. A popular speaker, Richman conducts seminars and workshops throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. Her coaching profile can be found at TheCoachingAssociation.com

Whether you’re Linsay Lohan, Toyota or Bank of America, you’re reinventing, changing, upgrading yourself and your company to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition.

No matter how complex or simple the switch, your goal is to drive change instead of being driven by it. If you believe there’s an urgent need, you’ll establish a coalition of groups responsible for making it happen, specifically, the visionaries, strategists and implementers. For that coalition to be effective, you’ll need to communicate, again and again, the “why, what, how and how come” of the change effort.

Don’t ignore those who ask “Isn’t this change for change’ sake?” Recognize that they’ve had to endure unsuccessful innovative spirits in the past who insisted on throwing out the old, just because that’s what it was. These trouble shooters have grown tired of “ready, fire, aim” managers and want to be part of the solution instead part of the problem. Their input is important and their experience critical to the success of the mission. You can get them on board by including them in planning and problem solving. You can take their concerns seriously by getting in the trenches with them. Implementation from where they sit looks much different than it does at 30,000 feet.

Going back to how things were or wanting things to stay the same aren’t options. They never have been. In fact, if “necessity is the mother of invention” we’re heading for the mother of all periods of change not because we want to, but because that’s where tomorrow is.

Entrepreneurial maturity. The two words are not as contradictory as they might appear. As markets cool, venture capitalists tighten their money belts, becoming more selective in awarding their hotly pursued financing to start-ups that have the greatest probability of success.  Expect these moguls to more closely scrutinize resumes, infrastructures, and business models, looking for quantifiable winners who have not only led the charge in the past, but have proven track records for delivering on their promises.

Communicate, communicate, communicate has replaced location, location, location, as verbal triplets that bear repeating. No matter how often it’s said, most people don’t do a good job of asking questions and listening to the answers they get. Instead, they keep pounding until the answer changes or the questioner goes away.

If employees are the first casualties of mishandled communication, customers run a close second. When either group is left to figure out what they don’t understand but need to know, they not only lose their connection with the larger organization, they lose their will to connect. With brand and company loyalty at a low ebb, communication is a three-peat worth listening to.

Community. Employees are working more and want more than a paycheck in return. They want their opinions considered, they want to make a difference. The want to fit in, they want friendship and support. Simply stated, they want a sense of community. The workplace is starting to meet them halfway. It’s more casual, hierarchies are flattened, and teamwork is an expectation instead of a slogan.

Family friendly companies interested in maintaining their employee base are responding in a variety of ways: by setting up storefronts that support the home front; offering fee based personal care benefits like on site dry cleaning, concierge service, and take out food. Others are establishing elder care and day care centers, general stores, and car care services for personal autos.

There’s an old expression, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Reinvention, maturity, communication, and community speak to basic needs we all have. We want to find a connection between what the world wants and who we are, what we seek in ourselves and what we’re willing and able to give to others.

In our determination to be more than what we currently are, we’ll have to grow and give others the space and the grace to do the same. Inevitably, we’re going to make mistakes. Our success will be measured by our ability to learn from them, regroup, and move on.

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Yes! You may use this article by Executive and Career Coach, Joyce Richman, in your blog, article in your blog, newsletter or website as long as you include the following bio box:

Joyce Richman (www.richmanresources.com) has been specializing in executive and career coaching since she started her own practice in 1982. She works in a variety of environments including: higher education, manufacturing, sales, marketing, media, technology, pharmaceuticals, medicine, banking and finance, service, IT, and non-profit sectors. A member of the adjunct faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership, Joyce is certified to administer a number of feedback and psychological instruments. Joyce is a weekly guest on WFMY-TV and the career columnist for The Greensboro News & Record. She is the author of Roads, Routes and Ruts: A Guidebook to Career Success and co-author of Getting Your Kid Out of the House and Into a Job. A popular speaker, Richman conducts seminars and workshops throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. Her coaching profile can be found at TheCoachingAssociation.com.

Click below to access a pdf with David’s biographical notes and a list of his publications and presentations:

David Hurst Presentationss and Publications 2010

David Hurst is a speaker, writer and consultant with more than 25 years of corporate experience coupled with highly innovative ideas about leadership, the management of change and the dynamics of organizations that promoted creativity and learning.

Books:

Crisis and Renewal:  Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Chanbe

Learning from the Links:  Mastering Management Using Lessons from Golf

Architects of Choice (forthcoming)

Click here for David’s coaching profile.

Who did I look for?  Someone who has credibility with employees, the courage to support a new initiative, articulate enough to discuss what they were doing and had the integrity to focus on the change itself – without expressly worrying about how it will affect them politically.  I then solicited their help as my ‘partner in crime’ for the guerilla warfare we were about to engage.

We hear so much about finding mentors, coaches, great bosses and other supportive people to work with us in both our jobs and lives.  Those people are also critical to the success of any change initiative.  However, the first person on board was not to help me strategize the change or to assist me emotionally in the process of change, it was someone who would quietly begin work on the change itself.

If the organization needs to retain people through more flexible staffing patterns – I found a ‘partner’ who agreed that this will help retention and who worked intuitively or with guidance to figure out how to manage and support a staff member who had a different working arrangement.  If we needed to bring more diversity to the organization – I sought a manager who may have lived in a different culture and could figure out how to build a team that was not homogeneous.  If new technology was critical to our success, I found someone who loved the new, wasn’t afraid to experiment and could articulate their success to others.

Finally, I got explicit about these arrangements and explained why we saw the need for a ‘partner’ and the role of the partner in this process.  The primary role was to pilot the change, demonstrate the success this change can bring and realistically articulate the management of change to others.  I wanted change to be successful in the field, not something that HR brought to the table.   A partner in crime.  The crime of doing something that does not fit the old unwritten rule – but instead blazes a new trail in this organization.

So, in your new endeavor, what is your ‘crime’, what trail are you blazing, and who is your partner?

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Yes! You may use this article by HR Consultant & Executive Coach, Ronnie Grabon, in your blog, newsletter or website as long as you include the following bio box:

Ronnie Grabon, SPHR, received her BA and MBA from Rutgers University. she is an Executive Coach and HR Consultant for companies and individuals undergoing transition.  After 30 years in corporate work, she recently completed her own transition by serving as VP of HR for a company undergoing bankruptcy and liquidation.  Over the last ten years. Ronnie has coached more than 500 people at the Center for Creative Leadership, as well as consulting with individuals, businesses and non-profits.  Ronnie can be reached at rgrabon@triad.rr.com or by phone at 336-706-1621.  Ronnie’s coaching profile can be found at TheCoachingAssociation.com.

A systemic approach to managing your talent is critical in today’s business climate.

Succession planning is not just reserved for Global 100 corporations. Small to medium sized organizations, family businesses, and large corporations all need a robust process for growing talent. The complexities of business today dictate nothing less.

• “We can’t afford to have the wrong people occupy key leadership positions in our company. The stakes are too high, the mistakes are costly. Some of our key staff are retiring in the next 5 years and I am not sure we have people ready to fill those positions. How can we know who’s ready? Quite frankly we don’t have any time to waste.”

Ensuring Future Talent

How well prepared is your organization with regard to its talent? Do you have replacements ready when key positions are vacated? Do you have a system in place for people to know what to develop to assume greater responsibilities? Do you quarrel at meetings over who is ready and who isn’t?

Developing a shared language and shared process is the first step to a robust succession planning process. When the process is clear and everyone knows the targets, you can drive development for critical roles where it belongs- to motivated employees with aspirations for doing more. This will ensure you have employees with “ready now” vs. maybe or never as a designation.

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Yes! You may use this article by Executive Coach Melodie Howard in your blog, newsletter or website as long as you include the following bio box:

Melodie Howard’s firm, In Perspective Consulting, focuses on designing and executing sustainable systems for development. Her particular specialties are: succession planning, corporate values, performance management systems, senior leadership competency development, executive coaching, 360o feedback and talent management. Melodie’s previous experience includes serving as the Group Director of Organizational Development for leading international re-insurance company, Partner Reinsurance, Ltd., based in Hamilton, Bermuda. She continues to work with them on a retained consultancy basis. Prior to her role at PartnerRe, Melodie spent 16 years at the Center for Creative Leadership in both operational and profit and loss responsibility roles. Melodie received her Master’s of Science in Organization Development from Pepperdine University in August of 2000 and a B.S. in Psychology from Guilford College in 1980. You can find Melodie’s profile onTheCoachingAssociation.com.