Jeff Faulkner

The Parent’s Role: Principles for Preventing Sibling Rivalry
October 5, 2007

A family business owner’s dream is instinctively to want their children to work together in perfect harmony. However, this is rarely the case because of the controlling nature of the entrepreneurial, control freak mom/dad. 

Many business owners are control freaks. When you merge an entrepreneur’s natural tendency to control with natural prideful emotions and high expectations of their children, you end up with a recipe for disaster. 

I once worked with a business owner who was in the process of attempting to develop his two sons to take over the business. He really wanted to transfer stock in the business to them, but there was a catch. He told his boys, “Prove to me that you’re exercising 3 days a week, you’re eating right and have stopped chewing tobacco, and be in church on Sundays and I’ll transfer some stock to you.” 

Principle # 1 – Allow your adult children to govern their own behaviors and attitudes, values and beliefs. If you don’t, they will respond to your over-control in unconventional ways that will get your long lasting attention. Furthermore, it inevitably sets up unhealthy competition between the kids to earn dad’s approval.

Another business owner, who was 70 years old, had three sons in their late 40’s. The sibling rivalry was intense between these three. The problem was rooted in the parents’ desire to treat their three sons equally. And it was out of control to the point that mom would give Christmas gifts behind the scenes to make sure they knew the same amount of money had been spent on them. Absolutely absurd! I know!

Principle #2 –Treat your kids equitably, rather than equally. Sibling partnerships require an understanding that disbursements from the gene pool are not equal and, therefore, each sibling has unique core competencies that support specific business roles. After all, the siblings in partnerships know full well that they are not created equal and do not work at comparable levels. Efforts of parents to compel equality among siblings will create resentment that will eventually destroy the partnership.

In a similar situation, I worked with a dad who had never given his children the opportunity to work together and learn how to make decisions together. In fact, it was a control freak dad who reserved the decision making power for himself. He wanted his children to work toward developing a sibling partnership, but when they experienced conflict, it made him extremely uncomfortable, fearing that the family would get blown apart. So he exerted his control and suppressed the conflict. Consequently, his children never developed the ability to work together effectively.

Principle #3 – Allow your children to learn from their failures. Provide opportunities for your children to learn the skills of joint decision making. Help them learn to resolve conflict. Encourage them to develop healthy communication skills. If you haven’t developed these skills yourself, recognize it, admit it, and get out of the way. Understand that attempting to protect your kids from making mistakes is really about protecting your own image and the image of the business and your name in the community. How ego-centric can you be? Get over yourself!

Posted by Jeff Faulkner on October 5, 2007 | Comments (0)