Next Generation Leadership: Effective Communication and Family Office Strategies

In this episode, we explore the importance of communication across generations within family offices. Uli shares his experience of managing multi-generational communication through biannual family governance retreats, creating an environment that fosters open dialogue and alignment. He emphasizes the significance of both financial and emotional resources in ensuring smooth generational transitions. Similarly, another guest reflects on how their family office has been shaped by years of open communication, with a strong focus on financial literacy, health, and wellness for younger generations. The discussion dives deep into the evolving dynamics of family communication and the crucial role it plays in sustaining family legacies and wealth.

Transcript

So here, we'll tie into another part of this question, but I don't know if anyone
who has kids out here, when you come home, I don't know if you've had the
experience where you go outside and everyone's sitting on their cell phone and
they're all together but no one's talking to each other. And so when I think about
the younger generation and communication, how they communicate versus how my father,
grandfather communicated, are completely completely different. So this question, I'll
start with you, ties into communication. How do you, you know, within your
organization deal with whether it's, you know, one generation to the next? How do
you effectively deal with communication and manage multiple generations instead of
everyone's aligned? >> So one thing we started doing probably 25 years ago was to
have biannual family governance retreats that would last several days and we might
get those facilitated or moderated sometimes by internal staff and now more also by
firing some outside consultants on that and preparing an agenda both from the family
members as well as just what I would generate as being in charge of that and then
we run through it and There are a lot of Q &A and we're able to do this in a
very, how should I say, conducive environment, some place usually in the United
States, sometimes outside that goes back to even as kids,
we used to visit national park lodges, so we might choose a location like that that
gives us a little bit of a DNA feeling, like something that we've been doing for a
long time and I think that addresses in large part the emotional component and
somebody was just saying you know the resources other than financial whereas I would
argue that money is a strong clue that keeps people coming back and especially when
performance is good and when it's not then you know there may be issues but in
terms of those let's say soft skills or a soft aspect so but that goes a long way
to creating a bond, so. - Right, you know, how do you incorporate communication,
you know, in your family office? - Sure, that's easy. We have a small family
officer, it's myself and my two sons. However, we have a large family, we
communicate a lot. I have five children, they're all married. I have 18
grandchildren, and so we started 10 years ago having regular family meetings with the
adults and we're having in fact our one is coming up week from Saturday, our one
here in the spring. We have one in the spring, one in the fall and we've got to
the point now where my oldest son really sets the agenda, does most of the talking
and I'm there if they have any questions but really I'm going to point in my life
where I'm making the transition, the handoff to my children. and we made it a
priority years ago. I made it a priority 20 years ago to start having my kids
travel with me and be aware of what I was doing. So when the exit took place and
we stood up a family office, we didn't think we were gonna do that. We thought
we'd do a multifamily office. I don't have a finance background. But the more we
looked at it and interviewed several multifamily offices and they're fantastic, but I
looked at the fees and said, I think we can figure this out ourselves and that's
what we've done for the last seven years and so we're very active in how we we're
just ourselves we syndicate with a lot of other family offices in the inner mountain
West and we find great deals because of how well we we communicate and we make
sure that with our family meetings that are but not only my children but now the
grandchildren are now getting old enough to understand we're teaching literacy, health
and wellness, and a number of things that are more important or as important as the
finances in the family.