Family And Friends 1 Second Edition

[Peppin Kishore]

Iput myself up for adoption. I went as a teen but there is also boards for adults looking for parents at many of the adoption agencies. That is a good way to start if you don't have friends that are interested in family. Once I was happy with my family after a while I grew up and adopted my own kids. Extended family is great. Just be real in your expectations. Your not gonna get along with everyone. And family members do come and go with rl issues taking them from sl or they just are looking for something different.

I worked with my classmates Marcelo and Roye for our final project, and we became incredibly close friends as a result. We shared openly and collaborated on a fascinating journey to discover answers to some of the questions we have asked ourselves for years. The project has enabled me to understand the complex dynamics of a fascinating family business at a critical point of transition. It trained me to ask questions and identify issues from a consultant's perspective, and the process also helped me to reflect the journey of navigating my own family business.

We are also grateful to Christine Blondel, who taught us the Family Business elective in Fontainebleau. She has such incredible experiences advising family businesses and serving on the boards of traded family-influenced companies, and she is always so open to share her experiences as well as listening to our opinions and perspectives.

I have also found an inspiring mentor and friend, Martin Roll, who is a Distinguished Fellow (family business) and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD. Martin, who also holds an MBA from INSEAD, has mentored me and many of my classmates, helping each of us to discover our unique life paths and strengths. Martin is a highly respected thought leader, a regular commentator in global media and an advisor to several global boards and prominent business families. Yet he is always so friendly, approachable and fun to be with when he mentors us young students. It is through conversations with Martin that many of us found the way to shape our futures as second-generation family business leaders.

Their focus on long-term planning and heavy investment into relationships has contributed to their resilience in our turbulent world today, and these lessons are worthy of being shared to a wider business community.

For this reason, the research and knowledge sharing at the INSEAD Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise is critical and meaningful. Last month the Wendel Centre organised its Family Enterprise Day conference, bringing together academics, family business owners and MBA students to share thoughts on the topic of family business resilience.

I also felt inspired by Caroline Hllein, Former CEO, Shareholder and Member of the Advisory Board Carolinenhuette GmbH, a German family business in its fifth generation. Caroline was once an MBA student at INSEAD, and the way she exercised such leadership at Carolinenhuette, stepping up as first female CEO of the family business at a time when her family needed her was incredible. She is such a role model for us young students.

At the Family Enterprise Day conference, my classmates Celina, Joceline and I presented our views as MBA students. Flexibility, resilience and innovation are some values we highlighted as important for family businesses.

After hearing the news friends and family members decided to hold an event to help raise money for the family, since Garey is out of work. The Ride for Brian included a family fun ride earlier in the day with everyone meeting back at Kava Korner for food, games, raffles and more.

With a constant line of people waiting to greet and talk to him, Garey was in high spirits as he thanked attendees for their support. Keeping a smile on his face, he spoke of the importance of remaining optimistic and not swelling on the negative.

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Despite all of this, I still firmly believe that the way to go in relationships with people who work for you is to be friendly, but not friends. So I figured it's time I did a reboot on this important topic. Like anything else in leadership, every relationship you develop is different. This requires you to read the play, and apply your experience and judgment to each specific situation.

In the workplace, with the people who actually worked on my teams, it meant I did a lot of listening - particularly to my direct reports. I paid attention to what was important to each individual that I interacted with. I knew what made them tick. I knew about their aspirations, their frustrations, and their joys. I could tell when they were off their game, and I could tell when they were performing at their best.

I shared as much of myself as I could if I thought that it would help them to be better or to have a broader perspective. All of this, without crossing the line to being friends. They knew they could count on my support and guidance, and I was direct and honest in my communication. But for the most part, I wasn't their friend. Being friends is more than this, it goes beyond a friendly collegial relationship and enters another realm altogether.

That's where it gets complicated, and the playing field that the team operates on becomes skewed. The key difference in my definition between friendly and friends can be summed up in one phrase: professional distance.

Being friendly with the people you work with is really good. In fact, if you want to be a great leader, I'd say it's essential. You need a context to operate within that demonstrates that you actually care about the people who turn up each day to give their best to you and the team.

In my experience, you won't ever be able to get the best from your people unless you know them reasonably well. Otherwise, how would you know how far to stretch them? How would you be able to read the signs of stress or burnout? How would you be able to find development opportunities that are aligned with their career ambitions? Being friendly is the starting point for trust and respect.

When there's a hard conversation that needs to be held or a hard decision that needs to be made, you will rationalize even more when it comes to a friend. You will hesitate for longer - or maybe forever. You'll reject the negatives and instead give them the benefit of any doubt, in every situation.

There were three occasions in my corporate career where I had to terminate someone who I was pretty close to. I wouldn't say that any of them were close friends, but closer than I would've liked under the circumstances - we knew each other's families and we'd spent a number of social occasions together.

So if they don't perform, and you manage to steel yourself to take the necessary action, it basically heralds the end of the friendship for all involved. Then, any friends of those friends also decide that you are the devil, leaving a noticeable hole in your social calendar. And make no mistake, it falls to the leader who makes the hard decision to bear the brunt of it. Everyone looking from the outside in thinks that it's heartless to treat a friend that way, which is sort of ironic because the friend who didn't perform in that role should feel worse for not delivering and for letting their friend, the leader, down.

I've also learned that differentiating on merit naturally creates stronger relationships. Now, I sort of already knew that, but the dozens of conversations I've had on this topic in the last few years have really reinforced it. I said in the original episode that you should spend 90% of your time with your best people. If you actually manage to do that well, you will undoubtedly develop stronger relationships with your best people and you'll naturally be closer to them. So there's likely to be a strong correlation between someone who you're close to and someone who is actually delivering the goods. The secret here is to make sure you keep that professional distance, no matter what.

I've learned that there are some genuinely tricky situations. What happens, for example, if you are promoted from within your team to then lead that same team? This is a really common scenario, and it's likely you will have developed peer friendships, which are entirely appropriate. But then you are thrust into a position where you now have to lead those same people - some of whom might be friends.

The bad news is you cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one. However, you can mitigate the potential negatives by putting explicit boundaries in place. It's been a number of years since I was in that position, however, even way back then, I understood the difficulties of having to lead someone who was a close friend. A really clear and explicit conversation that goes something like this should do the trick:

I also ran into this when I was leading CS Energy. There are places where a particular operational site is the main employer in the town. Everyone's kids go to the same school, their leaders' husbands play social sport together on a Wednesday night. It's almost impossible to be friendly, not friends in those circumstances.

This is why keeping professional distance is absolutely essential in these circumstances, but it can be incredibly difficult. We even used to bring in middle managers from outside of the town, just so they didn't have those deep, strong family bonds with the people they had to lead. Middle managers who take a strong line on performance in places like this are often ostracized in the community. Their wives don't get invited to social events, their kids are bullied at school - can you believe that? Forget being a CEO, these are the toughest leadership jobs around.

Think about this in the context of power dynamics at work. Although I'm the first one to fight for the rights of female agency and self-determination, this is an awfully muddy area. Social norms, particularly in the US and Australia, seem to have swung much further into the direction of protecting women from predatory behavior in the workplace. This is an incredibly welcome and long overdue change, but I'm sure there are also many workplaces where this hasn't yet taken root.

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