Families of wealth often look to advisors and other successful families to help them maintain their family’s stability and emotional cohesiveness. When they do, they soon learn that communication is essential to a harmonious family. They also find that communication entails more than ensuring everyone’s iPhone is on and working.
If you Google the definition of communication, you will read that it involves exchanging information or news. Yet we know instinctively that communication is much more than that. Communication can be quite incredibly complex within a family.
When engaging with families and facilitating conversations around wealth, you need to understand what the family is sharing and how the different personalities within a family communicate. You also need to understand each family member’s motives and intentions, which are a part of metacommunication.
Family conflict often arises because communication has broken down. This breakdown happens when members misunderstand or ascribe motives that don’t exist to each other. Recalling unresolved hurts and slights can trigger negative emotions, often resulting in a negative feedback loop, making healthy communication even more challenging.
Families experience communication breakdowns for a plethora of reasons.
One initial reason is that individuals defend their opinions with passionate arguments instead of explaining their position intellectually and emotionally in detail. This communication breakdown is typical due to the lack of skill and training in this type of communication. When we help others emotionally understand our perspective by using empathy, we bridge the gap of understanding.
When you work with a family wealth specialist, you gain a coach who can address individual personalities within the family structure. We believe something special occurs when family members become aware of their own and others’ personalities.
Understanding, acceptance, and appreciation become part of the conversation and benefit everyone involved.
Successful families of wealth take the healthy perspective of viewing the family unit as a team structure. We know from sports psychology that teams succeed when certain factors are present and optimized. One of these foundational factors is that of transparency. On the surface, we know this to be the opposite of opaque and cloudy. But in a family unit, what does this mean? Is only the head of the family transparent? How are the children transparent? Can you communicate openly if one person is transparent and others withhold important or trivial information?
Successful teams have taken the time to establish roles, responsibilities, and rules of engagement. Successful families who mirror this approach establish rules of communication and transparency within the family structure. These rules allow members to not only model healthy communication styles but also learn and grow closer to each other through their interactions within the group.
By working with a Family Wealth Specialist, our clients gain a facilitator who helps set up family meetings, workshops, and retreats, which act as excellent learning environments for educating families.
When the family unit reaches a point of open, honest, transparent communication, they are positioned for greater success and efficiency in achieving their stated goals. It is worth noting again that it’s not that families won’t have conflict, but the conflict moves from dysfunctional to functional conflict and, ultimately, resolution.
When families make this turn, functional conflict catalyzes new ideas, deeper bonds, increased performance, and greater alignment.
The ultimate goal for successful family units is to create and be an oasis for its members. A place where family members trust they will be invited, welcomed, cared for, respected, nurtured, and supported.
Family members learn to consistently model their language and behavior over time, which builds and strengthens trust among members in the long run.
Trust among and within a family structure allows its members to take measured risks to grow and change through the stages and cycles of life.
Wealthy families understand that money can sometimes negatively affect communication, transparency, and trust. That is why the most successful wealthy families are vigilant about assessing and reassessing the quality of each factor.
Alden Investment Group is here to help identify, assess, and implement the quality elements of happy, healthy, successful families. We are honored to be of assistance and are open to discussing how we can help.