The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.
— George Carlin
Workshop Description
Building and running a business is hard work. Being part of a family is hard work. But building and running a business with your family, however, can be a daunting challenge. Conversational capacity is a make-or-break competence for meeting that challenge and meeting it well.
But there’s the conundrum; running a thriving family business requires higher conversational capacity because the relationships are so much more complex, but the conversational capacity of a family business tends to be much lower precisely because the relationships are so much more complex. It’s a catch-22. The very competence that is so critical for running a healthy family business is often lacking in a family business.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
Worse still, members of the organization who are not family members often feel like outsiders –second-class citizens – and therefore have a harder time bringing their full value to the business.
Here’s the good news. It is possible to increase the conversational capacity of your family business. As both a personal and collective discipline, however, it takes practice to build it. Fortunately, the business itself provides ample opportunities for that practice.
Conversational capacity refers to the ability – of a team or an individual – to work in the “sweet spot,” that place in a conversation where candor and courage are balanced with curiosity and humility. It’s a pivotal competence. A team with high capacity can tackle its most complex and contentious subjects in a balanced and productive way. In this sense, it’s not just another aspect of building effective organizations and teams – it’s the defining competence. You can have a great product or service, a brilliant strategy, all the right people around the table, and all the necessary resources at your disposal, and yet, if conversational capacity of your team is too low, it will still underperform.
For a family business, however, we can define conversational capacity in a more specific way – as the ability to communicate in a way that is good for the business and good for the family. That’s right. By putting in the work to increase your collective ability to work in the sweet spot, you don’t just get more effective meetings, you get more enjoyable holidays.
For a family business we define conversational capacity as the ability to communicate in a way that is good for the business and good for the family.
This is why putting in the work to build your collective ability to work in the sweet spot under pressure is so important in a family business. We know this firsthand at The Weber Consulting Group – we are a family business.
By increasing your conversational capacity, you don’t just get more effective meetings,
you get more enjoyable holidays.
Takeaways/Goals:
In this workshop you’ll learn how to
- Get the entire team on the same page about how to constructively deal with the big decisions, tough changes, and the inevitable tensions, frictions, and conflicts that will crop as you move forward as an organization.
- Establish healthier, more disciplined patterns of behavior that create more effective business and build a stronger family.
- Help members of the organization who are not family members engage with the same level of candor and curiosity as if they were a family member.
- Create a personal plan – a set of practices that will help each participant build their own conversational capacity over time.
- Develop an evolving application plan – a set of ongoing practices by which participants will learn collaboratively apply their increasing conversational capacity to key processes, meetings, decisions, changes, and relationships.
- Develop, as a capstone activity, a unique Conversational Code of Conduct – a clear and shared set of behavioral norms that reflect your values, support your strategy, and strengthen your family ties
And, finally, if you’re willing to put in the work, the overall process is designed to increase the degree of fun, laughter, connection, and joy you all experience along the way.
Note: While this is listed as an advanced workshop, it’s really a customized version of conversational capacity workshop tailored for family run organizations.
Complementary Workshops
This course works well in conjunction with these courses:
Length: 4 hours
Format: Virtual or in-person
