Experts in talent management and leadership spoke at last week’s World Business Forum in New York City, which Crain Currency attended to relay these takeaways for family office professionals.
“One of the reasons I love family offices is they don’t tend to have a candor problem. They tend to have people willing to speak up, tell the truth, disagree with each other — healthy conflict is possible,” said Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School.
“But what they don’t always have, and where I do have some ideas and practices that help, is the ability to have high-quality conversations.”
Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, focuses her research on physiological safety and dealing with failure. “Nearly everybody does not look at failure the right way,” she said. “Failure is not bad or good — it’s just a reality.”
Edmondson’s work categorizes failure into three types:
- Basic failures are caused by human error or personally neglecting steps that are critical to success.
- Complex failures relate to “supply chain breakdowns” or external factors that are mostly beyond our control.
- Intelligent failures are the “undesired results of thoughtful experiments — those we need to learn to love,” Edmondson explained.
“A high-quality conversation is one where people aren’t holding back; they’re expressing their views, and they’re expressing them thoughtfully,” she said. “They’re willing to explain their thinking, explain their evidence and willing to listen deeply to what others are saying.
“A high-quality conversation is a healthy balance of speaking, making statements and asking questions.”
A business that merges family members and nonfamily-member employees bring challenges that Edmonson said are best handled by being “upfront with what those differences imply and willing to talk about them honestly and candidly.”
