Common Causes of Family Business Conflict & What to Do About Them.
Family Business Mediation Video No 34: Family Dysfunction.
By Jon Kenfield. Solutionist.
• Family Dysfunction: A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehaviour, and often child neglect or abuse on the part of individual parents, occur continuously and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions.
• Characteristics: (1) Addiction; (2) Perfectionism (unrealistic expectations); (3) Abuse; (4) Unpredictability & Fear; (5) Conditional Love; (6) Lack of Boundaries; (7) Lack of Intimacy; (8) Dependency; (9) Poor Communication.
• Family dysfunction occurs when the family system is broken. There’s a high chance of conflict developing if the dysfunction is allowed to spill beyond personal disruption into the wider family and/or into the family’s business activities.
• Systems need to be self-organising to ensure survival. In the wild, dysfunctional pack relations usually mean exclusion and death – breeding out of the gene pool.
• In families, excuses and accommodations are often made, which unbalance the system because more resources (financial / emotional etc) are sent in one direction – which causes greater unbalance, jealousy, conflict ……..and dysfunction.
• When this spills into a business, it upsets the business system in much the same way, with maximum impact in smaller businesses.
• Business dysfunction creates inefficiency, dissatisfaction, conflict and eventually loss of competitiveness through consistently poor decision making.
Solution:
• Identify signs of dysfunction and respond promptly and decisively, in both family and business. The signs are usually products of lengthy states of being – so they won’t be fixed quickly, or through inexpert attention.
• Engage independent / external / expert resources to help. (eg: psychs, coaches, trusted advisers, counsellors etc.). Most deep-seated family problems of this type simply cannot be resolved internally. “We cannot solve great problems at the same level of thinking that created them” – Einstein.
