Career Planning In The Family Business

Individuals should be able to enter the marketplace at any time during their lifetime and find work that brings satisfaction and enjoyment. The process which results in such work is career planning and this article outlines some of its advantages.

Function

Career planning is about identifying work options available to create personal growth and development. Accountability for finding a right career rests with the career seeker. Career planning is not about having a job imposed by someone else, no matter how attractive the offer or how great the pressure of the business or family.

Succession is sometimes viewed as a unilateral decision, with senior generation family members making choices for the younger generation. In other times and in other cultures, this may be the case. But in Australia young people have more freedom of choice.

Skills Identification

In skills identification, the career seeker looks back over his or her life and selects achievements about which there was a feeling of elation or usefulness. From patterns of skills gleaned from those instances, he chooses those which he prefers to use regularly. Simultaneously, he identifies values important in the work setting. They might include geographical choices, desire to travel or stay close to home, working with people, need for independence and flexible hours, the extent of responsibility desired.

Obstacles to Career Planning

The first obstacle is the absence of a career plan. Young people get lulled or seduced into the family business without any sense of what it entails or whether it is right for them. A second obstacle is that individuals tend to be blind to their skills. Successor candidates hope to have what it takes to lead the business, regardless of their skills. Family members either fit into available jobs, or ambiguous positions (such as management trainee) are created for them, with little clarity about the function and responsibility.

A third obstacle is that networking is viewed narrowly. Options are limited to the confines the family business; other possibilities are not explored. There exists a tendency to look at positions, not payoffs. A fourth obstacle is an unwillingness to consider the fear that if individuals really look at themselves they might discover they aren’t interested in or don’t fit their family business. Finally, parents tend to write the career script, without regard to the abilities or desires of the younger people.

Conclusion

In any business, recognizing abilities required to perform a function, identifying gaps in the background of the position holder and planning methods to eliminate those gaps, develops a training program. What is different in family business is that family members training for top management positions in the business will often be expected to fill top positions in the family as well. There must be training about, and an embracing of the function of the stewardship on the part of those family members.


This article has been partly extracted and modified from Frishkoff, P. (1990). Career Planning in Family Business. Proceedings of the 1990 Family Firm Institute Conference, October 17-20, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

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