What is Leadership?

by Marie · April 26, 2013

According to Mark Haynes Daniell and Sara Hamilton, in Family Legacy and Leadership: Preserving True Family Wealth in Challenging Times (Wiley Finance), every family needs a leader – maybe several.

Without a family leader or leaders most families will revert back to an ‘each generation for itself’ mentality. Most families fail to examine the family’s history for values, lessons and accomplishments. Most families don’t think about attempting to change the way the whole family operates.

Once in a while, a stray member may try to pull together genealogy, or make note of who first bought that antique bed or tell a story or two about great-grandma Georgia, but generally – without a leader – there is no coordinated effort throughout the family to move forward with a common mission or to preserve the best of family history and culture.

Most families have no legacy. Most extended families have no leadership.

To have a legacy, say Daniell and Hamilton, “a collective commitment by the family members to create and sustain something greater than themselves” is needed.

To get that collective commitment, a family needs a leader to guide them towards it. Without this, each generation and family unit just goes its own way. But what is leadership? What kind of leadership does a legacy family need?

Here are my thoughts on the kinds of leaders a family (like mine) at the beginning of this journey needs.

The kinds of leadership a legacy family needs.

An initiator.

To get started on the path to ‘something greater than themselves’ every family needs to have that one family member who comes up with the idea of doing so.

That one family member needs to have the ability and the influence to initiate a change in the way the family as a whole operates. Most often, this will be an elder – a patriarch or more typically the matriarch of the family. The initiator might frequently be in his or her sixties or seventies, when we all tend to reflect back on our lives and forward through the lives of our offspring.

A cheer leader.

Once started on the path, the initiator needs to be cheered on by a family member or members who support the cause. Without this support, the initiator may well give up on trying to effect change. This might be a spouse or even a even older elder.

One or more financial leaders and contributors.

Unless the family already has wealth or has an event which creates wealth, the family needs a financial leader willing and able to take on the job of figuring out where to hold family assets and how to fund those accounts.

This person needs financial expertise, a willingness to try new things and time to do the research. Other family members must also have trust in this financial leader. They must trust their ability, their truthfulness, their motives and their knowledge.

Without shared wealth or a shared enterprise, it is more difficult to keep family members involved in a common mission to create something greater than themselves.

A second generation leader.

Once the matriarch or patriarch get the family engaged in the idea of a multi generation legacy, they realize that they need to get the next generation actively engaged. They need someone to whom to turn over the reins. This leadership can be shared between siblings of the original patriarch or matriarch, as the second generation members typically are close.

The second generation leader is a key role in ensuring that the family develops and adheres to plans to keep the legacy going into the third and fourth generation. They are the leaders that might set up processes and structures and programs to take the family legacy forward as the family and its fortunes grow.

A family history leader.

Each generation needs to have one or more leaders to ensure that the history, culture and lessons of the family’s past are passed along to the next generation and to preserve that a collective commitment to create and sustain something greater than themselves.

The family history leadership role makes sure that stories supporting the family mission and values are documented and shared. They examine the past of family ancestors to discover the lessons and pass those along. They develop mechanisms and processes to help future generations continue to pass along the history and culture as they add to it.

A family education leader.

Families also need someone to focus on making sure that all next generation family youth have the appropriate training in the family culture, history, mission and finances.

This leader is the one that will organize money camps for the young kids and youth excursions to keep the cousins engaged in projects together. She or he will need financial expertise, a sense of fun and the ability to consult with and train all ages.

They will help parents teach financial literacy; help introduce spouses to the family ideals and finances; and organize educational components in family meetings and excursions.

Where our family is on this journey.

Our family is just starting to try to change the course and become a legacy family. I am the initiator, the financial leader, the education leader and the history leader. As matriarch, I have the ability and the influence to try to initiate this enormous change in the way our family thinks. We currently have no shared wealth or common business, but we are discussing options. We are still working to define our shared values and what it is that we as a family want to create as the ‘something greater than ourselves’.