Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 296 | Should you Manage your Family Like a Business?

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Ep. 296 | Should you Manage your Family Like a Business? · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  And so they discover that these three questions really force his conversations both directions.
• 0:09
  What's up, guys? Welcome to 5-Minute Fatherhood. So Jeff and I love to look at people that have taken ideas from especially the workplace and have applied them to the family. And I know for some people that feels a little weird, but the reason why that makes a lot of sense is because the family is an organization. It has to produce a lot of things. And so it's important to begin to treat the family more like you would think to treat
• 0:36
  an organization. And so one of the management philosophies that has just erupted in the last few decades is Agile. And a guy named Bruce Feiler just wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review. And the article is entitled The Agile Family Meeting. And if you guys have been following us, you know that we really are interested in ways of seeing families have good, productive weekly meetings.
• 1:03
  And so let me read, I'm curious, Jeff, what you think about this. So he said, at a moment when many families around the world are confined to home, climbing the walls, and are searching desperately for fresh techniques for managing their household, chaos, one proven solution that my family, along with many others, uses comes from an unlikely source, agile development. And basically what this does is you ask a series of questions on a weekly basis. Number one, what worked well in our family this week? Number two...
• 1:32
  what didn't work well in our family this week? And number three, what will we agree to work on this week? And with this, there's, these are questions that our family for years has been asking at our family meeting, you know, what's the one thing we want to work on? What do we want to improve? What is working? What isn't working? Um, and this basic idea that happens within agile development, this kind of really started in trying to get, um,
• 1:57
  software developers that were only essentially getting communication downstream from kind of the top of the corporate ladder down to the developers. What came back up were things that just were not what the leaders wanted. They realized that communication had to go both ways. And so they discovered that these three questions really forces conversations both directions. And so he said there's three results of this. It empowers the children,
• 2:24
  It shows the family that parents aren't infallible and it builds in the flexibility that families need to improve things iteratively over time. And so if you guys haven't experimented with a family meeting, it's a really, really helpful tool. And I think that we can learn some stuff from from the business world in this area. But, yeah, Jeff, how does that strike you?
• 2:47
  Yeah, I love, I don't know if you pronounce it, Filer, Filer, but I love his stuff, you guys. It is awesome. Definitely check it out. He has a great book in this regard, too. But, yeah, I think one thing, too, I'll even note, too, about what you said earlier that sparked a thought is why we take so much advice and sometimes –
• 3:06
  notes from businesses or groups or organizations is not just because the family is an organization, but what the, what, what workplace and what groups have not done in America that family has is lost. The fact that they have a mission inherent, right? Like a business cannot go on without a mission. Um, and I think that's why, so then they have to, because of that, they have to then use a lot of tools to,
• 3:28
  For those to accomplish that mission. When we forgot in the West that we are a mission based family. Right. We believe we're consumer based families and consumers are going to have different tools to do what they think they need to do. Right. So that's just one thing I like to think about. But I totally agree with the family meetings. That's like step. There's like there's we do a million tools. There's one or two or three things, maybe Sabbath family meetings that are like.
• 3:51
  If you just nail these, that's like 80% of turning your family upside down for better. And so, yeah, lean into that. Look up at this article, family meetings. And there's a lot of, I'm even writing about this in my book right now. There's seven different family type of meetings. You know, I don't think there's seven, but there's a lot of like, you know, small little five minute ones. There's pregame, there's postgame, there's coaches meetings. There's all these different layers that when you think about it is a really helpful unlocking tool that shouldn't be overwhelming, but it's like, oh yeah, we get to do this over the next 10 years and we have a lot of time to practice. So that's what I would say.
• 4:21
  That's awesome. And if you guys want to see kind of how we design a week that includes our family meeting, how that kind of launches our whole week, you can check out the seven day family over at familyteams.com. And in there, we kind of walk through how you design a family rhythm and how that meeting kind of kicks off all those things. And we kind of go through a number of different meetings that Jeff's describing. So you can check that out. Seven day family over at family teams.