More than one son or daughter of a company founder has been coaxed into the family business in the years before dad’s retirement. Dad wants to back away from the business. “Planning for a graceful exit”, he says. “And”, he continues, “You are the heir to the company business.” Dad says that he realizes that it will take some time to transition out and transition you in.

From your corporate experience, you will bring new ideas to the family business like concepts about intellectual property and compliance. In the corporate world, key inventions, know-how, customer lists, and the like are documented, managed within information systems, and counted as assets.

Similarly, those corporations mitigated risk through auditing to compliance standards and then sustaining compliance through development of clearly written procedure manuals. Documentation was coupled with staff training which reinforced comliance with the procedures. At the corporation, decisions were arrived at in working groups, with key functions in the company agreeing on how they would support a change. New technology? Has Engineering approved the design? Has Legal protected the intellectual property? Has Marketing positioned the change in the marketplace. Has Sales introduced the concept to key customers and provided them with a beta product to evaluate? Eventually, change was adopted and enforced by the chain of command.

Arriving at the family business, you may find a troubling lack of documentation of core know-how, and a lack of internal controls and cross-checks you were accustomed to in a public company, at least since passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) law. But when you bring up lax controls with your father, he may shrug it off. You start to realize that he is the center of everything at the company. The company was built on his great invention and know-how. He personally manages all the key accounts. He watches over the books and bank balances.  He is the company’s knowledge management system. When he does delegate, it is usually to loyal, trusted staff, whom also are approaching retirement. It begins to dawn on you that your presence may be the first tangible sign of “succession planning” within the family business.

You begin to realize that the company is designed around your father. Separating the business knowledge from your father will be something like surgery. Is he even sincere about backing off? And if he is, you’re not sure that filling his central role is what’s best for the future of the company.

So you’re left with this realization: How do you capture the business processes, policies, and procedures from your father. And how do you do so without draining the personality out of the business?

Sell Progress as a Retirement Plan for Dad

So if you’re that son or daughter stepping into the family business, you probably realize by now that if you want the business to grow profitably and continue as a leader in its markets after dad leaves, he can’t remain the personification of all company know-how, relationships and control. He has to gradually entrust the essence of his company to your efforts to document policies, procedures, systems and controls. And your job, as it’s shaping up, is like a cruise director that can organize all the right get-togethers, but can’t make anyone come to them.

Deep down, you know this. Trying to fill your dad’s shoes is not the way to go. And you couldn’t do it anyway, because you’re not your dad and not one of the employees would pretend that you were.

But first things first. You sense that your first customer for this change is your dad and other family currently with hands-on control of the closely held business. You’re going to have to sell it to them on the idea of replacing personalities with process.

So, how do you sell something to your father that he never embraced? And why would employees accept any policy or process so long as your dad is still there at the center of everything? They can always just ask him, right?

There is no easy answer to this. Clearly it’s a journey of small steps for everyone. Your job will be twofold: helping employees develop and adopt policies, processes and controls that will govern their work lives; and coaxing your dad to encourage decisions to be made by consulting policies instead of him. Work with employees to develop policies and controls and they will support them. Then work with your dad to accept policies, procedures and controls as codification of his way of doing things that have made the company successful.

This is the hard work of business succession planning. You face the task of transplanting your dad’s way of doing things into the people and processes of the company. Bit by bit, the man can be separated from the company, and the company will continue to function successfully.

What Business Buyers Are Looking For

Buyers will look to see if the founder is separable from the business. Replacing the key man with policies, procedures and systems transforms the company in the eyes of potential buyers into an asset that can sustain and grow without the founder. Will sales dry up or key know-how vanish when the founder clears out of the corner office? If they will, the company can’t compete in the buyer’s mind with other buying opportunities where the intangible assets of the company have been corporatized into the documentation, policies, procedures and systems of a company.

How will buyers know? In their due diligence, buyers will look to see if the company has up-to-date procedure manuals. They will look at HR and accounting compliance and evaluate the company’s vulnerability to legal trouble should allegations of harassment, fraud or abuse arise. What is the risk that management attention and capital will be tied up in law suits, allowing competitors to pull ahead? Buyers will talk to employees and observe how decisions are made. They will observe the operation and size up the viability of the company without the founder.

Your Leadership Style Should Build on Your Strengths

If our Baby-Boomer parents counted on hard work to get ahead, we Millennials have learned that they also have to work smarter. They have learned that they don’t have to make all the decisions. Millenials built careers on the leverage of teams, systems and controls, and relied less on a personal hard-driving style like their parents did. As the next in line, your leadership style nurtures continuous improvement: You expect those closest to the work to make decisions and act on them. You have more patience for mistakes than inaction or constant checking-in with the boss. Examine your leadership style, and how you lead differently than your dad. Work to your strengths.

The Management Layer - a Mirror for Dad’s Management Style

Of course leading a transition will take some time. Will you have enough? As if you were a buyer sizing up the compnay, you should also size up the risk of challenge.

One indicator of how serious dad is about ceding management of the company, is the approach taken by his management staff in place today. They have had many years to develop patterns of work and action in response to your dad’s leadership style. Is the management independent-minded? Are they making real decisions, and acting on them? Or do they complain and shrug their shoulders about what they would like to do, but cite dad’s lack of support. Do they get in line with dad as quickly as possible?

Is the management staff fundamentally weak and simply implementing whatever dad wants, or is the management commitment there for it to work? Are they proactive and focused on meaningful change? Does every decision have to go through dad, or are there policies and procedures in place to govern decision making? In short, do managers manage or do they react to dad?

So above, in broad terms, we have laid out the challenge — can you perform the transplant surgery without cutting out the heart of the business? But we have not gotten into specifics about what you do in HR, what you do in accounting, in procurement, sales, marketing, etc. Describing development of policies and procedures in each function of the business will be addressed in a series of future articles, one per function.

Jerry Sweas contributed to this article jerry.sweas@comcast.net.

The thing about IT systems is that people have to use them. No matter the on-time, on budget performance of the development, the success of your install will be judged on how you move the needle on the metrics that the system was designed to affect. And to move the needle, users have to use your system effectively.

Getting users to use it takes two things. It takes buy-in, which you no doubt facilitated by involving users early to define their requirements. It was at this stage that you investigated and communicated to users the underlying core process that would be automated by your system. You got on the same page with users at the very beginning that the right work is in fact being automated.

Getting people to use your system requires their buy-in from the start, and bite-sized, context-sensitive training and communications after your system launches. Copyright, Bizmanualz, Inc. © 2009.

The second thing that you need to get users to use the system is communications and training, aka: a roll-out. Roll-out is when you remind users that they defined the requirements in the first place, and at that time you all agreed that by automating the core process, their lives would be easier, and the enterprise would benefit through improved metrics.

Remember, your million-dollar technology investment is at risk if people don’t use it. Your IT development was certainly serious. So your roll-out needs to be serious too, not a Band-Aid slapped on to try and recover.

Deployment: Who needs to know what, and when do they need to know it?

A serious roll-out reflects your understanding of how your system will actually be used. Remember those use-cases? OK, dig those up and consult them when planning your training and communications.

Develop a training plan that is consistent with the use-cases that you captured when you gathered user requirements. Copyright, Bizmanualz, Inc. © 2009.

Develop training from the point of view of your users. Think about the context in which the information will be used. That is, deploy training in formats appropriate for the setting. For example, field-delivery workers will have their hands full, literally. They may not have the time to attend live training for extended periods. Instead, break up the information into bit-size nuggets, and deliver it digitally to their mobile devices in visual or video format.

Deliver training in bit-sized nuggets as it is needed. Use formats that work in the situation. Make it as easy as possible or people to know what they need to know to use your system effectively. Copyright, Bizmanualz, Inc. © 2009.

Close the loop by updating standards, policies and procedures.

Remember how, early on, you and your users got on the same page about the core processes that you would be affecting? Ultimately, you need to close the loop. You need to update company standards, policies and procedures to reflect any changes that you have made in the work flow, compliance or standard practices.

It’s too easy to focus on the project management metrics and forget that ultimately it’s the impact of automation that matters. Do users remember that they set the requirements? Do they know how to use the system to do their job? Are people making the connection of improving metrics back to the technology causing it? Take a good look at your roll-out plans, and make sure that you get payback for your technology investments.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

When dealing with your knowledge management communications, think about all of your changes and improvements as organizational “news”.  You have to get the word out and communicate the news so others can profit from the changes and improvements you’ve made.  Could you do this like a news show?

All of the communications activity must be planned and coordinated.  You would need a news staff to write, produce, and distribute your news materials.  Your news show could have a schedule with a regular time slot, format, and an editor or anchor for your program.  Perhaps you run feature stories regarding training events, Kaizen of the month, and progress on major changes or improvement objectives.  Be creative — have fun with it — make it engaging!  Produce videos, a newsletter, a change wall, or skits for the changes.

What’s your news program’s budget?  Major software changes in IT get money for new software and software customization, but considerably less time and money is allocated to effectively communicating these changes.  This may be due, in part, to the lack of a formal in-house communications program.  If you don’t have such a program, do you go with “what works for everybody else” (which really doesn’t), or do you try something different…like a news show?

Show Your Commitment to Change and Improvement

Identify a news staff whose job it is to get out the word on change and improvement.  Delivering change and improvement is like producing a show.  You have to budget for the production of the show (change and improvement development activities) and you then have to have the show on a regular basis, just like the news.  Change and improvement, like the news, isn’t a one-time event: it’s ongoing.

Your knowledge management program requires a serious commitment to change and improvement.  You can demonstrate your commitment by the time and money you budget to communication, as well as by the quality of the Change and Improvement Show you produce.  Seeing a high level of commitment from management, the rest of your organization is more likely to effect the changes and improvements your company needs to thrive.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

In ‘Top Ten Reasons’, we looked at why policies and procedures don’t work.  In this post, I’ll share a little about what we do when companies ask us to help improve their policies and procedures.

“Too long”, “unclear”, and “complicated” generally top the list of “Reasons Why Procedures Don’t Work”.  We often find that clients have complex flow charts, swim lane diagrams, and subway maps, usually with no clear starting or ending point or communications objective.  When workers look at these diagrams, they don’t know how to read them — they don’t know what the author is trying to tell them.

Get Organized, Then Consider Your Communications Objectives

While capturing everything you learned while studying your process may help you, you don’t need to show that around.  Think of your spaghetti diagram as homework, but think of your procedures as having a job to do. Your procedures are responsible for communicating know-how to someone who may have an alternate view of how a task should be done.

Think of your procedures as stories, with a beginning, middle, and end.  After discerning your intent, we look in our library for something we have composed already that tells a similar story. But our procedure communicates flow, or how raw materials, information and labor come together to create value for customers. By organizing the story around flow, we can simplify your procedures, not to mention the underlying processes. Flow should be a theme in all your procedures.

When we review a client’s procedures, we compare them to stories (e.g. procedures) that we have already written. We simplify client procedures so that they communicate flow. And we add measure and balance information at transition points to keep the underlying processes running smoothly.

Procedures Should Help Work Flow

Think of work flow as the current in your favorite fishing or boating stream.  When the stream moves at a “normal” pace, the water stays within its banks.  However, if a larger-than-normal volume comes downstream, or if the normal volume encounters an obstacle (like a bunch of fallen trees), the stream rises.  Soon, the stream has nowhere to go but out of its banks. What a mess.

To maintain work flow in your company, you need to know the measure and balance that should be maintained at each transition point in your process. For example, how much raw material should Receiving hand off to Production every hour?  Every day?  Such concrete measure and balance information determines the tempo of your processes. Workers need to know the appropriate tempo to prevent production managers from being inundated with material, and prevent inventory from backing up.

Procedures communicate flow.  And other kinds of documents and communications tools have other jobs. Thinking about and achieving all the communications jobs needed to roll out a process and keep it humming along is what we call “implementation”.

After Developing Your Procedures, You Have to Tell the Story

When we review a client’s procedures, we compare them to procedures, or stories, that we’ve already written. We simplify client procedures so they communicate flow.  And we add measure and balance information at transition points to keep the underlying processes running smoothly, at the appropriate tempo.

That may end up being a lot of information — more than you would want to write in text form as a procedure — so we deploy communication tools: maps, job aids, visual work boards, training, videos, etc.  These tools get the right information to the right people at the right time, so they can do their work at the right tempo and stay in sync.  Deploying communications tools in this way is how we achieve implementation.

I’ll cover implementation in a future blog post.