Why Family Office leaders should cultivate white space

Imagine you've just walked out of an estate planning meeting with your client family, your next meeting is to review new cybersecurity threats, and suddenly you get a call from a family member. They've just moved out of their house and want to talk to you about divorcing their spouse. Throw in a land war in Europe and it is easy to feel overwhelmed.

Leaders in single family offices (SFO) face ever increasingly complex, interdependent, and rapidly changing challenges. They also tend to operate in an environment where the family office has one client, who is also their boss, very often does not understand their industry and may have little interest in understanding it. This is a difficult leadership challenge for anyone.

In our work with leaders in this setting we often see there's a necessary mindset shift. If you've been trained as an expert at solving problems within your profession, such as an attorney or CPA, then as great and important as that skill set or gear is, there is a need to develop other gears. It can be very efficient and even seductive to solve problems yourself.

However, two other gears that become important are stepping back and seeing the overall system that made it need a more strategic approach. For example, instead of framing one staff member as a problem employee, maybe you see that the hiring and training system needs to be revised. To do this though you need to step back and think, to have what we call “white space”. That is the time, energy and reflective ability to think more deeply. You may even start to think about the culture in the family office and the interdependency between it and the family’s culture.

With every SFO leader we coach, one of their top priorities is finding and cultivating more of that white space. Research shows that among the top 5% of leaders, over 40% have a daily reflective practice and another 10% do so on a regular basis. If you feel like at work you are Indiana Jones running ahead of that boulder, you may be busy and even productive but you're not truly leading at your best. Good leaders need to devote more time to think about the strategy and the long-term vision and less time to the operations.

If we focus all our attention, effort, and resources solely on the operations side of the business, we put the whole organization at risk. One way to find the right balance is cultivating the white space and the shift in mindset is to get a coach. Specifically, a leadership development coach. 

They can often frame a path or roadmap towards becoming more of a leader and not just an expert in your field. One client we have said she now spends over 80% of her time at work as a leader and perhaps 20% or less as an expert. Having both capacities is important as well as having the agility to know which gear you should be in.

But let's go back to the safe, neutral place a coach can provide. If you walk into your spouse, your staff, or the client family and say I feel woefully inadequate for this new task, you will get fear, concern, and maybe even a suggestion for a new career path. But with a coach there's a fundamental premise that you hold the answer, and our job is to help you reframe the problem, consider options, test your assumptions, and even look at some of the patterns in your life and make them into more mindful choices. What you seldom get from a coach is advice on how you should solve the problem but, instead, more facilitation to increase your capacity and agility to address things more effectively not just more efficiently. This also enables you to develop those around you individually and as a team and not surprisingly as one of our clients said: make going to work more fun.

Think about it; if the majority of your client family’s assets are in the FO and these assets are the driver for protecting, growing, and helping your family impact the world in positive ways, then isn’t investing in the leadership development of the SFO vital?