Divorce And The Family Business

Wednesday 23 May, 2001

by George Tanewski

Divorce is a process and not an event, and a frequent one at best. It is both an emotional and a legal process, which because of the strain and pain involved for the participants, tends to be hurried through with little attention to the resolution of the significant issues.

It is just one of a number of major disruptions, such as chronic or terminal illness, death or remarriage, which effect family life. Characteristic of each of these events is that they require a reorganization of and thus transition for the family. Membership and relations are changed, often never to return to the previous state.

Reorganization

The process of divorce or the period or reorganization which it requires, lasts three to five years. It doesn’t seem to matter the type, or nature of the crisis or how fast one tries to get through it. The process seems to be organic; there is nothing either the family or its helpers can do to speed it up. And speed it up is just what the family wants to do. Extracting oneself from relationships and establishing new or different ones with family and friends is difficult. Extracting one’s life dreams, hopes and fantasies from involvement with another is painful. Divorce is a process which ends a marriage and affects the family’s life but it does not end relationships. It does not mean that connections must be cut off, rather new ways to relate may be found.

Time as Healer

While the process of divorce is organic, it is important not to be fooled into thinking that time in itself is the great healer. Time must be utilized in order for it to become healing. The goal for families and those who deal with them during these transitions in organization is to move through these times with as little disruption to family and work life as possible. This often requires that the process be slowed down so that people involved have a chance to plan, prepare and process what they are doing.

Because the divorce process is so tension-filled, it is easy for it to become a reactive process whereby each action leads to a reaction so that each becomes indistinguishable from the other. This is the way in which children, lawyers, therapists and family members and even businesses tend to get drawn into the process. They become instant but temporary solutions to rising tension. Polarizing the situation or viewing it as adversarial only further intensifies the tension increasing the likelihood of bringing in other things or people as solutions. This is what is called “triangling”. As tension increases between any two parties, there is a tendency to involve a third party. Then the relationships between any two depends on their relation to the third. And sometimes professionals inadvertently encourage this reactivity.

Assets

When tension is high anything that is a joint asset of the parties involved in a divorce has the potential for becoming an attempted solution to the difficulties. That includes children, the home and of course the family business. Work that is not part of a couple/family’s assets, while often viewed as a haven for those going through transition, is also not without its difficulties. Most divorcing people report a decrease in their work productivity and creativity. This may be noticed by employees in a family firm especially if they are aware of the family crisis, and since information like this is generally known to members of the family business, it is always noticed and worried about.

Guidelines

There are general guidelines for dealing with divorce and family business:

• Keep as many relationships open as possible. Cutoffs don’t work.
  
• Principals need to deal directly with one another not through an intermediary. This includes not using lawyers, children, in-laws, and the business in doing so.
  
• Process needs to move slowly so that tension can be dealt with rather than reacted to.
  
• The business can be used as an asset to be shared but not destroyed. Using it “to get at” the principals involved is not helpful. Nor is it helpful to use financially in some ongoing manner. It only ties the participants together unwittingly.
  
• Those not centrally involved in working out the relationship, such as in-laws or girl/boy friends, shouldn’t be involved in the process.
  
• Plan these contingencies before one enters a work relationship with relatives.

Divorce may end a marriage but there is no need for it to end a business or lead to family dissolution.

This article has been partly extracted and modified from Brown, F.H. (1990). Divorce and the Family Business. Proceedings of the 1990 Family Firm Institute Conference, October 17-20, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. 

 

Source:ceoonline.com