With family businesses getting to the age where one generation need to take over the next in the Gulf, isn’t it about time to take a serious look at the consequences of not being proactive? There is a huge stigma around doing the right thing for the business when it affects the family members involved. Social norms of tribalism and good etiquettes hold a stronger grip over fixing problems.

In the gardening world, it is normal to do what is called pruning of trees. That is to say to remove the strands that grow out of the main trunk of trees. This is done to allow the main trunk to be the sole benefactor of the nutrients that the roots give the tree rather than dispelling it within not just the main trunk but the strands that have sprouted from the main trunk and are demanding their share of the nutrients. If this process goes unchecked, then the main trunk will never be able to attain its maximum growth because the strands will suck away some of the growth. In some case, and you can see it from trees where there are two or sometimes three trunks growing at the same time, what happens when the strands become as strong as the main trunk. The correct approach from a gardener’s perspective is to remove the strands at first sight. This is what family businesses in our area seem to fail to understand. It is up to the leader, read gardener, to do if he wants to keep the main business strong and growing. But what is something that appears to be symptomatic in the region is that the leader doesn’t do that for fear of either social repercussion or weakness. This inability to do the right thing eventually kills the business. Slowly but surely, the leader, and this is an excellent example of an oxymoron, will strangle the business because he is paralyzed either by those social norms or by fear. In case you are wondering what are these norms, they are the unacceptable social decision to cut a family member from the protection, in this case financial, of the family. What the leader should be doing is taking a stance to tell the disrupter that he cannot siphon the money from the main business to build his own at the expense of the main business. The problem for the leader is that this siphoning happens in the background where people can’t see and the spurning off is done in the public where people can see. The leader is also frightened that his prestige will be hurt by being seen as the person who couldn’t control his family in the business. This, in some cases, is worse than death to him.

The main problem is that this pruning of the business is quite a normal thing. Sometimes, even the best businesses need to remove problems be it in the form of people or side businesses. The fact that the business is a family one just adds another layer of problems to manage. It is simply an issue of does the family want to keep up appearances or keep the business functioning. The tough decision in some cases it to allow those damaging factors to fester or to stop it from creating problems in the future. I guess this also comes down to the age and the weakness of the leader. A weak and old leader is less likely to take a stance to correct things because he wants to go away thinking that he has left a mark on the business. The strong leader, who is willing to take the hard decisions and usually unpopular ones, no matter what his age, will be the one that people will hate in his lifetime but will remember fondly upon departing when the weak leader takes over. What the weak leader of the family business who doesn’t take a stance to stop the strands from strengthening and sapping the growth of the main trunk from fear will do is gradually kill the trunk even if it happens after his lifetime. He will be remembered as the person who lost it all.

There is a reason it is called a family tree. Like a tree, a family can be strong and grow when all the branches know that the trunk is the main source of their growth. And like a tree, if it is left unchecked by the gardener, it can strangle itself.