One thing I have noticed over the years is how easily fairness can become tied to sameness. When a family has several siblings, people may assume everyone should participate the same way. They should attend the same meetings, understand the same subjects, take on similar responsibilities, and show roughly the same level of interest in the family’s financial affairs.
I understand why that idea is appealing. It feels orderly, and on paper, it can look fair. Real families, however, are rarely that orderly. One sibling may be genuinely fascinated by the family business. Another may care much more about the family’s charitable work. Someone else may have built a completely separate career and prefer to have very little involvement. Over time, I have become less likely to view those differences as a problem that needs to be fixed.
The Same Childhood Does Not Produce the Same Adult
I have spent more than 25 years working in wealth management, including with families whose businesses, assets, and lives can involve several generations or countries. One thing that continues to interest me is how differently siblings can experience the same family.
Two people can grow up in the same house with the same parents and still remember their childhoods very differently. An older child may remember when the family business was struggling, and their parents were constantly working. A younger sibling may have grown up after the company was established and the family’s circumstances had changed. One child may have spent summers around the business and learned how it worked almost accidentally, while another may have wanted nothing to do with it.
By adulthood, these siblings are not interchangeable simply because they share a last name. That sounds obvious when I say it, but it can become surprisingly easy to forget when a family begins talking about responsibilities.
Interest Is Difficult to Manufacture
I have seen how much energy people can bring to something they genuinely care about. A family member who loves the operating business may want to understand its customers, employees, history, and challenges. Another person may become much more engaged when the conversation turns to charitable causes. Someone else may be interested in preserving the family’s history or maintaining relationships among relatives who live in different places.
Then there may be a sibling who is perfectly happy doing something entirely separate from the family’s financial world. I think that person can sometimes make everyone else uncomfortable. An unspoken question may arise about why they don’t seem to care as much.
That question has always interested me because I am not sure participation and caring are the same thing. Someone can love their family without wanting to work in the family company. Attending every meeting does not necessarily demonstrate commitment, just as missing meetings does not necessarily demonstrate indifference.
The more families I have encountered, the less comfortable I have become drawing conclusions from those things alone.
Equal Participation Does Not Always Feel Equal
Another issue I think can get overlooked is this. Giving siblings the same role does not necessarily create the same experience for each person.
Imagine three siblings attending a meeting about a family-owned company. One has worked in the business for 15 years. Another is a physician who has never worked there. The third lives overseas and has built a career in an unrelated field. All three can receive the same information and sit through the same meeting, but they don’t enter the room with the same background.
The sibling who works in the company may immediately understand references to longtime employees, customers, or past decisions. The other siblings may be hearing those names and stories for the first time. They are technically participating equally, but the conversation will not necessarily feel equal.
That does not mean the person with the most experience automatically has the most valuable perspective. Sometimes someone who is removed from the daily operation asks a surprisingly useful question precisely because they do not share everyone else’s assumptions. I simply think it is unrealistic to pretend that everyone starts from the same place.
Contribution Can Take Different Forms
Families can also become focused on the roles that are easiest to see. People notice who works in the business, who attends meetings, who sits on a board, and who regularly talks with professional advisors. Those responsibilities are visible and relatively easy to describe.
Other contributions can be much quieter. One sibling may keep relatives connected when everyone lives in different cities or countries. Another may remember stories about the family’s history that nobody else thought to preserve. Someone may care deeply about philanthropy. Another may be particularly good at communicating with younger relatives.
Those contributions do not fit neatly into an organizational chart, and that is one reason I sometimes wonder whether families can become too focused on charts in the first place. They help explain formal responsibilities, but they cannot explain every relationship.
A family is not a corporation, even when the family happens to own one.
Different Roles Can Still Create Tension
I do not want to suggest that different levels of involvement are automatically easy. There are real tradeoffs.
When one sibling is much more involved than everyone else, that person may gradually accumulate knowledge that the others do not have. The less-involved siblings may eventually feel that important conversations are happening without them. Meanwhile, the sibling carrying more responsibility may become frustrated because they feel they are doing work that nobody else sees.
What makes this complicated is that everyone’s feelings can change. An arrangement that seemed completely reasonable five years earlier may begin to feel uncomfortable.
I have also seen how people’s interests can change as their lives change. Someone who wanted very little involvement while building a career or raising young children may become curious later. A sibling who spent decades deeply involved in the family business may eventually want some distance from it.
That raises a question I find myself returning to: Why do we sometimes treat family roles as permanent when almost nothing else about a person’s life stays permanent?
I Have Become Less Interested in Perfect Symmetry
Earlier in my career, I probably paid more attention to whether an arrangement looked orderly. Experience has made me more interested in what is happening underneath the arrangement.
When someone participates heavily, I wonder whether they genuinely enjoy that responsibility or whether they feel obligated to take it on. When another family member stays away, I wonder whether they are truly uninterested or have never felt there was a meaningful place for them.
I also wonder whether families sometimes create identical roles because those roles genuinely make sense or because anything else feels unfair.
Those questions do not always produce comfortable answers. Sometimes people simply want different things.
One sibling may feel a deep connection to the company their parents built and genuinely want it to remain part of their life. Another may respect everything that company represents while having absolutely no desire to spend Tuesday morning discussing it. Neither reaction necessarily says anything negative about that person’s relationship with the family.
A Family Can Contain Very Different People
After working with families for many years, I have become skeptical of the idea that harmony requires everyone to participate in the same way. Families are collections of individuals. People have different personalities, careers, spouses, interests, strengths, memories, and relationships with money. Those differences do not disappear when everyone sits down at the same table.
I still understand the appeal of symmetry. If there are three siblings, giving each person the same role can look wonderfully simple. Everyone has an equal box on the organizational chart, and nobody seems left out.
Family life has never struck me as particularly interested in looking simple, though.
One person may want to build something. Another may be drawn toward philanthropy. Someone else may want a life that has very little connection to the family’s business or financial affairs. Their interests may change ten years from now.
I have stopped assuming that these differences mean somebody is doing family participation incorrectly. Sometimes they simply mean that the people sitting around the table really are different people.
Important Disclosure
This commentary reflects the personal opinions, viewpoints and analyses of the Arden Global Family Offices employees providing such comments, and should not be regarded as a description of advisory services provided by Arden Global Family Offices or performance returns of any Arden Global Family Offices client. The views reflected in the commentary are subject to change at any time without notice. Nothing in this commentary constitutes investment advice, performance data or any recommendation that any particular security, portfolio of securities, transaction or investment strategy is suitable for any specific person. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. Arden Global Family Offices manages its clients’ accounts using a variety of investment techniques and strategies, which are not necessarily discussed in the commentary. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
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