Family Succession: The price of silence
Where loyalty, gratitude and money are bound up together, a quiet room is not always a room in agreement.
At a glance
Families can make big decisions without the one fact that matters. When objecting feels like ingratitude, people ask safer questions, and a successor’s real wishes may never reach the room.
Admiration keeps people quiet as surely as fear. A founder’s record earns deference on business, but it cannot say what the next generation wants from life.
Ask advisers whether a plan is right, not just how to deliver it. That includes us.
The real test of a family is what happens after someone objects. An invitation to speak means little if disagreeing carries a cost later.
The meeting went well. Everyone said so
The meeting went well. Everyone said so afterwards.
The founder set out his plans for the business with the ease of someone who had rehearsed them for years. His daughter, who was to succeed him as chief executive, asked sensible questions about the timetable. Her brother wanted to understand how the shares would be divided. The lawyers confirmed that the structure would work, and the tax advisers that it would work efficiently. There was coffee, and a certain amount of relief.
It was only later, walking back to the car with her brother, that the daughter mentioned she had always hoped to do something else with her life.
The family is invented, though anyone who has advised families for long enough will recognise it. Nobody in that room hid anything on purpose. The founder bullied no one, and the advisers were diligent. Yet the person whose answer mattered most left without giving it, and the person making the decision left without noticing it was missing.
Why would a capable adult say nothing at such a moment? Partly because, in a family like this one, disagreement is never a single act. The man proposing the plan is her father, but he is also, in some sense, her employer, the source of much of her financial security and the author of a body of work she genuinely admires. Questioning his plan risks sounding like ingratitude for everything that made the plan possible. A question about timing, by contrast, shows she is engaged without committing her to anything at all.
Questioning his plan risks sounding like ingratitude for everything that made the plan possible.
The organisational psychologists James Detert and Amy Edmondson set out to understand why people at work keep quiet about ideas that would plainly help their employer. Their answer, published in 2011, was that most of us carry a set of unexamined rules about when speaking up is risky or out of place – rules we would struggle to put into words but obey all the same. People seldom stay silent for want of something to say. More often they have done a quick, half-conscious sum of what saying it would cost.
Carry that into a family and it arrives somewhere uncomfortable. The daughter may have kept quiet not in spite of loving her father, but because of it.
The weight of a good record
Fear explains some of this, though probably not the most interesting part. Admiration can silence people just as effectively.
A recent study in the Journal of Management Studies matched the chief executives of 79 family firms with members of their senior teams and asked what made people willing to speak up to the boss. Executives who believed the CEO cared about their welfare spoke up more. Those who rated the CEO’s ability most highly spoke up less. The research describes association rather than cause – nobody is suggesting that able leaders silence the people around them – but it separates two things that are easily confused: trusting someone’s judgement and trusting that they want to hear yours.
There was a further wrinkle. Trust made a measurable difference only to the executives from outside the family. For the relatives sitting at the same table, it did not. Whatever keeps family members quiet, it seems to run on rules of its own.
In a family, the thought tends to go: they built all this, so who am I to question it? There is something right in that instinct. Forty years of sound decisions earn a hearing that a thirty-year-old’s hunch does not. But a proven record in business has its limits as evidence. Knowing how to build a company cannot tell you whether your daughter wants to run one. When deference spreads from questions of markets and strategy into questions of purpose and identity, the founder ends up being asked to supply answers that only someone else can give.
Advisers, ourselves included
It would be convenient to leave advisers out of this, and not entirely honest. Where one member of a family controls who is appointed, and who is replaced, there is a commercial reason to be careful about challenging what that person wants. In our experience this rarely shows up as anything so crude as telling a client what they want to hear. It shows up as a gradual narrowing of the brief, from asking whether a plan is right to working out how best to deliver it.
An adviser can work out superbly how to deliver a plan without ever asking whether it is the right one. In the meeting we began with, the legal and tax work may well have been impeccable. It was impeccable work towards a future the daughter did not want.
This is where the cost of silence stops being a matter of feelings. A reluctant successor becomes a leadership problem a few years later. A conversation postponed becomes a transition postponed, usually to a worse moment. And someone may spend a decade discharging an obligation they never felt free to turn down.
Making disagreement survivable
None of this is an argument for turning every family decision into a debate, or for handing everyone a veto. Families need decisions, and somebody usually has to make them. The aim is more modest: to make sure the information that matters is in the room before authority is exercised.
There is encouraging evidence that the setting matters more than the disagreement itself. A study of 300 managers across 55 Belgian family firms looked at senior teams divided over how much weight to give the family’s non-financial priorities – control, identity, the continuity of the name. Ordinarily the division pulled the team apart, and the quality of its decisions suffered. Where people felt safe taking interpersonal risks with one another, the damage was contained. In the safest teams, the disagreement went with closer collaboration rather than less.
In practice, a few habits seem to help. Hear individual views before the head of the family states a preference, because once a preferred answer is on the table most people drift towards it. Give a prospective successor a private conversation about their own ambitions before presenting them with a role everyone else has already celebrated. And ask your advisers, us among them, to test the premise and set out the credible alternatives, not merely to polish the plan already chosen.
The harder part comes afterwards. Inviting someone to speak costs nothing; what happens once they have spoken is the real test. Is the person who objected still trusted with responsibility? Are they in the next conversation? Does the disagreement stay attached to the proposal, or does it drift onto the person, as proof that they are ungrateful, or difficult, or not quite committed to the family? People notice these things, and they remember them the next time they are asked what they think.
Listening does not oblige anyone to agree. A founder can hear an objection, weigh it, explain why he has reached a different conclusion and still make the decision. What matters is that the objection is judged on its merits and does not quietly become a verdict on whoever raised it.
For the founder in our meeting, the valuable discovery would not have been a reservation about the timetable. It would have been that his daughter wanted a different life, and that she could tell him so while there was still time to plan around it.
So here is a question worth asking at the next family meeting, or simply over dinner: when did someone last challenge an important decision, and what became of them afterwards? If nobody can quite remember, the quiet may not mean what everyone assumes.
Sources
Detert, J. R. and Edmondson, A. C. (2011), ‘Implicit voice theories: taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work’, Academy of Management Journal, 54(3).
Clinton, E. et al. (2025), ‘Speaking up to the boss: the effects of top management team members’ felt trust and perceived CEO trustworthiness on voice behaviour in family firms’, Journal of Management Studies, 62(4), 1747–1778.
Vandekerkhof, P., Steijvers, T., Hendriks, W. and Voordeckers, W. (2018), ‘Socio-emotional wealth separation and decision-making quality in family firm TMTs: the moderating role of psychological safety’, Journal of Management Studies, 55(4), 648–676.
About the author
Nick Perryman is Vice Chairman and Partner at Clarus Global Capital and has 25 years of investment and wealth management experience. He was previously a managing director at UBS where he was head of its international wealth business in London, and before that head of investment products and services which included $18bn under discretionary investment management. He is co-author of the book, Leadership in Wealth: Mastering the opportunities of wealth in your family, firm and society. Email Nick
Important notice
This article is provided for general information, discussion and educational purposes only. It reflects the views of the author at the date of publication and is not intended to constitute, and should not be relied upon as, investment, financial, legal, tax, accounting or other professional advice. It does not constitute an offer, solicitation, recommendation or invitation to buy, sell or hold any investment, financial instrument or service, nor should it be regarded as a personal recommendation or as taking account of the objectives, financial circumstances or needs of any particular person.
