Successor or hostage? When your path is set at birth

“When I was seven, my father sat me in the chair in his office, turned it towards the window that looked out over the whole yard, and said: ‘One day all of this will be yours.’ I was the proudest child in the world. Now I’m forty, I run the company, and I still don’t know whether I ever chose it.”

The sentence is composed, but it is not invented in the sense of being rare. In different forms it is spoken by people who grew up alongside a family business — a craftsman’s workshop, a farm, a village inn, a factory their father built up from a garage. The story is often the same: a gift given with love turns, somewhere along the way, into a task, and the task into an obligation you cannot step out of without betraying someone.

In this post I want to write about what happens when your path is decided at birth. Not about how to carry out a handover — that is the work of lawyers, tax advisers and family business consultants. But about what goes on beneath the surface: expectations nobody ever voiced, autonomy, differentiation, and the guilt that speaks up every time a successor wonders whether he might live differently.

A gift that is also a task

For a child growing up in it, a family business is something special. It is not just the place where the parents go to work. It is the topic of conversation over lunch, the reason holidays get cancelled, a source of pride and worry, sometimes almost an extra family member that gets more attention than the children. A child senses very early that the business matters to the parents — and that he matters too, because he is part of a story that is meant to continue.

There is something beautiful in this. Few children know at the age of ten where their place in the world is. But there is a trap in it as well. If a child is given a place before he has even asked who he is, he may never ask that question at all. Or he may ask it only at thirty or forty, when he is already married, has a mortgage, and the staff call him “the young boss”.

The international GUESS survey, which asked students from business-owning families around the world about their career plans, found something that often surprises parents: even five years after graduating, fewer than ten per cent of these young people planned to take over the family business. Most had other plans. That does not mean they were all rejecting their families. It does mean that the confidence with which many families count on a successor is often more the parents’ wish than the children’s real choice.

In Slovenia this question is especially alive. Many private companies were founded in the late 1980s and the 1990s, and their founders are now at an age when the handover can no longer be postponed. Many families are facing succession for the first time — with no models from earlier generations and often without a language in which to talk about it at all.

Four reasons a successor stays

The researchers Pramodita Sharma and P. Gregory Irving described four different bases on which a successor stays in a family business. I find their model very useful because it shows that “staying” is not a single decision; it can have very different roots.

The first basis is affective: I stay because I want to. The work interests me, and I see a chance in the company to develop something of my own. The second is normative: I stay because I feel I must — because I owe my parents, because leaving would be ungrateful. The third is calculative: I stay because leaving would cost me too much. And the fourth is what the authors call imperative: I stay because I cannot see that I could go anywhere else at all.

The findings of their research and of later studies match common sense: successors who stay mainly because they want to are more satisfied and more committed in their role. Those who stay mainly out of duty, or without a sense of choice, more often experience tension, fatigue and a relationship with the business that is a mixture of loyalty and resentment. Most people carry all four reasons at once. The question is not whether you have a “bad” one, but which one is loudest in you.

The expectation nobody voiced

When I talk with people who grew up around a family business, I am often struck by how rarely anyone ever said to them outright: “We expect you to take over.” Parents frequently even insist they never pushed the child. And they are right — they never pushed with words.

The expectation is passed on differently. Through the pride in their eyes when the child helps in the warehouse over the holidays. Through silence when he mentions he would like to study music. Through the line “you’ll see what it’s like when you’re here”. Through the story of grandfather who started with a single machine, told in such a way that it is clear what is expected of the story’s next chapter.

Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, one of the founders of family therapy, coined the term invisible loyalties for this. They are bonds and obligations that nobody in the family puts into words, yet everyone feels. The German psychiatrist Helm Stierlin described a similar phenomenon he called delegation: parents unconsciously “send” a child out into the world with a mission that springs from their own wishes, fears or unfinished stories. The child is loyal because he carries out the mission. And when he wants to put it down, he feels he has betrayed something more than a career plan.

In families with a business, the mission is often very concrete: preserve what we have built. Prove the effort was not in vain. Sometimes also: put right what I missed. The successor then takes over not only a company but also his parent’s story — with all its hopes and wounds.

Differentiation: being yourself without leaving

The concept that helps me most in thinking about successors is differentiation. Murray Bowen described it as the capacity to stay in close relationship with your family while keeping your own thinking, feeling and decision-making. A differentiated person can hold a different opinion from his father without cutting contact, and can stay close to his mother without merging with her expectations. I wrote more about this in Differentiation: how to stay yourself and stay in the relationship.

With successors, something matters that at first sight seems contradictory: rebellion is not necessarily freedom either. A young man who, out of defiance, goes into another profession just to prove to his father that he does not need him depends on his father’s expectations just as much as the one who stays because he does not dare to leave. Both are reacting to an expectation instead of choosing.

So differentiation is not a decision for or against the business. It is the inner capacity to ask that question as your own at all. Some who develop it discover that they really do want the company — and then lead it with far more energy, because it is no longer a burden but a choice. Others discover that they do not. Both can be healthy outcomes.

Bowen stressed that differentiation does not happen by leaving. Someone who cuts physical or emotional contact with the family in order to be himself often carries the unresolved relationship with him into every new setting. Differentiation happens within the relationship: in being able to tell your father or mother something that will disappoint them, and staying in the room while they react.

Even a successor who has genuinely chosen the business can end up with no room of his own. He has taken over the title, but not the right to do things his way. The founder is still in the office every day, staff still go to him for the final word, and every new idea is measured against “the way we have always done it”.

Psychologists who study motivation have found for decades that a sense of autonomy — that your actions are truly yours — is one of the basic psychological needs. When it is missing for a long time, a person does not just become dissatisfied but often tired, cynical or simply empty. In successors this sometimes shows as a strange passivity: someone who was full of initiative as a student, after a few years in the family firm, just waits for someone to tell him what to do.

It is important to understand that this is not laziness or incompetence. It is an adaptation to a system in which personal initiative was not rewarded. And because the system is a family, it is very hard to tell what is a business decision and what is parental criticism. I have written separately about separating the roles of parent and boss in Father as boss: how to separate the family from the business.

Guilt as the guardian of family balance

If I had to choose a single emotion that most often keeps successors in place, I would choose guilt. Guilt towards the parents who “built all this for you”. Guilt towards employees who are counting on you. Guilt towards siblings who may have received less or stepped aside so that you could take over. And guilt towards yourself, because you do not dare say what you really want.

Guilt is not always the enemy. Healthy guilt and toxic guilt differ in whether they alert us to real harm we have done to someone, or punish us for having needs of our own. With successors, the second kind is often in play: a feeling that the very wish for a different path is a kind of betrayal.

Seen systemically, such guilt has a job. It keeps the family in balance. As long as the successor feels guilty at every thought of leaving, nothing changes — and the family does not have to open questions that could be painful for everyone: what will happen to father when he is no longer the boss? What about mother, who has stood beside him all her life? What does the company mean without the name it carries? One person’s guilt sometimes carries the fear of the whole family.

The view from relational family therapy

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we do not stop at the question of whether a successor should stay or go. We are interested in the emotional atmosphere that prevailed in the family when this story began to be written. Christian Gostečnik describes how people in adult relationships unconsciously repeat what they experienced in their family of origin — not because they want to, but because they know nothing else.

With successors, the questions are therefore often very concrete. Who in the family had to be the strong one? Who was allowed to be disappointed, and who was not? Did the business ever stand in for a conversation the parents did not know how to have? Was one of the children the one whose success calmed the tensions in the family? I wrote about how early children are given such tasks in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child.

It often turns out that the pattern did not begin in this generation. A founder who cannot let go of the company may himself have grown up with a father who trusted him with nothing. A mother who quietly supports her son taking over may have had to give up her own plans. For this kind of view a genogram is very useful — a drawing of the family tree that records not only names and dates but also relationships, roles and turning points. In the longer, 90-minute session A Look into the Past we draw it together and look for the patterns that repeat.

A conversation that comes too late

The conversation below contains sentences often heard in such families.

(composed, not a real person)
Son: “Dad, lately I’ve been wondering whether this is really my place.”
Father: “What are you talking about? You’re doing well. What are you missing?”
Son: “I don’t know if I’m missing anything. I don’t know if I ever chose this.”
Father: “Chose? I didn’t choose anything either. I worked because it had to be done.”
Son: “That’s exactly what worries me. That at sixty I’ll say the same.”
Father (after a long pause): “You think I’ve regretted anything?”

A lot happens in this short exchange. The son voices doubt for the first time. The father first dismisses it with the argument of success — “you’re doing well” — because for him success is the answer to every question. Then he reveals something about himself: that he did not choose either. And finally, perhaps for the first time in his life, he opens the door to the question of his own regret.

Conversations like this are rare because they are frightening for both sides. For the son, because he risks hurting his father. For the father, because the son’s doubt also strikes at his own life story. But it is precisely these conversations that are often the beginning of change — not necessarily of a decision, but of real contact.

If such a conversation seems impossible in your family, that is not necessarily a sign that the family is bad. Often it simply means that this has never been talked about and nobody knows how to begin. I have also written about how to say something the other person will not want to hear in How to say what you think without the relationship falling apart.

Exercise: what is mine and what is inherited

The exercise takes about half an hour. You will need a sheet of paper and some quiet. It is not meant to help you decide, but to help you see more clearly what your decision is made of.

1. Divide the sheet into two columns. Head the left one “What I genuinely like about the business” and the right one “What I fear if I left”. Write without editing, for at least ten minutes.
2. For each item in the left column, ask yourself: would I still like this if the business were not a family one? Underline the items where the answer is yes.
3. For each item in the right column, find a face. Whom would you disappoint, hurt or leave in the lurch? Write the name next to the item.
4. Read the four reasons in the infographic above and estimate how much each of them — I want to, I ought to, it doesn’t pay, no other way — counts for you. Share out a hundred points.
5. Write down one sentence you have never said to anyone in the family but carry inside you. You do not have to say it. It is enough to know it exists.

If you feel relief during the exercise, that is information. If you feel anxiety or guilt, that is information too. Neither feeling is a decision, but both are part of the map you need before you decide anything.

Where this view does not apply

I want to be honest here, because the “hostage” story is very appealing and easy to over-generalise.

Many successors are in the business because they genuinely want to be. Growing up around the company gave them knowledge, a network and a sense of meaning they would not have found elsewhere. If that is your story, you do not need to go looking for hidden wounds. Research on successors who stay out of enjoyment of the work shows that they do well — and are often more successful too.

Not every difficulty is psychological. Sometimes what weighs on a successor is not family dynamics but an entirely practical question: the company is in debt, the ownership structure is unsettled, agreements between siblings are not in writing. Then therapy is not the first step. You need a good lawyer, a family business adviser or a mediator. Therapy can help with how you will bear those conversations, but it does not replace professional advice.

Parents are not the culprits. Most parents who built a business did it for their children too. Their expectations are often the expression of a love that knows no other language. A view that turns parents into villains is just as limited as one that denies the successor’s distress. In systemic thinking we do not look for a culprit, but for a pattern.

If more serious signs appear — prolonged insomnia, loss of pleasure in everything, thoughts that it would be better if you were not here — the first step is to see your GP or a psychiatrist. In acute distress in Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112.

When you decide

Some who walk the path of differentiation stay. But they stay differently: with a conversation about what they need, with clearer boundaries between the family and the business, and with the right to do things their own way. Others choose a different path — how that can happen without breaking contact is the subject of Allowing yourself a different path: deciding not to carry on.

Both decisions have a price. Staying means accepting that you will always carry part of your parents’ story too. Leaving means accepting that you will disappoint someone. Maturity does not lie in avoiding the price, but in paying it as someone who chose — not as someone who got stuck. You can read about why the years between twenty and thirty-five matter so much for this in Between 20 and 35: why this is the key time for becoming independent from your parents, and find a short explanation in the knowledge base under separation from parents.

What to remember

• A successor can stay for four reasons: because he wants to, because he feels obliged, because leaving does not pay, or because he sees no other way. What matters is which one dominates.
• Expectations in family businesses are rarely spoken — they are passed on through pride, silence and stories. These are invisible loyalties.
• Differentiation is not leaving or staying, but the capacity to make the decision yourself and stay in contact with your family.
• Guilt at the thought of a different path often guards the balance of the whole family, not just your own.
• Legal and business questions need experts in those fields; therapy helps with the relationships those questions open up.