Owner, Director, Parent, Leader - How Can I Be Clear About My Role When I Wear Multiple Hats?
In a family business, it's typical to wear many hats. You might be the founder, a board member, a parent, and a team leader - all at once. From our experience, we often see how navigating these overlapping roles can feel overwhelming. Without clear boundaries, responsibilities can blur, effectiveness can suffer, and trust in key relationships can erode.
Our Solution - Clarifying Roles to strengthen relationships and build resilience
Strong relationships are the backbone of both your family and your business. That’s why we help you acknowledge and define your different roles, so everyone can manage the complexity with clarity and confidence.
Step 1: Know Which Table You’re At
We distinguish between business and family roles to prevent boardroom/business table issues from spilling into family dinners. Core family principles and beliefs will shape the business culture but will be expressed differently in each context.
When your children are involved in the business, role clarity is even more important:
- At the Business Table (Owner, Director, Leader) - You focus on strategy, alignment and accountability for business performance.
- At the Family Table (Parent) - You focus on nurturing relationships, supporting all your children equally, and maintaining family unity.
Step 2: Define Your Hats and Responsibilities within the business
Your roles evolve with your business. In our experience, founders often wear many hats with little formal structure. As the business matures, especially into second or third generations, it becomes essential to more clearly separate;
- Ownership
- Governance
- Management
Even early in the life of the business, identifying the different responsibilities helps you understand your unique contribution in each role, which enables you to communicate it clearly.
Our systems-based approach creates healthy boundaries, reduces confusion, and builds a more resilient, productive organisation - without compromising family connection.
"I hate conflict. Help!"
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many people - especially in businesses where family relationships are tied to professional responsibilities - find conflict deeply personal and emotionally charged. This can become paralysing, and avoidance often becomes the default strategy. Left unaddressed, it can strain relationships, stall decision-making and erode trust. But conflict is the inevitable flipside of bringing diverse perspectives together to pursue shared objectives.
In families and businesses, avoiding conflict doesn’t make it go away – it just delays the impact, often making the eventual fallout more damaging.
Building a Conflict-Confident Culture
Our objective is to help family businesses move from conflict avoidance to conflict confidence. Conflict doesn’t have to threaten your sense of belonging. When handled confidently, it can even increase it.
How? We begin here: everyone in the family, and everyone in the business, should be able to confidently answer 3 questions:
1. What are our shared essentials and priorities around here?
2. Who has the responsibility to define them?
3. How can I contribute?
When family business leaders commit to a framework that allows everyone to answer these questions with clarity:
- the number and severity of harmful disagreements reduces and
- the power of diversity is unlocked to build resilient and innovative businesses underpinned by strong relationships.
By Western Australian based Family Business Accredited Advisors
Heidi Rawson & Mal Cooke
Neometric
Connected on purpose
