“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
For most of my life, I’ve viewed this as sound advice. And in some cases, it is — for example, when I get the urge to tackle a DIY home improvement project that will inevitably require multiple trips to the hardware store, several layers of spackle and a call to a professional.
It is not, however, great business advice — particularly for those who strive to be like the women we’re honoring in this month’s issue: transformational.
Sure, you can take a failing business and really shake things up, Bar Rescue-style, in an attempt to get it back on track. That is by no means easy to do successfully. Still, few would question you for trying to transform a company that was already moving in the wrong direction. After all, what’s the alternative?
I would argue that it’s tougher to be truly transformational in a successful business — especially a successful family business. When you take the reins from your parents who built something great, the notion that you’re the steward not just of the business, but of your family’s legacy, can be overwhelming. From there, it’s easy to become overly cautious. When “don’t screw this up” becomes your personal mantra, it’s very difficult to make changes, regardless of how necessary they may be.
To recognize that a business’ current success does not guarantee its future success — that sustainability will require innovation, scalability and modernization — takes a combination of strategic vision and objectivity. To actually follow through with sometimes painful changes at a thriving company takes pure courage of conviction and the ability to build consensus and get buy-in.
In our Transformational Women of Family Business feature, you’ll read about how our extraordinary honorees added value and made improvements to their families’ businesses and governance structures. In the process, they avoided stagnation and ensured continued success. Some of them encountered skepticism from non-family employees; others encountered pushback from within the family. All of them, at some point, had to make the case for trying new things.
For a separate article in this issue, I spoke with three women who took over businesses from their fathers in the male-dominated construction industry. Each of them is finding ways to evolve the businesses, forging her own path forward while honoring her father’s legacy.
As anyone reading this surely knows, family businesses tend to have a lot of moving parts. It’s important to remember that, even if the company overall is a well-oiled machine, parts still need upgrades from time to time. True leadership requires getting under the hood and identifying where performance can be enhanced.
While family businesses are complex, there is also research to suggest they’re uniquely suited to cultivating transformational women leaders. As Barbara Spector writes in this issue, a recent peer-reviewed study published in a top management journal found that family businesses are more supportive environments for female CEOs than businesses not owned by families.
As one of the researchers notes in the piece, “Women in family businesses had the absolute strongest ability to capitalize on open-mindedness.” The female family business CEOs, the investigator says, had the confidence to challenge the status quo.
Even if it ain’t broke, it can always work better.