5 Lessons For Daughters Taking Over The Family Business

In the traditional conception of a family business, a man starts a business, sires sons, trains them to take it over, and then hands it over to them when he’s old and gray. Think PC Richard & Son, Steinway & Sons, Harney & Sons, and on and (s)on. But that is changing all over the world, as research indicates daughters are increasingly taking over family businesses. Social science researcher Daphne Halkias has written a new book about how father-daughter succession works all over the world. I wrote about Halkias’s work a few weeks ago, and this week I got the chance to speak with her about what she’s learned about the phenomenon from surveys in 28 countries. Here are five take-away lessons.

1. Family size matters. Why are daughters taking over more than they used to? Part of it is increasingly progressive attitudes about women and work. But another part of it is changes in family size. (A bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, of course.) “In the old days, people would have 12 or 15 kids, so one of them is going to be a boy,” Halkias says. “Now people are having one or two kids, and they might all be girls.” Even if an old-fashioned father would rather pass his business down to a son, he may not have a choice.
2. Women are often better at navigating the emotional difficulties of taking over. No matter who’s taking over from whom, the transfer of power in a family business can be emotionally rocky. The business owner may not be quite ready to give up leadership, even if they think they are. The younger party may chafe against following the parent’s instructions. But women are generally better at making the transition than sons, Halkias found. “Women have a very natural ability to communicate and open up communication channels, because of traditions where women are caretakers and negotiators in the family,” she says. “In studies where they’ve compared male successors and female successors, that’s the difference. Women can negotiate the emotional minefields.
3. Traditional cultures have unexpected work/life balance benefits for women. Here in the West, we like to think we’re far ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to enlightened treatment of women. But more traditional cultures have hidden benefits for women — especially mothers — who decide to work. In the US, we just assume that finding childcare will be difficult and expensive. “In every other part of the world, the extended family takes care of raising the children,” Halkias says. “If I go to my office, I may be living in an apartment where five or six stories are all my family. I don’t have to worry about child care, or day care, or someone doing their homework with them. There’s a communal spirit of taking care of the children.”
4. Women have to work twice as hard. Halkias found that daughters often hesitated to take over the business, where sons rarely did. “Women had a lot of internal dilemmas that perhaps men wouldn’t have, because of traditional roles. It was not about competency — they were bright, capable, organized.” Rather, it was about the unique difficulties they knew were ahead: “Winning over employees is much harder for a woman than a man,” she explains. “The upper management below them are almost all male. … They had to have a little more trial by fire. But women are used to that. A woman sometimes has to work twice as hard to get half as much.”
5. It’s getting better. “In 28 countries, no one said, ‘There was no way we could have worked it out and I’m thinking of leaving the company,’” Halkias says. “That was good news. Even in very traditional societies, fathers were proud of daughters, and wanting to push them ahead. We may not have seen that a generation ago.”