SUCCESSFUL HANDOVER OF A COMPANY

Attitude and Awareness, combined with open, cross-generational communication

Every year, in Austria alone,  6000 companies face the challenge of handing over their company. Studies reveal, that almost two thirds of these handovers to the second generation, fail! Yet, each handover is individual and a unique situation for the company – with no fail-save recipes at hand.

Many company successions are well resolved on the superficial, technical and structural level. However, what is completely neglected in most of the handovers, is the different attitudes, patterns and characteristics of each generation, and the enormous changes, for everyone involved. More or less every time, there is a certain tension between the people involved, especially in family businesses, which can turn out to be a very painful process.

Classic management consulting alone is not very helpful – usually even counter-productive. Much remains unaware , not spoken about, creating conflicts. De-motivation, resentment and frustration begins to spread. The atmosphere within the workplace suffers and massive friction losses occur. It is not uncommon for a company, to be enormously weakened, or  for the handover to fail with enormous financial and personal losses.

Concrete situation of a company succession

A successful, well-established wholesale company with upcoming retirement of the founder. When the company  is supposed to be  handed over to the son, tension as well as conflict arise. The son specifically thinks of leaving the company entirely, and of pursuing his career outside the parental company.

Sequence of events

cross-generational LeadingX10- seminar for everyone involved.
further development through internal seminars
individual coaching, based on this.
Answers to the following questions can be experienced:
How do my problems actually arise?
Why is my solution-strategy not working?
How can we reconcile the interests of the company, with the personal needs and values of everyone involved?

Contents

• Development of leadership-capability,  in the field of personality – focus: attitude and awareness
• Create awareness on how to deal with changes and challenges
• Create common experiences and WOW- effects
• Development of openness and tolerance towards the new,  as well as the different, the other
• enable a change of perspective
• Through working out concrete principles, alternative attitudes arise, that aim at real inter-personal communication and conflict management.
• Recognising one’s own possibilities beyond the previous limitations,
• based on the needs and goals of all parties involved, effective agreements are made and implemented with full drive and energy.

Magic

“A company’s handover and arrangement of succession is always associated with major changes and proves to be a challenging task. Often it turns out to be a painful process. Sometimes it even fails completely. Our company’s handover from my father to me, went flawless. A decisive criteria was having a different attitude and an open, respectful cross-generational basis of communication, which we learned and experienced in both, the LeadingX seminars, as well as the individual coaching sessions. As a highlight and with great success,  we continue to make use of these services for our internal staff and customer-academy.” MG