Wealth of Wisdom

CHAPTER 58Establishing Ground Rules for Family Meetings

Keith Whitaker

Regular family meetings are a key practice to ensure family flourishing over generations. To better understand the process for planning an effective family meeting, readers should check out Grady and Ulaszek, “Leading Successful Family Meetings” in this volume. This chapter will focus more narrowly on the task of establishing ground rules for those meetings.

Why Ground Rules?

That's a natural question. Most family gatherings don't require explicit rules. That said, every gathering of human beings includes many implicit or unspoken rules. Each family also has its unspoken rules or norms that it carries with itself into work, vacation, and formal and informal get-togethers.

Family meetings can be stressful events, even if well prepared and attended by family members who love and trust each other. A family meeting may involve discussions of money, investments, spending, giving, not to mention family members' mortality. Because these are family meetings, not just business meetings, they may also be overlaid with emotions and dynamics that reach far back into family history.

For these reasons, it can be very helpful to make explicit the “rules of the road.” Clarity about the ground rules helps to ensure that the meeting process will feel safe and productive for all participants.

Process

The process of establishing family meeting ground rules is as important as the rules themselves. If you haven't had family ...