Building Structures for Your Enterprise
Adapted from Shared Vision, Shared Values Webinar with Joyce Hrinya & Jonathan Magidovitch
Harnessing the Power of Values to Build a Collective Future
There are many forces at work within a family business. Strategic decisions, financial considerations, and operational demands all compete for attention. Yet beneath these visible activities lies a powerful, often invisible driver of how families work together: their values. Understanding what those values are, how they interact, and how they can be channeled into a shared vision is one of the most important and frequently overlooked investments a family enterprise can make.
This article will explore what values are, why they matter in the context of shared assets, and how families can work together to co-create a shared vision that sustains their enterprise across generations.
What Are Values & Why Do They Matter?
Values begin forming in infancy. From our earliest moments, we develop preferences based on what helps us survive and thrive in the world. These preferences solidify over time into the priorities, intentions, thoughts, and actions that define how we show up in our families, our businesses, and our communities.
Values are, in essence, our fingerprint. They are entirely our own, shaped by our unique experiences, and remarkably consistent throughout our lives.
Most of us are not consciously aware of our values. We experience them as things that matter to us, causes we invest time and money in, principles we find ourselves defending, or boundaries we feel compelled to hold. A traumatic event, a major life change, or even a move to a new environment can shift our values, but the core fingerprint remains surprisingly stable.
In a family business setting, this matters enormously. When individuals with different value fingerprints come together around shared assets, they bring with them an entire architecture of assumptions, priorities, and ways of engaging with the world. Without deliberate attention to those differences, families can find themselves in conflict. This is not because anyone is wrong, but because each person is operating from a deeply personal and largely unconscious set of drivers.
The Hidden Tax of Unexamined Values
When families avoid doing the work of values clarification, they pay what might be called a hidden tax. Meetings that should be focused on strategy instead become charged with unnamed emotion. Decisions that ought to be straightforward become flashpoints. Family members may find themselves feeling judged, misunderstood, or dismissed, not because of any particular issue on the agenda, but because their underlying values are colliding beneath the surface.
This tension is not inherently destructive. In fact, the friction created by differing values can be a source of creativity and innovation, pushing a family beyond comfortable assumptions toward new and better solutions. The goal is not to eliminate differences, but to understand them; to see where each member stands, to find genuine common ground, and to move forward together with greater clarity and intention.
A useful first step in this process is individual values work. A tool created by Ann Dapice, Values Unfolding Exercise (adapted version on our website), guides individuals through examining their own values in a structured way. This exercise, which may take a couple of hours the first time through, invites self-reflection on what truly matters and why. It is recommended not as a one-time event but as an ongoing practice, particularly when significant life changes occur.
From Individual to Shared: Co-Creating Values
Once individual family members have a clearer sense of their own values, the work of co-creation can begin. This is not a process of compromise, where individuals give up what matters to them. It is rather a process of discovery, of identifying the genuine intersections and overlaps among family members’ values and using those as the foundation for a shared framework.
The family gathers to discuss the list of values that everyone brings and works through a facilitated process of active listening and trust-building until the essential shared values for the enterprise emerge. These become the group’s values. They don’t replace individual values, but are a separate, co-created framework that guides how the family operates together around shared assets.
Facilitation is key to this process. The facilitator might be a trusted family member (possibly the “chief emotional officer,” the one others turn to for perspective and empathy) or an external advisor such as an attorney, accountant, or family business consultant. What matters most is that the space is structured for honest dialogue, that every voice is heard, and that the result genuinely reflects the family’s collective priorities.
Once shared values are established, they should be made visible and revisited regularly. One way to do this is to begin every board meeting or family meeting by reading the values statement aloud. This simple practice keeps the shared framework active and present, anchoring discussions and decisions in what the group has collectively agreed matters most.
The Role of Love in Family Business
What keeps families in the room when the work gets hard? What provides the persistence to keep returning to difficult conversations, to stay the course through friction and disagreement? The answer in this family business context is love. Not romantic love but love in its broadest sense: the bond between siblings, the affection between parent and child, the shared pride in something built together, the love of a common endeavor.
Scholar Frederica Gregorato describes love as what makes us willing to “stay in trouble in the material world.”
It is the force that provides persistence, the willingness to try again after a failed conversation, to return to the table after a painful disagreement, to keep working toward alignment even when it does not come easily. This is the secret sauce of family businesses; the quality that differentiates them from non-family enterprises and, when channeled well, becomes their greatest competitive advantage.
Crucially, love in this context does not mean the absence of individual agency. Each family member must remain grounded in their own identity and values even as they work toward shared ones. As Gregorato puts it, love without agency is not love, it is domination. The task for family businesses is to hold both: genuine connection and genuine individuality, in productive tension.
From Shared Values to Shared Vision
Shared values provide the ethical and relational foundation for a family enterprise. Shared vision provides its direction. Once a family knows what it stands for, the next question is: where does it want to go? Without a co-created vision, individual owners may each pursue their own interpretation of success which can lead to confusion, misalignment, and potentially conflict.
As with values work, creating a shared vision requires a facilitated process. Individual owners begin by articulating their personal vision for the shared assets. As they look to the future, they identify what success would look like, what they hope to build or preserve, what they want the business to mean for their family and community. These individual visions are then brought into dialogue and, through a process of listening and synthesis, distilled into a single shared vision that all owners can genuinely endorse.
This shared vision becomes the North Star for the enterprise, the fixed point that orients all subsequent decisions about strategy, investment, governance, and operations. Without it, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” With it, the family has a common reference point that enables alignment even when individual perspectives differ.
Building Strategic Pillars for the Enterprise
Shared values and a shared vision do not exist in the abstract. They must be translated into concrete action through a strategic framework. A focused set of priorities give the family’s energy clear direction over a defined period, typically one year.
Each strategic pillar is supported by a set of executional objectives: specific actions that move the family closer to its vision in alignment with its values. The entire framework including values, vision, pillars, and objectives can be captured on a single page, providing owners and managers with a practical tool for governance and decision-making.
The creation of this framework is itself a co-created process. Just as the shared values and vision were built through dialogue, the strategic pillars and objectives should reflect the collective wisdom of the owning family. When they do, every member of the team can see their own priorities and perspectives reflected in the plan, making genuine buy-in far more likely.
Persistence as Practice
None of this work happens quickly or easily. Values clarification, shared vision development, and strategic alignment are ongoing practices, not one-time events. Families may not reach consensus on the first attempt, or even the second. The work requires patience, trust, skilled facilitation, and hopefully the love that keeps people returning to the table.
What makes the effort worthwhile is the foundation it creates. Families who have done the work of co-creating shared values and a shared vision find that their meetings are more productive, their decisions more aligned, and their relationships more resilient. They have a common language for navigating disagreement and a shared framework for evaluating opportunities. They know what good looks like, and they have built it together.
For any family with shared assets, this is perhaps the most important investment they can make: not just in the structures and governance mechanisms that support their business, but in the deeper work of understanding who they are, what they value, and where they want to go together. That is the work of shared values and shared vision, and it is the foundation on which lasting family enterprises are built.
