Family Meetings for Frantic Families
Notes from Lencioni's "The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family"
Family Meeting Notes
The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family
Like many, I’m a huge Patrick Lencioni fan.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team was my painful first introduction to Lencioni's work. If you haven't read it yet and are interested in how teams interact, read it now.
Lencioni writes fables supported by research into his topic. His books, being narrative-driven, are hyper-palatable but not shallow. These aren't empty calories. Most of the time, you don't need 400 pages to make your point. The only thing you need is a good story.
As I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, I reflected on my business and entrepreneurial journey with new eyes. This honest evaluation was painful for me as a business partner. Sadly, I realized that my team and I exhibited every dysfunction.
We hit all five. Yay! [Please excuse my sarcasm.]
Work was needed; thankfully, we came together as a team to engage in that work.
The most important exercise we did? We affirmed our values.
Why values?
Values give us a common language. They are attributes to cling to in troubled waters. They guide our decisions and offer a principled platform for navigating new decisions and endeavors. They also help hold us accountable to our clients, teammates, and ourselves.
After much thoughtful conversation and collaboration, here are the core values we settled upon for Trailhead Planners, our wealth management business.
We lead with empathy.
We are optimists.
We are essentialists.
We are reliable.
We are committed.
Reaffirming our values has been a guiding light in our business conversations. We trust where each individual is coming from and are committed to the same ideals.
From Business to Personal
Riding the success of these conversations, I took a hard look at my family life. My wife and I share many values. They were the basis of our brief courtship and ultimate marriage. (We met and were married within one year!)
Yet, I couldn’t say that we had ever written down our family’s values or come up with a mission statement or statement of purpose for our family. As our kids grew older, how were we to instill values into them if we weren’t rock-solid on what our family’s values were in the first place?
So, I started researching different methods of installing family meetings or organized consultations.
One thing immediately stood out to me. Conversations about values, purpose, vision, and meaning have become ubiquitous in the business world, and rightly so. Yet, finding books about bringing these conversations into a family setting was harder.
Demoralized, I asked Twitter for help, and a friend suggested I read Lencioni’s book.
Frantic Families
Recently, I read Lencioni’s book for families, The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family.
My family needs this. Before the kids, my wife and I could talk whenever we wanted. Despite being two busy young professionals, we rarely encountered scheduling conflicts.
When babies came, we were struggling to keep our heads above water. Every moment goes to your young children, changing diapers, naps, food schedules, and bedtime routines. These consumed us.
Amidst job changes, starting a business, daycare bills, and a growing family, we didn't have time for a family meeting. We pushed tasks forward as we could, making decisions when forced to by deadlines or other frantic needs. It was unorganized, but we were sleep-deprived and burnt out.
We did what we could as we could.
But as our babies became toddlers and little kids, we settled into stability in our home lives. Correspondingly, we began to want more formal conversations for our family.
How would we go about this?
I'm a financial planner and work with many successful families. One of my services is offering families a calm space to reflect on their goals, values, and aspirations and not lose the forest for the trees of daily life. The tyranny of the urgent distracts us from thoughtful planning on important matters.
The answer, of course, is to get systematized.
But that’s easier said than done for many families.
Personally, I’m a routine person, but my brain fights systems like it’s nobody’s business. As a business owner, I’ve come to rely upon and generally appreciate systems, workflows, and effective documentation.
However, I don’t want to get systemized at home. I just don’t. I want to relax, spend time with my kids, and feel at peace.
My brain tricks me into thinking that systems hinder these ends, but really, systems support them.
All to say, I knew it would be challenging to systemize a family meeting structure, but I also knew it would be worth it.
The first step was to find a simple and repeatable process that offered structure and direction.
Here's where Lencioni's book comes in.
First, you can buy Lencioni’s book here:
You can buy my book, “Money with Purpose: Receive the Dividends of an Undivided Financial Life” here:
Also, please consider subscribing and sharing this newsletter with someone you think would benefit:
The 3 Big Questions for Frantic Families
The 3 Big Questions follows Theresa and Jude Cousins and their four children. The Cousins live in San Francisco, Jude owns a consultancy, Theresa is a former high school math teacher and current stay-at-home mom, their kids do sports, they are involved in their church, volunteer at school, members of the school board and life feels...frantic.
Like most parents today, they feel like they are always hustling, yet always behind.
I won't spend much time on the fable, but it's a great read and quick to digest.
Ultimately, after a quick dive into Jude and his partners' processes for working with their business clients, Theresa shapes them into principles and processes that are easily adaptable for families.
She simplifies and formats them for the distinct purpose of helping families.
These are the three big questions for a frantic family.
1. What Makes Your Family Unique?
2. What is Your Family's Top Priority - Rallying Cry - Right Now?
3. How Do You Talk About and Use the Answers to the Questions?
~Pg. 179
Let's dig into those questions one by one.
Question 1: What Makes Your Family Unique?
"Another way to phrase thie question is, what differentiated your family from every other one on your block, or at your school, or in your church? ~Pg. 180
What makes your family unique? What makes it yours? Special? Different? What is uniquely yours?
Do you remember when you were young and went to a friend’s house, and it was painfully obvious that you were entering a whole new world? Your friend’s family was different. Maybe they had different values, a different lifestyle, or liked different foods. The house probably smelled distinct, had a different feel, and creaked in different places.
After growing up in a world of sameness, your family, you entered what may as well be a new country or even civilization.
To a child’s eye, this can be both wondrous (or sadly, terrible) and overwhelming.
However, the differences between families are real, even as adults.
This has re-emerged in my consciousness as a parent. We raise our kids differently, we have different rules, and different values.
We stand out not only from our friends, but also from our extended families. My wife and I are wildly different.
You may feel the same.
Lencioni recommends defining your core values and ‘strategy.’
Don’t overthink it. A few examples -
We are passionate learners.
We value education
We value bilingual speakers.
We value our ethnic background and culture.
We value peaceful time at home.
We value our faith and spiritual community.
We value being of service to our community.
We value adventure.
We value time spent outside.
We value time together as a family.
Strategy is the next differentiator.
What’s your family’s strategy?
Once again, don’t overthink it. Lencioni recommends two or three sentences that guide your family’s daily, weekly, and annual decisions. Here’s an example from the book:
“We are a passionate family that believes in standing up strongly for what is right, even when there is a cost. We live our lives around our Church and our faith, placing special emphasis on maximizing our involvement in our children’s lives and nurturing family-like relationships with our friends.” ~ pg 189
I see the strategy as a guiding principle for your actions and family decisions. Most options in life aren’t black and white. They are shades of grey, rife with tradeoffs. Your family strategy, rooted in your family values, can offer a guiding light as you navigate important decisions.
Question 2: What is your family’s top priority—rallying cry—right now?
Every family needs a single, agreed-upon top priority, something it can rally around for unity and maximum impact. The best way to determine that priority is to ask the right question in the manner that best provokes an honest accurate answer. ~Pg. 190
Lencioni offers three examples of questions to prompt your rallying cry:
“If we accomplish just one thing as a family before the Fourth of July, what would that be?”
“If there is one thing about our family that needs to be different by Christmas, what would it be?”
“What is it that we’d have to accomplish by the time that the school year starts in order for us to say that it was a successful summer?” Pg 190-191
The idea is to get away from a long list of priorities that you’ll never accomplish and focus on one crucial goal for your family’s well-being.
A defining characteristic of your rallying cry is that it must be achievable within 2-6 months.
Beyond that, it’s your house, your rules.
Here are some examples:
By the end of the summer, we will eat at least four meals a week together as a family.
By the start of spring, we (the parents) will hire a babysitter so we can go on one date a month.
By the start of the year, we will have a plan for our respective retirement dates.
What’s your rallying cry?
Once you have your rallying cry, you define objectives for achieving it. You need to source and interview babysitters if you want more date nights. Then, you need to call references and have a trial run.
Once all that is in place, you can start scheduling regular date nights.
A rallying cry without objectives is empty words. The objectives help you build toward the goal.
Question #3 How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions?
One of the most common mistakes people make when they do strategic planning or personal development plans is that they neatly produce a handsome document and bind it for posterity. ~Pg. 196
I run into this often as a financial planner. Having a plan is great. But it’s not sufficient. The planning is where the real juice is, and the planning never stops.
Your family is no different. You have your values, your strategy, and your rallying cry. Surely that’s enough!
Well, you’re farther along than before, and that’s good! But there’s more.
You need a regular system for reviewing your family’s values, strategy, and rallying cry, as well as a process for reviewing your progress and consulting on regular decisions.
You need a family meeting!
“The most important thing a family has to do to keep its context alive is discuss it in regular meetings. Yes, meetings…
…it is critical to talk about your context, and most important, regularly assess your progress against defining and standard objectives.” ~ pg. 197
Lencioni suggests a weekly cadence for your family meetings. Begin by reviewing your rally cry and then assess progress on your objectives. Use a number or color system to label progress. This part shouldn’t take more than five minutes.
Then, review what needs to be done to push the objectives down the line. For example, if ‘1’ is not started and ‘3’ is completed, what does it take to move objectives with a ‘1’ to a ‘2’ or ‘3?’ What barriers or obstacles are you hitting, and what can be done this coming week to move it down the line?
Your family meeting should take no longer than 10-15 minutes. You probably don’t have much more time than that anyway! But make it sacred. Put it on your calendar. Block off time when you can be truly present to each other.
Consider putting your values, objectives, a rallying cry, and more on a whiteboard or large printout in a visible place for your family.
What Do You Think?
What do you think? Are family meetings for you?
I suggest they are for everyone.
Here’s what my family did:
The Sadighi-Ranstrom’s center their lives around the spiritual principles of the Baha’i Faith; we value service to our loved ones and community, personal development, travel, and peaceful time spent at home together.
What would your statement look like?
Our initial rallying cries have centered around defining summer travel plans, scheduling regular dates for my wife and me, and cleaning up our house as we emerge from the baby phase.
We struggle to schedule the weekly meetings, but we hope to nail down a time that consistently works for my wife and me every week. We have learned that we are too wiped out once the kids go down. Mornings are frantic. We hope to schedule a regular weekly breakfast, lunch, or coffee while the kids attend school and daycare. Wish us luck!