Although it is sometimes blatant, nepotism can often be subtle and difficult to spot. As we saw in part 1 of our blog post series on nepotism, family businesses may engage in nepotism with the best of intentions to support and care for their families but can end up with many problems. This blog post series discusses what to do if you realize that nepotism has already taken root in your business and how to rectify the situation, using four steps.
Step 1: Acknowledge and own the problem.
Define the problem clearly, then communicate the problem to family members, stakeholders, and employees. For example, you might say during a board meeting, “I am concerned about our practice of paying family members X amount more than our non-family team members for this role. This needs to change as God has called us to pay the workers what they are worth and a byproduct of not doing this could mean that we lose our top performers.”
Step 2: Identify what should have been done instead, and apologize if needed.
Once you have defined the problem, the second step towards resolving the issue is to think about what should have been done instead. Because nepotism is unfairly favoring family members, it can be helpful to go back and ask: what would have been fair in the situation? Without blame-shifting, figure out why the mistake was made and how it happened.
Make a clear apology to those involved in the situation, with no qualifications. Instead of trying to protect your image or ego, practice humility and empathize with the harm that it caused others. Express that things are going to change. You might say things such as:
“I’m sorry that I allowed family members to be paid more for the same role than non-family members. I understand that is unfair and deeply frustrating, and I am going to take steps to change that going forward.”
The next step is to make the situation right. In our next post, we are going to look at some common situations involving nepotism and thoughts for course-correcting.
Chew On This
What is one way you can start to make things right if you find nepotism in your family business?
