The BBH Center for Family Business and Center for Women & Wealth are committed to helping family business owners engage all members of the next generation in conversations around the family business. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you and your family, please reach out.
Late last year, we released our research on how family businesses develop future leaders, and when and why women took on leadership roles in family business. While the presence of women in leadership and ownership roles is accelerating across the country, family businesses are actually trailing Fortune 500 companies in female leaders. We set out to find out why and how family business can change that.
Based on our years of experience working with business-owning families and interviews with about 30 women, we found three key factors that strongly influenced women’s paths to leadership: early exposure to the business, communication of inclusion as a family value, and strong female role models in the family. And in situations where these factors weren’t present, success was still possible thanks to a “disrupter” – an event or individual who changed the trajectory of the company.
Here, Adrienne and Ben sit down together to dive deeper into the findings.
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