Let’s imagine an everyday, if rarely seen, scene: a young man is having dinner with his college friends. While your colleagues complain about their bosses, getting their first job, or that Starting salarieshe is silent. Your fear is different. Your “boss” is your father or your aunt and be “Job Search” andIt is a fate that seems to have been written since birth. If you dare to voice your concerns—the pressure to support the family fortune, the fear of not living up to the founding grandfather—you’re likely to get incomprehensible looks or wry comments about “having an honest problem.” This creates the first major obstacle to the survival of the family business: loneliness.
The worker is not a commodity
ANDThe success of a family business is usually measured by balance sheets. Market expansion and profitability. However, Statistics suggest that we misjudge long-term sustainability. It is estimated that in Argentina 70% of family businesses do not survive the transition to the third generation. Globally, the survival rate for the founders’ grandchildren is only 12%.
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Why do financially healthy organizations fail? The answer is rarely in the market; It’s on the Sunday table. The fragility of these companies lies in the lack of emotional preparation of new generations and lack of family communication which was paradoxically broken by the attempt to protect each other.
The Protection Paradox: “I Don’t Want You to Suffer What I Suffered”
To understand the current gap between young people and their family businesses, we need to look to the older generation. Many founders and current second-generation managers experienced their integration into the company under the strict mandate paradigm. They began working at a very early age, often out of obligation due to the sudden death of a parent or due to a culture in which saying “no” was a betrayal.
When these leaders became parents, they consciously or unconsciously made a decision born of love: “I don’t want my children to have to go through this.” To protect them from the rigors of business, recurring economic crises and the stress of day-to-day management, they created a bubble. They kept factory problems away from home. They gave their children the freedom to choose, to study what they wanted, to travel.
Working in the age of AI
The result is a painful paradox. By “protecting” the children from the reality of the enterprise, they simultaneously excluded them from the passion, mystique, and history of the efforts that built the legacy. Today, these parents are nearing retirement and desperately want their children to get involved. But they encounter young people who view the company as a “black box”: a place that generates dividends but which they find strange, intimidating or simply uninteresting.
The founding generation is frustrated: “How come they don’t care about all the stuff I built for them?” The answer is that no one can love what they do not know, nor feel part of a story that has always been half-told to them.
The loneliness of young people: between desire and guilt
On the other side of the divide, younger generations face a monumental identity challenge. Unlike their parents, they don’t just strive for stability or fulfill a duty; They are looking for meaning. Your professional identity is inextricably linked to your personal fulfillment. For the children of business families, however, this search for meaning is associated with feelings of guilt and silence. Many feel like they have a “double task”: processing the story they have received while also trying to figure out who they are outside of the last name.
This is the critical importance of peer environments. There are many young people who go through these challenges and find that they have no one to talk to. Her friends who don’t belong to business families don’t understand the complexity of having to negotiate salary with your mother or the pressure of knowing that your own mistake will affect your siblings’ wealth. They also often fail to empathize with the guilt that comes with not wanting to join the family business: “If you can get an ‘easy’ job thanks to your family, why shouldn’t you?” But sometimes this decision is anything but easy.
This lack of competent people to talk to leads to the false conclusion that their problems are unique, embarrassing, or the result of a disorder that only affects their family. The reality is that this is not an isolated problem; It is the systemic structure of the family business. But without a mirror to look at himself, the young man isolates himself, and this isolation leads to paralysis. They don’t enter the company out of fear or guilt, but in both cases they do so without the emotional tools to lead them.
From silence to conversation
The real risk for family businesses is neither external competition, nor technology, nor the country’s economy. The real risk is silence. It’s the conversation that isn’t having, the son walking away because he doesn’t feel heard, the father not delegating because he doesn’t trust. Business continuity is not mandatory; Link after link is created. Effective means of communication are crucial because they act as translators between two worlds that desperately need each other but have forgotten how to speak to each other. For parents, supporting their children’s participation in these spaces is an act of courage: it means accepting that the way they experienced the company will not be the same for their children. For young people, it is the opportunity to stop being “children” and become protagonists of a story that they want to tell for the first time.
More litigation and fewer claims: a separation that makes employment more expensive
Ultimately, the most valuable legacy is not the company itself, but the ability of the family to stick together with a common goal across generations. And that always starts with feeling part of something that is bigger than yourself, but in which you have an irreplaceable place.
The power of the tribe: learning among like-minded people
It is at this blind spot that external intervention becomes not only useful but necessary. Experience shows that technical training (an MBA, a finance course) does not solve the emotional block. What unlocks the potential of the new generation is validation from their peers. Bringing together young people from different business families in the same room creates immediate relief. When he hears that another young man from a different industry and a different city feels the same discomfort when talking to his father about money, or feels the same “survivor’s guilt” about having privileges he didn’t earn, his spirit fades. The problem ceases to be “my family” and becomes “our challenge.”
This process of socializing and relativizing problems allows us to move from complaint to action. When the young person understands that their doubts are normal, they feel empowered to express them. The tribe gives him legitimacy that he cannot find in solitude.
The urgency of early preparation
Waiting until the founder dies or decides to retire to start preparing the next generation is a serious strategic mistake. Emotional and attachment preparation takes time. A sense of belonging cannot be “installed” overnight. Families who are afraid of the future often put pressure on their children to get involved in the business without first clarifying the “why”. This usually leads to rejection.
Director of Estim Groups
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