Family values
Why should we care about our family’s values?
Values are the guiding principles that unite a family and shape how it makes decisions, resolves conflict and treats its members and its wealth. They often sit alongside the vision and mission in a family charter or constitution, and they're meant to outlast any one generation's leadership.
A more operational definition is the values are the beliefs a family holds dearest, the ones that guide choices across generations, from how wealth gets spent to how disputes get resolved. Some are universal, like integrity or respect. Some are particular to the family, like a founder's appetite for risk or a commitment to a trade or a place.
Values guide behaviour and decision-making when the rulebook runs out. They're distinct from strategy, which is what you do, and culture, which is how it feels to be part of the family, though all three reinforce each other.
As Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew and Vice Chairman of Disney, put it: "Decision making is easy when your values are clear."
Applying the principles of business to family
No serious business leaves its values to chance. Once there's more than one decision-maker, it needs a shared filter for calls nobody wrote a policy for: who gets promoted, what counts as fair, when to walk from a good deal. Skip this work and a business doesn't end up value-free. It ends up with values by accident, rewarding whoever is loudest or longest-serving.
A family is the oldest version of this enterprise, and the harder one: many decision-makers, decisions spanning decades, members who never had an induction. Shared blood doesn't mean shared values.
How values permeate every aspect of a family
Take a value as ordinary as "we look after our own." Said aloud, every family agrees to it. Lived, it shows up differently depending on what's actually happening.
It's there in a will, in the decision to structure a life interest trust for the sibling who never quite found solid ground, rather than an equal share handed over and gone within a year. It's there in a business decision, in whether the family member who wants to leave the operating business is bought out fairly and helped toward whatever's next, or quietly frozen out for wanting something different. It's there at a family gathering, in whether anyone follows up with the relative who's gone quiet for two Christmases running. And it's there in conflict, when siblings disagree hard about a decision and the value decides whether the argument is about winning, or about still being a family on the other side of it.
Nobody drafts a clause that says "we look after our own." It just turns out to be the thread running through the will, the governance documents and decisions made.
Where it shows up across the five capitals
I've written before about the five forms of capital: financial, human, social, intellectual and cultural. Take a value like "education matters," and it becomes a specific investment in each:
Financial capital: School and university fees paid directly, plus a modest investment account seeded for every grandchild the day they're born to learn the basics of investment.
Human capital: Every next-gen member expected to finish a degree or trade before joining the business, with coaching and further study funded well past graduation.
Social capital: A mentoring pairing at the family council, where an older relative works alongside a younger one learning the business, not just handing over a title.
Intellectual capital: A governance curriculum nobody skips: no seat on the investment committee or family council without sitting through it first.
Cultural capital: The story that is told about the generation that scraped together school fees in lieu of daily luxuries before wealth.
The return isn't just capable graduates. It's the next generation who trust each other's judgement, because they've all been through the same rigour and know it wasn't handed to them.
Defining values: less governance and more shared stories
One of the exercises I run with families is during the informal part of a family meeting or retreat, and it works from teenagers to grandparents. Everyone reviews a set of value words, narrows their choices down, then tells the story behind the ones that matter most.
The real work happens in what comes after the words. A word every family will nod along to, like “honesty” or “loyalty”, means something different to everyone at the table until it's pinned to a memory and rewritten as a sentence specific to this family. That's the step that turns "honesty" into "we tell each other the truth, even when it costs us," - it's the point where the room goes quiet and the values feel personal.
The family finish having shared their most meaningful stories, closer to each other for having told them and clearer than they've ever been on what the family actually values
Embodying the family values
Values are absorbed from what a family tolerates, not what it says out loud. A founder who talks about humility but never admits a mistake in front of their children teaches a different value entirely.
Give the values a keeper (the family council is the natural home) and let the values guide every decision the family makes.
When to revisit the values
Values only discussed in a crisis will always feel like a rebuke. Revisit them on a cycle instead, at a family assembly every year or two, and expect them to evolve, not because the family's character changes, but because its circumstances do. A blended family, a generation grown from six to sixty, a liquidity event: each is a good moment to test the old words against the family today, and see if they still fit.
I did this same work for Kinexis before I ever asked a family to do it, and landed on three words I still bring to every family I work with: independence, trust and discretion.
If your family has never done this work, or has values on the wall that no longer describe what happens at the table, that's the conversation worth having. Reach out here for a conversation.
