Several family members sit on our leadership team alongside non-family executives, and business decisions keep getting made informally at Sunday dinners. How do we shut down this shadow governance and rebuild trust with non-family leaders?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Kitchen-table governance is toxic to an executive team. When non-family directors realize that official strategy is debated on Tuesday only to be overturned over pot roast on Sunday, psychological safety vanishes. Your non-family executives will stop contributing, withhold hard truths, and eventually leave.

You must establish a strict governance boundary immediately. Family dinners and ownership discussions belong to the shareholder realm, not the operational leadership realm. Declare openly in your next Level 10 Meeting that operational issues are resolved exclusively through the Accountability Chart and within your scheduled executive meetings.

Enforce this through three strict rules:

- No operational decisions count unless they happen inside your official leadership meetings and are documented in your meeting notes.
- If business comes up at a family gathering, any family member must shut it down by saying that the issue belongs on the leadership Issues List for IDS.
- Hold all leadership members, family or not, strictly accountable to their five core roles and GWC.

Next, address your non-family executives directly. Acknowledge that informal back-channel decisions have happened in the past, validate their frustration without being defensive, and give them express permission to call out shadow governance the moment they sense it. When family members honor the process publicly by submitting issues to the leadership Issues List instead of resolving them in private, non-family leaders regain confidence that the Accountability Chart is real. Accountability applies to last names equally. If a family member cannot respect that line, they must step off the leadership team.