Next Generation Resources
Effective next-generation development cultivates leaders who honor your family’s legacy while bringing fresh perspective and innovation to your family enterprise. It creates intentional pathways for growth in both skill and wisdom, helping emerging leaders build the confidence, capabilities, and the community they need to step into their role.
We have curated some of our favorite resources to help next-generation members and their families think about leadership readiness and intentional development.
Articles & Writings
The Dividing Line: When Generations Define “Work Ethic” Differently
When a senior generation’s Saturday-morning inventory count collides with a next-gen’s Saturday soccer games, families often mistake the disagreement for a referendum on character. This blog argues that “work ethic” is rarely the real issue; underneath it sit deeper anxieties about legacy and relevance for the senior generation, and about capability and legitimacy for the next generation. It encourages families to move past interpreting each other’s behavior at face value and instead ask what each generation’s instincts make sense of given the context they came up in.
Read more in this blog
By Eliza Orleans
New Year, New Chapter: Tips for Family Business NextGens on Creating Actionable Self-Development Plans
Being a respected next-gen family member is one thing — building the diplomacy, influence, and collaboration skills to lead the family enterprise into the future is another. This piece lays out practical guidance for creating a self-development plan tailored to nextgens: treating the planning process itself as valuable, building broad-based exposure across the business, aligning goals with real business and ownership needs, finding peer community, coordinating with other family members’ development, seeking honest outside feedback, and balancing hard and soft skills.
Read more in this blog
By Megan Helzner
Developing Next Generation Members in the Family Business and Family Enterprise
In today’s rapidly evolving world, family enterprises face an unprecedented challenge: developing the next generation of leaders while navigating change that moves faster than ever before. This perfect storm demands more than traditional approaches—it requires both fresh thinking and wisdom about what has worked, knowing when to lean into time-tested methods and when to innovate boldly.
Are you preparing the next gen for what’s coming? Explore strategies every family-owned business needs as leadership and wealth shift faster than ever.
Read the article
By Jessican Hutchison and Cecilia Garza Madden, published by Family Enterprise USA.
Following a Founder
Founders build businesses in their own image. Their businesses are a fusion of person and enterprise that can become a liability once it’s time to plan for what comes after them. This piece argues that successful continuity depends on a founder’s ability to embed values and vision strong enough to inspire independent leadership in others, and it lays out the core requirements for a healthy transition: an early, honest succession plan, preserved core values, cohesive ownership, stronger governance structures, and deliberate organization development.
Read more in this blog
Next Generation Leadership: Honoring the Past While Preparing for the Future
Next-generation development in family enterprises is rarely a clean handoff — it often gets treated as a tug-of-war between generations rather than a deliberate process. In this blog, CFAR uses an explore/exploit framework to show how rising leaders can hold onto what’s worked while building the skills to navigate a changing business landscape. It’s a practical resource for family business owners, next-gen leaders, advisors, and board members trying to clarify who plays what role in developing tomorrow’s leadership. Includes downloadable slides and the full webinar recording.
Read more in this blog
By Cecilia Garza Madden and Jessica Hutchison.
Peer Group
Learn more about our Next Gen Peer Group
Videos
In this webinar from Jessica Hutchison and Cecilia Garza Madden learn:
- What’s at stake in next-gen development today
- The explore/exploit framework for balancing tradition with innovation
- Practical strategies for your family’s learning spaces
- How to connect legacy to leadership with a framework that actually works for family enterprises
Continue The Conversation