Eliza Orleans
Principal
Picture this. A family business’s founder or senior leader sits across from a son, daughter, niece, or nephew, and tries to explain why Saturday mornings used to mean inventory counts, why vacations got cut short for client emergencies, and why none of that ever felt like a sacrifice — it felt like a necessary step towards building something great. The next generation member listens but has their own version of a Saturday well spent, including going to a kids’ soccer game, volunteering at the local food shelter, and eating dinner with their family after a busy week of work and travel. Unimpressed with each other’s explanations, the two are at a standstill.
Sound familiar?
This conversation plays out in family businesses all the time, and it’s particularly common in a post-COVID environment, given the proliferation of hybrid and remote work.
This tension, sometimes framed as a generational divide over work ethic, is understandable. Often, the senior generation built the family company through sheer will, perhaps at a deep personal cost, and they associate that sacrifice with the values that have made the business successful. The next generation has watched that sacrifice up close, in some cases watched it cost their parents’ marriages, health, or time they can’t get back. They’re determined not to repeat that pattern in their own families. They want the family business to grow and thrive, but not at the expense of everything else.
While both sides usually think the other is wrong, I would argue that neither side is “right” or “wrong” in this instance. The mistake most families make is treating this kind of disagreement as a referendum on character and approaching the conversation with a zero-sum mentality. Who works harder, who cares more, who’s “really” committed, etc. That framing guarantees a standoff because it turns a difference in values into a question of worth.
Getting Underneath the Surface
“Work ethic” is rarely what the conflict is actually about. It’s the presenting issue, the thing that’s easy to argue about because it sounds objective. Underneath, there’s usually something more personal and harder to say out loud.
For the senior generation, anxiety is often less about the number of hours the next generation is logging and more about legacy and relevance. Pushing the next generation to “work harder” might be a stand-in for deeper, more vulnerable questions: If I step back, who will fill the gaps? Can the business really survive without me? If the next generation runs the business differently than I did, does that mean my way was wrong? If they don’t need to sacrifice as I did, does that mean my sacrifice wasn’t necessary — or worse, that I chose it over things I shouldn’t have?
For the next generation, the surface statement may be something like, “I don’t want to live like that.” But beneath this may lie a fear of not being seen as capable or of earning legitimacy only by replicating a model they’ve already concluded is unsustainable. There can also be grief or resentment for a parent they didn’t get enough time with, or for a version of family life that was crowded out by the business.
None of this gets resolved by debating how many hours a hardworking person actually has to work on a Saturday. It gets resolved, or at least made workable, by naming what’s actually at stake: identity, legacy, fear, grief, and trust. One of the best things a family can do during these heightened conversations is to keep asking each other, “What is this really about?” until the conversation moves from the symptom to the underlying need.
Taking in the Broader Context
It may help to understand why each generation’s instincts make sense on their own terms. The senior generation typically built their business in a context where growth, survival, and identity were fused together. Their definition of work ethic was forged under a certain degree of scarcity: limited capital, limited reputation, limited margin for error. There was no separation between “the business” and “who I am as a person.” And for many senior generation members, there was no need to separate the two because they loved their work so much.
The next generation came of age watching that scarcity-driven model up close, but they’re operating in a different environment, perhaps one with more financial cushion, more cultural permission to talk about burnout, and greater visibility into other paths. Most next-gens work plenty hard. What they may be rejecting is a model in which the business absorbs everything else in their life by default, rather than by choice.
Instead of asking whose values are correct, one might ask, “What is the cycle that each generation is caught in?” For the senior generation, it might be something like, more hours → more revenue → more security for the business and the family → more identity invested → more hours. In their time, the cycle was self-reinforcing and ultimately successful. The next generation, in contrast, is curious about the possibility of a different cycle, one that drives business growth without necessarily sacrificing time for family, hobbies, and/or service.
Where Families Get Stuck
The conflict escalates when each generation interprets the other’s behavior through their own lens, without ever surfacing the deeper layer underneath it. The senior generation sees boundary-setting as a lack of commitment, when it may really be a fear of repeating a painful pattern. The next generation sees the 24/7 work schedule as a refusal to evolve, when it may really be a fear of becoming obsolete. Both interpretations contain some truth, and both miss what’s actually driving the other person.
Having A More Productive Conversation
The families who navigate this well aren’t the ones who resolve the disagreement by shouting louder or focusing on one side “winning” over the other. They’re the ones willing to get underneath the debate about hours and find the disagreement or miscommunication that’s actually happening — about legacy, trust, and whether change can happen without anyone’s contribution being erased. Some questions a family might get started with include:
- What are the messages I got about work, money, and effort as a kid?
- What about the other generation’s perspective and experience can I get curious about?
- When I imagine the worst-case scenario (e.g., having to work 18 hour days), what am I actually, specifically afraid will happen? And what would it take to share that with the person “across the table” from me?
- Am I focusing on inputs (e.g., hours worked) or results (e.g., profit)? What if one does not necessarily drive the other one?