update: my brother is my business partner and he keeps going MIA

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose brother was her business partner and he kept going MIA? Here’s the update.

The news is all positive but the path there was not without its challenges.

So when I wrote in, my brother had gone out on vacation without giving any notice (again…), leaving me and others in the lurch. Many commenters supposed he was entitled and spoiled, making big money for doing nothing, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re a mid-sized family business; all of us work very hard and everyone is paid a solid livelihood, including the family owners. But no one is making Fortune-500 money. And on the other side of the coin, all the same executive pressures exist. The responsibility to keep this place going, to make the right choices so we survive a recession, survive the competition, and survive the changes in technology and workforce and varying governmental requirements is intense. My brother was buckling under the stress of living up to everything … not least of which was being pulled between my father’s expectations and the expectations of his wife, neither of which he could meet and neither of whom he could figure out how to talk to about the reality of what he could and couldn’t do. Then go ahead and add the pressure of a very successful older sister, who is his boss, to the mix. Simply put, he was freezing up and stalling out in the face of all that conflict.

This is the thing about family business that nothing and no one can really prepare you for. People tell you to compartmentalize. They tell you to separate business from family. They tell you to not let the two worlds mix. But the reality is that you are sitting there, at all times, being both a daughter and a manager, a sister and a colleague, a parent and a boss, a child and a subordinate. There is no separating, no putting on different hats, no being two different people inside yourself. You’re just one person, and there actually is no way to keep your family history from impacting your reactions to the other person, and no way to inure one way you have to relate to someone from impacting the other way you relate to them. When it’s good, it’s really good. But when it’s hard, its everything that is hard about family combined with everything that is hard about business, which is hard indeed.

So the very hard choice I made was to decide that I had to do what was best for the company, for the sake of myself and all my colleagues, and to let go of the rest. I had to be okay with losing my relationship with my brother for the sake of the business.

When my brother returned from his trip, I put him on unpaid leave and told him that if he wanted to rejoin the family business he would need to come back to a labor/field-only position without any authority. My brother is actually very talented and skilled in many ways, just not as a project manager, so keeping his skills in our workforce was in the best interest of the company and I told him so. But I fired my brother and told him he would have to reapply for a new position because his old position no longer existed.

Then, as his sister, I told him I loved him. I told him I would be happy to help him financially while he was out of work. I told him I would be happy to help him find a therapist. And I would be happy to support him and his family in any way they needed during this time, just not through the company. I tried to be there for him, even as I was the one firing him.

And he was never upset with me. He saw all of it. He knew he had let everyone down. He knew why I was doing what I was doing. He left the office that day feeling even more awful and more horribly guilty about the whole situation.

It took him about six weeks of not working, of dealing with the implications of what was happening, of finally being honest with his wife about all of it, for him to come to terms with everything, but he did. He is now regularly seeing a therapist (ironically, my therapist, which is a good thing because she is great) and he is starting to deal with some of the baggage from our childhood. Eventually he did come back to work. Now, day to day he is just a mason, laying brick and block at the direction of others. He was on hiatus for a while from his ownership duties, but he is now back on our executive team since he is still an owner and an officer. Those meetings are after hours so they don’t interfere with his field duties. It’s still a little bit of a weird set up, because it’s still family business. But he is doing his job well and he is much happier now that his role matches his capabilities and he’s not constantly worried about dropping the ball or not meeting expectations. And so am I.

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