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Shaun McNamee is a Family Office Managing Director disguised as a Chief Financial Officer. Before taking on the role of Family Office Leader he was a Chartered Accountant, Director and Partner within multiple Big Four firms across Europe and today leads a Single Family Office in London with oversight for everything from treasury and tax to investments, HR and private assets. Here Shaun offers his take on why Family Office Leaders should have downplayed titles, why academic benchmarks only form half a picture and why working within family values to meet your objectives is critical.

In effect, my role is Managing Director but in the world of Family Offices, the titles professionals receive often do not reflect the breadth and depth of the activities that they must do in order to be successful nor are titles fully descriptive of the role.

On some days, my role crosses from CFO into Chief Investment Officer or Chief Technology Officer but while my responsibilities encompass more than my job description, it is also imperative that I do not carry a broader title.

I argue that within a Family Office that has underlying operational businesses (as opposed to managed investments with fund managers) it is actually quite important to ensure the Family Office Leader has a title that is not Managing Director. This is twofold: to avoid a conflict with the professional Managing Directors of underlying businesses and to strictly delineate the role of principal from that of Family Office professional.

With the Chief Financial Officer title it is easier to probe the financial results and the financial controls without directly challenging the business strategy that the professional business managers have created.

In my experience, Principals always have their own passionate views about their business so my role as Chief Financial Officer of the Family Office adds value by bringing an independent viewpoint to challenge management through an investment led approach supported by robust financial analysis.

UNIQUE CHALLENGES

Family Office Leaders face unique challenges which require performing multiple different roles at any one time. For example, I may spend the morning mentoring a younger member of the family around financial management, tax or a residential lease agreement and in the afternoon be entangled in a complex tax or governance matter with third party advisors and trustees.

It is often in these situations that I am also reminded of the importance of judging when and where external support is needed to complement internal resources in order to deliver the right solution or advice to the Principals of the Family Office.

That is one of the key elements of being a Leader in a Family Office, being able to understand that the role is essentially to facilitate the family’s decision making whilst advising the family to ensure they have the full information and knowledge on the consequences of those decisions.

THE DECISION-MAKERS AND THE INFLUENCERS

It is incredibly hard to categorise leaders, particularly in the Family Office but I certainly recognise there are different styles of leadership and two that I immediately think of are the Decision Maker and the Influencer. I think within a Family Office it very much depends on the extent to which the wealth that is being managed has been distributed or is anticipated to be distributed across multiple generations.

Today’s Family Office Leaders have perhaps grown up with first generation wealth held by a single principal. In this case the Leader has a role as a Decision Maker. In my view, the role of a Family Office Leaders will change to that of Influencer with an increasing emphasis on experience across multigenerational offices.

The Family Office Leader of the future is going to be much more Influencer focused and centred around making sure that the different family generations are properly catered to. Whilst professional knowledge and experience will still be a prerequisite, the great Family Office leader of the future will have empathy and understanding of the different priorities and desires of future generations. Perhaps one element for younger generations will be a focus on sustainability and the sustainability of wealth in a low carbon world.

DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS, DIFFERENT LEADERS

Good leaders adopt different leadership styles according to the situation.

I worked in a Family Office that was led by a first generation ultra-high-net-worth individual who ran very successful businesses and in that circumstance it was a one-to-one relationship between myself and that Principal. This required an entirely different leadership approach to the multigenerational Family Offices I have worked with where there are multiple touch points and whilst the Principal is of course very important, the next generation have substantial responsibilities and concerns that also need to support.

This is one area where I felt my experience gained over a number of years as a Chartered Accountant really helps. Without making an advertisement for chartered accountancy, a benefit I gained from a breadth of career in public practice with a number of Big 4 accounting firms is that I was able to see a wealth of different businesses and a wealth of different organisations. Not only was this remarkably interesting but it also allowed me to gain an understanding to the importance of people and how it is often their motivations and desires that make a business successful.

EVOLVING AS A LEADER

While my public practice experience has certainly shaped my leadership style and contributed to the knowledge I have today, it is a foundation that needs to be built upon.

If you want to work in a Family Office as a good leader you need to take a proactive approach to your learning, development and professional competency as well as ensuring you cultivate a set of contacts who are able and willing to help you on the understanding that you might be able to also help in the future.

ADVICE TO THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEADERS

The best piece of advice I was ever given as a leader is that people listen.

I was once told that people interpret and listen to what you say much more because you are a leader than those not in a leadership position. People will read into everything you say a number of different ways, sometimes they are true other times they are not, they are sometimes made up or misheard and often misinterpreted. Ever since I was given that advice I ensure I am always very measured and careful in the things that I say particularly to a team of people or to a wider family audience to ensure my messages are not misconstrued and if they are, I make sure to correct them.

I would encourage others to follow the same advice but to offer some specific words of wisdom to the next generation of leaders I would say, one of the most important elements coming through is personality.

We put a lot of value on qualifications, exam results, numbers and figures about how successful, intelligent or smart a person is and while they are great benchmarks to be able to grade people in different ways against each other, I would say to new leaders, the most successful leaders I have known with the Family Office space have strong empathy and are able to create a personal connection with people.

If you can do this you can guarantee far better results in a team, better relationships and better workplace cultures. I would say to young leaders while it is important that their results, numbers and exams are all there, work very hard on developing that personal relationship as it will serve you much better in the long term than an exam sat over a decade ago will ever do.

ADVICE TO PRINCIPALS

In my view there is always a base level of competency and knowledge that you need to have in a Family Office Leader and it is quite difficult to achieve that without having had a relatively broad based career whether that is in accountancy, investment or law.

A family needs to know that they can rely on the individual who has a breadth of experience across all of those things that can ultimately help them make the right decisions but beyond that, I think Principals and families need to take a step back and recognise that they are essentially trusting some quite important and personal matters to an individual and they need to feel comfortable that the individual working directly for them understands what the family’s objectives, desires and needs and emotionally what the family requires.

You need empathy and a breadth of understanding to reflect back the family values and work within those values to achieve their objectives. It is perhaps easy for leaders to work outside of the values of the Family Office to achieve the end goal but I do not think this will sustain the family’s wealth or organisation in the long term.

Ultimately, in my view families need a leader who is intelligent with a breadth of knowledge who is both empathetic and aligned with your family and their values for the long-term.

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