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Family Business leadership: lessons learned

January 9, 2023

Mark Essex, course director of KPMG in the UK’s Family Business Leadership Academy, talks about his key learnings from the past 12 months.

Suffering from a talent shortage? Move to skills-led organisation design

January 3, 2023

Employers can’t survive by constantly trying to push square peg employees into round hole positions. Instead, they need to look at what’s available to them in the talent market and conjure up a solution that meets their needs… Make your holes squarer, says Mark Essex, course director of the Family Business Leadership Academy, KPMG in the UK.

“Back in the day” is a phrase my kids use a lot. Of course, they don’t mean the 1980s or even the 20th Century. They mean 2019. “You know, when you used to go to work every day, Daddy”. Leaving aside that working from home is working, there is a truth in what they observe. Especially when it comes to recruitment.

Family businesses look to next generation to drive change

December 8, 2022

Succession in family firms has never been such a hot topic. Change is underway at the top of family businesses, triggered largely by the pandemic, says KPMG’s Mark Essex.

Succession in family firms has never been such a hot topic. Change is underway at the top of family businesses, triggered largely by the pandemic.

Investing in people is like investing in anything, we all want the best ROI

December 1, 2022

Take a look at one of your most important asset classes, your talent, and start to think about how you can improve the investment, says Mark Essex.

In the struggle for talent, some of your competitors might prefer to poach your staff rather than coach their own. And if one of your best people is seduced by a golden hello from a rival, you’d be forgiven for looking again at how much you invest in your staff. Of course, it won’t be long before someone comes out with the cliché: “What if you train them and they leave? What if you don’t and they stay?”

Leadership through the lens: How to pass on experience and knowledge in a virtual working environment

October 28, 2022

Helping the next generation learn leadership skills is possible in a virtual world. But it’s harder and we need to work harder at it, says Mark Essex.

Leading teams in a virtual world is harder. It requires effort, concentration and planning. But, for business leaders passing on their experience gained over a lifetime, it’s an investment. And the return is higher for family businesses.

Don’t wait for hybrid working to settle down; it won’t

October 14, 2022

In a tight labour market where talent is scarce, family business should make a virtue of their optionality and flexibility on this issue to attract talent, says Mark Essex.

The invention of email is 51 years old and has been a staple tool of office workers for at least 25 years. However, in that time we still haven’t really adopted a set of ubiquitous norms; we still receive hundreds of messages a day and use basically the same workflow for “Fancy a brew” as “Please see attached a multi-million pound contract”.