[Photo: The nave of Lichfield Cathedral]

We lived not far from Lichfield Cathedral forty years ago. Drove past its three spires more times than I could count.

And somehow, in all that time, I never once went inside.

I finally did recently, and I’m glad I waited, in a strange way, because I don’t think I would have appreciated it as much forty years ago as I did standing in that nave, looking up at arches that have been holding themselves together since the 1300s.

The cathedral was besieged three times during the English Civil War, fortified in 1643, fought over by Royalists and Parliamentarians in turn, the building caught between sides that couldn’t agree.

By the time the fighting was done, the central spire had been demolished, the roofs ruined, every piece of stained glass smashed. Restoration began in the 1660s, but it took until the nineteenth century, the better part of two hundred years, before the damage was fully repaired.

And yet it’s still standing. Still magnificent. Still, somehow, exactly what it was always meant to be.

Standing inside, what struck me wasn’t the damage; it was the foundations. Whatever was destroyed above ground, the spire, the roof, the glass, the base of the thing held. The walls held. Whatever made this a cathedral in the first place survived the conflict that nearly tore it apart.

I think about that a great deal in my work with family businesses, because conflict in families is rarely about the thing it appears to be about. The argument over the business decision, the disagreement about a hire, the tension at a board meeting: these are the spire and the roof. They’re visible, dramatic, sometimes genuinely destructive.

But they’re not the foundation.

The foundation is the relationship underneath. The history. The love, even when it’s buried under frustration. And before any family business can resolve a conflict properly, before the spire gets rebuilt, somebody has to go back down to that foundation and check it’s actually still there.

Most families skip that step.

They try to fix the visible damage, settle the argument, paper over the disagreement, find a compromise everyone can live with, without ever checking whether the foundation underneath is sound.

And so the same conflict, in a different shape, comes back a few years later, because the real work was never done.

Lichfield Cathedral took two centuries to fully repair. Most family conflicts don’t need anywhere near that long, but they do need someone willing to look past the damage and check what’s actually holding everything up.

Checking the Foundations: Why Family Business Conflict Is Rarely About What It Appears to Be About

This week I wrote about finally visiting Lichfield Cathedral after forty years of driving past it, and what struck me wasn’t the damage it survived during the Civil War, but the foundations that held throughout. It made me think about how family conflict works in almost exactly the same way. When a family business comes to me in conflict, the presenting issue is almost never the real issue. A disagreement about a hiring decision, a dispute over how profits are distributed, a falling-out over who gets final say on strategy: these are the visible damage, the equivalent of a destroyed spire or a smashed window.

They are real, and they genuinely matter. But they are rarely, on their own, the actual source of the conflict.
 

What’s really being fought about

Underneath almost every sustained family business conflict I’ve encountered sits one of a small number of underlying issues.

A feeling of being undervalued, a long-standing imbalance in contribution or recognition, an old wound from childhood that has never been addressed and has simply been carried into the boardroom, or a fundamental disagreement about identity, what this family, and this business, is actually for.

The argument on the surface is usually a proxy for one of these deeper things. Two siblings disagreeing furiously about a marketing budget are very rarely disagreeing only about marketing. More often, the budget disagreement is where years of unspoken feelings about fairness, recognition, or old sibling dynamics finally find somewhere to surface.

This is why so many attempts to resolve family business conflict fail, even when they appear successful in the moment. A mediator, an adviser, or simply time, helps the family reach a compromise on the visible issue.

But because the underlying foundation was never examined, the same pattern reappears a year or two later, wearing a different disguise.
 

Why families avoid the foundations

Going down to the foundation is harder, and more frightening, than fixing the visible damage.

It requires family members to say things they have often avoided saying for years, sometimes decades. It requires acknowledging old hurts, admitting to feelings of resentment or inadequacy, and sitting with discomfort that a quick fix to the surface problem conveniently allows everyone to avoid.

There is also, often, a fear that examining the foundation will reveal something unfixable. In my experience, this fear is almost always worse than the reality.

Foundations that have held a family together for decades are usually far stronger than anyone gives them credit for.
 

What checking the foundation looks like

In practice, getting to the foundation usually means slowing down considerably. It means resisting the urge to resolve the visible disagreement quickly, and instead asking questions that go further back: how long has this tension existed? What does each person feel they haven’t been given credit for?

It also, almost always, benefits from someone outside the family holding the process. A facilitator who has no horse in the race can ask the questions family members cannot ask each other directly, and can hold space for answers that might otherwise feel too dangerous to give. Lichfield Cathedral lost its spire, its roof, and every piece of its stained glass during the Civil War. It took the better part of two centuries to fully repair the damage. And yet today it stands as one of the most magnificent buildings in the country, because whatever was destroyed above ground, the foundations held.
Family businesses can survive remarkable amounts of visible conflict, so long as the foundation beneath the relationships is genuinely sound. If your family is caught in a conflict that keeps resurfacing in different forms, it may be worth examining what’s underneath rather than fixing what’s on top. I’m happy to have a confidential conversation about where to start.
peter@familybusinessman.com