This article is part of our special report on “Educating the Next Generation of Family Office Leaders.”
When it comes to educating new family members, money is only part of the story. Financial know-how matters, of course, but as children marry and families grow, there’s another question to answer: How do you pass along a family’s history, values and way of making decisions to new family members?
Enterprising families are responding with a sort of cultural education, which advisors say leaves new family members better equipped to handle both the emotional and financial complexity that comes with joining an ultra-high-net-worth family. Making an effort to share family values can help keep the family, its finances and legacy intact.
Adam Fisch, relationship manager at Our Family Office, a multi-family office in Toronto, says knowing a family’s history and values helps new members understand expectations.
“Wealth comes with a message, whether it’s verbalized or not. So I view family education as an effort to formalize that message and ensure that the wealth is received alongside information about what matters to the family, how the wealth was earned, and what the expectations are around responsibility for the wealth,” he says. “Essentially, it’s about preparing new members or next-gen members to look after it in a way that is going to serve them well in the future.”
Understanding family values can also be preventative and help new members make the most of their opportunities.
“There’s the risk that the wealth doesn’t serve you,” explains Fisch. “Either you feel trapped by it or you aren’t equipped to manage it properly. It can lead to that sense of directionlessness, or lack of purpose. If preparation isn’t done, it can lead to really negative outcomes that wealth can’t necessarily fix.”
Mindy Mayman, partner and portfolio manager at Richter Family Office in Montreal, says sharing values and history also supports family cohesion and can help build a framework for future problem solving.
“At the end of the day, you can’t divorce enterprising families from the word ‘family,’” says Mayman. “So the argument for values-based education is that family cohesion can be built around common family values. And if you have common family values and family cohesion, it should make it easier to deal with any type of challenge you meet.”
Families use a number of formal and informal tools to share family history and a sense of family values. Family meetings provide an excellent venue for conversation or educational sessions, and trusted governance tools such as the family constitution make a great medium for passing along values and setting expectations.
Family foundations can often serve as useful training wheels for new members or the next gen.
Adam Fisch, relationship manager at Our Family Office
Mayman notes that these documents work best when they are revisited regularly and updated to reflect changing family dynamics.
Some families use living wills to express how they expect future generations to conduct themselves in the context of wealth. Others turn to the family foundation, using it as a training ground for both financial literacy and values-based decision making.
“Family foundations can often serve as useful training wheels for new members or the next gen,” says Fisch. “And going through the process of deciding on grants can also help pass on values of what’s important to the family.”
Video is another great tool.
Toronto-based Context Studios creates long-form documentary films—often structured in episodes, like a Netflix series—for enterprising families. The films include interviews with founders and other key family members and document family history, values and governance for future generations.
Andrea Lekushoff, Context’s founder and CEO, says video’s immediacy and accessibility make it a great educational tool. Unlike governance documents or written histories, documentary films accommodate different learning styles and allow all family members to hear the same stories in the same voice, which is helpful for creating cohesion.
“Families want alignment,” says Lekushoff. “They want new members to understand not just what a family did or does, but who they are, and video creates a shared language around values and decision-making.”
Lekushoff says the end result is more than a highlight reel. “It’s a very carefully designed educational tool, and it becomes a legacy asset.”
Tools like video can capture and share the family’s past and present, but Mayman says that at least some conversations about family values should be future-facing and interactive. In other words, an entire family’s values should not necessarily be dictated by one person, or one generation.
“The wealth creator is often a Type A personality, used to being in control,” says Mayman. “That’s normal and natural, and probably was key to that individual’s success. But when you’re discussing values, this can be a shared experience, ideally conducted with a third-party facilitator. And through these conversations, you can delve into family constitutions, governance documents, family councils, ownership councils—the more established institutions that we know in the family office space.”
It’s difficult to measure success in the short term, though a family that communicates well and has the capacity to solve problems without making headlines is probably doing a reasonably good job of educating its members. In the long run, Mayman says, success means keeping the family—and its assets—healthy, aligned and intact across generations. To secure that, she stresses that education should be an ongoing process.
“Things evolve. The world evolves. So I think part of the success is to establish this framework at the outset but to be flexible and continue to adapt it to the changing reality of the family. So it’s not like we create a constitution in 2026 and that holds for 50 years,” says Mayman. “I don’t know what the world’s going to look like in five years from now, so it’s an ongoing process.”
And often an emotional one. Fisch says the conversations and revelations involved in educating family members often result in tears.
“We’ve certainly had cases where we’ve revealed the family’s assets to next-gen members who had been historically kept in the dark. And there are tears shed in those meetings, with family members feeling like they’re finally being trusted enough to be let into the inner circle,” he says.
“Ultimately, it ends up breeding a closeness that maybe wasn’t there before,” he adds. “And that can be a really a powerful thing.”
Cindy McGlynn is a Toronto-based writer and editor who frequently writes about business, culture and the arts. In addition to holding communications roles at tech startups and writing for consumer and B2B publications, Cindy has edited two national magazines and served as a long-time columnist for the Toronto Star’s Eye Weekly magazine. She has been contributing to Canadian Family Offices for four years.
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