Family Office Culture and Identity

Jill Barber is President of CYMI Holdings, which provides wealth advisory services to each member of the Mathile Family. Jill joined CYMI in 1999 just prior to the sale of the Iams Company to Procter & Gamble.

Jill is respected by her peers from Family Offices around the world and is often invited to share best practices on Business Continuity Planning, Risk Management, Strategic Planning, and Family Office Structuring.  She began her career at Arthur Andersen in 1996 and advanced quickly to a tax manager position specializing in S Corporation and Partnership Tax. For more than two decades, Jill has been a trusted advisor to three generations of the Mathile family.

Jill is a Certified Public Accountant (C.P.A.) and a Certified Private Wealth Advisor (CPWA®). She graduated Magna Cum Laude with B.S.B. in Accounting and Finance from Wright State University in 1994.

 Kirby Rosplock

Welcome to the Tamron Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kirby Rosplock, and today we're talking about family, office culture and identity with Jill Barber. Jill Barber is the president of CYMI Holdings, which provides wealth advisory services to each member of the Mathil family. Jill joined CYMI in 1999, just prior to the sale of the IMS company to Proctor and Gamble, and Jill is a respected executive in the Family office community both in the United States and around the world, and is often invited to share best practices and insights on business continuity, risk management, strategic planning, family office structuring, among many other topics.

Kirby Rosplock

She began her career at Arthur Anderson in 1996 and advanced quickly to a tax manager position specializing in S corporations and partnership tax accounting. For more than two decades, Jill has been a trusted advisor to the three generations of the Mattel family. She's a CPA. She's also a certified Private wealth advisor. And she graduated magnum cum laude from Wright State University with a bachelor's in accounting and Finance. So we are thrilled to have Jill here today because family office culture and identity is a topic that is fresh and unique and interesting.

Kirby Rosplock

But I'm sure we're going to get some great insights from you today, Jill, on just what does that mean?

Jill Barber

Thanks, Kirby. I'm happy to be here and happy to share what I've learned so far in my journey and hopefully share some good tips and thoughts for all of your viewers.

Kirby Rosplock

Fantastic. So maybe, Jill, you can just jump in and tell us a little bit more about why we should care about family office culture and identity. What does that mean to you?

Jill Barber

Yeah, so Kirby, I think the biggest thing for me is when someone told me a few years ago, we've done a lot of work around strategic planning, and they said, Culture eats strategy for breakfast, which is a Peter Drucker quote that I think maybe many family office executives have heard. And I said, well, I don't know what that means. And so went on an exploration of that comment and really discovered that we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the next steps were for the office, what services we should provide, how we should do that, how to create a full service family office for the family we work for. But if we didn't pay any attention to our culture, we really didn't do ourself enough justice. It made everything more difficult. We kind of had a culture that was created at the time haphazardly and not intentionally, and it just feels like things got more difficult for us in creating those strategies. And I would say the risk of us not being successful in meeting our goals went up. So we stepped back and took a lot of time and really focused on our culture over the last two years, even in the midst of a pandemic and we're really starting to reap the rewards of that work in moving our strategies forward.

Jill Barber

So I think it's one of the bedrocks to thinking about the future, innovating and being strategic in your planning.

Kirby Rosplock

So help me unpack a little bit more. What exactly when you think of family office culture and your family office's identity, what does that really mean? I mean, can you give us some more explicit examples of things that you think really go into the culture that you're creating?

Jill Barber

Sure. I think of culture as the behaviors, the norms, the assumptions that you have on how your organization is going to work on a daily basis. So, for instance, a real, maybe benign thinking thing is so we all have offices in our organization. I'm in my office now, and when my door is shut, as it is in my background here, nobody will come in my office. So they might ping me via chat or something to ask a question or see if I'm available, but they won't walk in. But if my door were open, people then have the ability to just walk in my office and say, hey, can I interrupt you? Or can I have a minute? That's just kind of a norm in our office, and it's part of the culture we've been trying to build. So that's 1 may seem kind of small and like I said, benign, but it's really helpful as you figure out how you navigate 20 people in an organization. Bigger things are one of our values in our organization is around learning continuously. So we put a lot of dollars and effort and energy and resources toward developing not just the technical skills of the people here, but also them as a whole person.

Jill Barber

We have programs in place around that, and so we're engaging that in our whole culture and in everything we do every day about how do you collaborate together to allow people to learn different things? How do you put people on different teams so they can experience different things and learn from each other, as well as giving them opportunities to go to conferences or use executive coaching or read books or whatever that might be. So that's another way we express our culture and what we think is really helpful in supporting our strategy of being the most trusted advisor for the Mathile family.

Kirby Rosplock

Well, and I think you even being here today, right, sharing your insights on this podcast just illustrates how you're both walking the talk and really wanting to educate those around us and help other families and family offices sort of face the challenges. I'm kind of going off a little off script here, but I wondered too. I mean, the culture of privacy, right? So there's always a tension between maintaining and protecting the sanctuary of many of these families who don't want to be bombarded, who don't want to be solicited. And so that's probably another big piece of family office culture of what is OK to share and how much is actually not okay to share. And I'm sure that goes into how you operate as well.

Jill Barber

Absolutely. That's a really good point, too, Kirby. As you said, that what came to my mind is then when we talk about identity, which is more about how the family office shows up in public and what we're known for, there's some push and pull on that for any family office around. Wanting to remain private and wanting to kind of be that blockade for the family, but also wanting your staff to have pride in where they work and who they work for and be a great partner and community member. So whether that be philanthropically or out in our community, we want people that work here to be proud of that. So we do have to create an identity outside and separate from the family, that the family has their own identity within our community, but we do work to try and create that for ourselves as well. And that's a challenge I think every family office probably faces. And I don't know that we've cracked the code on that one, but it's definitely something we talk about a lot. But for sure keeping that privacy for the family, but also having a public face to ourselves so that we can show pride in the community we work in and the people that work for us.

Kirby Rosplock

And I know you were extraordinarily generous back to the education value of allowing us to sort of document the whole Mathile family strategic planning process within the Complete Family Office Handbook, which, again, such a valuable resource to really understand how active you are and thoughtful and intentional in not only what you're trying to achieve, but then just the planning steps that you put into place and the process that allows you to execute. Because I think that's where so many family offices struggle is the execution piece. And again, back to culture. I mean, that is such a powerful statement to how your culture operates, how you work together, how you manage change, and how you have to adapt.

Jill Barber

Right, right. Well, and that comes a lot from the family. In our instance in particular, I think I always say our culture aligns with the family's culture. It's not the same, but there's direct alignment. And that's where I really see you can see from the leadership within our family and their value on vision. Clay always said a vision is a dream with a plan. So how do we take our vision, which is our dream of what we want this office to be, but put a plan around it? And so that's where you see where the family and the family office cultures come together and really support each other and how you move things forward. So the planning is really important part of that. And it's the intentionality. This stuff takes time. It's not something you can spend 2 hours or 5 hours or three days in a course and learn and come back and not do anything with and put on a shelf. It's not going to become part of who you are and what you do every day. It's practice, practice, practice and practice some more.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah, and it sounds like, I mean we were brainstorming for this podcast but it sounds like that's actually really the organizational culture element has helped right as build out the leadership and help develop both family office leaders and family member leaders. I was going to bring up that mobius trip that we were talking about because I think it's a powerful way to sort of see this idea that we've got the family office executive leadership on the left hand side and the family owner leadership. Maybe you want to walk us through and talk us through how you see this graphic and how it relates to your own family office.

Jill Barber

Sure. This never ending... Again, when we were talking in the beginning, this infinity loop that keeps happening is you have leadership within the family that's supporting the family culture, the development of the leaders within the family, what they want to do. And as they're doing that, they're also coming over to the other side of this loop and supporting me and my leadership team as we build out our culture and ensuring that it is aligned with what the family wants and how they view the world and what's important to them. Again, taking the tilt from a business standpoint and who we are, there is much more family focused than it is business focused and helping and supporting our leadership development and all those development plans I was talking about earlier. And then we have to make sure we're aligning with those values that we don't step outside of that too far and investing time and resources in the opportunities to grow. I've been given a lot of opportunities for growth in my time here at CYMI and wanting to make sure that's not just at the top echelon, but you're pushing that leadership development down into the organization.

Jill Barber

Because really, again, our family believes you can lead from anywhere. And that's really a value of theirs that we take into our organization as well. So it's knowledge and skill building, it's giving opportunities for individual growth. You see, at the bottom we talk about preparing the next generation, whether that be within the family or within the family office and really fostering ours is more culture and you might see more as values or beliefs. A lot of families use those versus using a family culture using that word. But they kind of align when you talk about it from a business standpoint, what are the norms, what are the expectations of the family. And so we're helping support theirs, they're helping support us as we're learning skills and as they're learning skills both as a family and as a family office because we're so close as an organization and a family. We see those and we're like, oh well, they're starting to talk about family dynamics. How do we bring that into our organization? We start talking about how to frame conversations and how do they bring that into the conversations they're having with the family. So it becomes this all ships rising kind of situation where we're all learning from each other and that close nature of the relationships allows that to happen and be really supportive.

Jill Barber

And if that's not happening, you feel it, you notice it in a day to day and you hit some bumps under the carpet when that happens.

Kirby Rosplock

But it sounds like you have a really inclusive culture so that even when you hit those bumps, you have ways of addressing differences or if there's any sort of potential for conflict, you can diffuse it so before it continues to separate. Yeah, absolutely.

Jill Barber

And I think that's a key. I think conflict is tough, especially when you're working with a family and you're not a family member. It's tough when you are a family member too, but when you sit outside that system. But one of the things we can do is really help to normalize some of those kind of conversations, right. Depending on who's got the skill set, given whatever the situation is, we can work with each other and help support each other through that process. And I think that's what makes it so successful and so important is that again, all ships rise. The family can see this in a different way through people they really trust. And you can have those more difficult conversations because you have that foundation that they don't necessarily have with a lot of other advisors or a lot of other people in their lives.

Kirby Rosplock

And I love too how the mobius strip this family office culture. Infinity loop also sort of illustrates that you can model and provide behaviors that now have positive effects and implications potentially for behavior within the family and vice versa. You were talking to me too about we just don't think about succession, about promoting the most senior person, right. But really promoting leadership opportunities. I love that statement because I think it's just a powerful reinforcement of the continual learning mandate, right. Continuing to rise, continuing to move forward, kind of knowing that nobody's exactly stuck or pegged in any one place if everyone's growing.

Jill Barber

Right. A couple of things on that, Kirby. One is I feel like you can lead from anywhere and what we want to do is empower our people to make decisions and have to have accountability and responsibility toward them, but that they have some of that control that they need to be able to be truly accountable for those decisions. And I sit at the top of an organization, I'm not in the day to day of everything, so I'm not the best person to make the decision. So I think that's one piece of it. The other piece is, and I think this is maybe a fear or a concern of a lot of family offices because of that privacy that you brought up earlier is turnover is really low, which we love because people are there for a long time, they get to know the family. Families don't necessarily want their information out in a lot of places but we all are mostly small organizations and there becomes a point in time where you have some really great people that when you give those growth opportunities to there isn't any place for them to go with them here in our organization.

Jill Barber

And what we keep talking about in our organization is we don't want people to leave. But we completely understand the fact that and we are really proud of the fact that we have former alumni of CYMI that are out in the world working in various different jobs and industries, doing amazing things for other families and family owned businesses that we should be really proud of. And that growth then allows others down in the organization then to rise up and get those same skills. So some turnover in our mind is really good, it's hard and that's, again, a cultural thing. How do you build that into your culture? That. It's not that we want people to leave, but we want people to fulfill their fullest potential. And if they do that with a younger head executive of an office man, you might be waiting around a long time if you want to lead another family office. And so maybe that's the right thing. And, boy, I would be excited for someone to have that opportunity, and I'd be really sad to see them go, because we are all so close. But in our culture, we've built in this idea of that's a good thing.

Kirby Rosplock

Yeah, well, I think that's powerful when you actually empower your people to do what's right for them because they know that in many ways it's right for the organization, right? If you live a lie and you sit within a place that is eating you away because you feel like you should be going and doing something else or your heart isn't in it or your passion isn't there, it reflects on some level in the quality of work and the energy that you put out. So I think to have a really strong resilient culture you need committed, excited, happy, want to be there and that's a given in any organization. So I think it's completely logical. Even if you have really talented people who could get, by giving 40% effort, fulfill their job mandate, if they have 60% of potential sitting on the table untapped, I think it's powerful that you can unlock that and say, that's okay, figure it out. And if it requires moving on, that's hard for us. But again, I feel like your type of organization is the one that everyone dreams, right? To be able to work in someday. And it took a lot of intention and time and effort to create that culture.

Kirby Rosplock

Maybe you can give us some other examples of where you find nuggets of culture that emerge from activities or how you approach things or how you operate.

Jill Barber

So it's interesting. Again, as you were talking, the first thing I thought about was the one we don't have solved yet, which I think we're in the process of figuring out is this new, flexible virtual world, right? We're in an organization right now where probably the last person that entered our organization has been here at least five years. So it's really easy. We all know each other, the relationships are strong. We didn't skip a beat when COVID hit. So how do you do that when we've got two open positions right now that we're trying to bring into the organization? How do we do that culturally and make that person feel a part of all that we know we are? And we've been doing a lot of this work during the pandemic and really trying to evolve the culture into what the next version of our organization needs to be. A great example of that is how we started doing what we call coffee breaks. So we have our staff meetings, we have a weekly quick check in staff meeting, and then we do a longer monthly one. And we're doing these 15 minutes coffee breaks where we're actually putting people out in Zoom breakout rooms and allowing them to just talk about whatever.

Jill Barber

And usually not with people you work every day with, because we really see those people a lot and are more connected to them. Because one of the values within our organization is to care personally, that we care about the whole person. We want you to share. We want to know when things aren't going well for you in your personal life, or when you're having a down day, or we want to be able to tell those things so we can not stay away from you, but to support you through it. I was just actually talking today, interestingly, with one of our staff people whose sister is having a really tough time, and she's been helping her, and she got a little emotional and vulnerable over lunch just talking about how things were going. And she just apologized profusely about doing that. And I just said, you need to stop. I said, this is what we want. We want to be here to help you. We want to be able to listen to you and support you. And we talked about our employee assistance program, and maybe she wanted to tap into that just to get some emotional support through this time and what resources could we bring to bear?

Jill Barber

And so we want to be there for the whole person. I think that's a great example of our culture. We're collaborative. So us being away, what we've missed is what happens when you walk out of a meeting or when you go to get a cup of coffee in the morning. And that spontaneous collaboration, that just happens because you're like, hey, I was thinking as you're walking out of a meeting from something else. And so we realized we were missing that and trying to create opportunities to bring that back. So how do you not lose that? So at the end of meetings, I just stay on and I'm like, I'm around for another 15 minutes if anybody wants to chat or talk or whatever after a meeting. So doing things like that to try and reconnect the collaboration piece of it, that's a little more spontaneous. Those are great examples of things I'm trying to think. I think one of the other things that we are talking about, so conflict, we talk in our organization about challenging people respectfully, so making it about the issue and not the person and putting language to that, which is a really important thing.

Jill Barber

So how do you create a common language about how you have a conversation like that? So use certain words. It's not about you, Kirby. It's about the issue. I can say that to people in my organization. And when I see somebody getting a little flustered, like I'm personal it's somehow a personal attack. And if you have that common language that everyone knows, kind of like, my door is shut, send me a chat. My door is open, you can come in. So it's how do you create those norms where people kind of know how that works the greatest? We have an individual who came a few years ago and he came in and he said, so this is my understanding about doors in this organization. Am I right? And I was like, you're right. And that was so great that someone else in the organization could explain it in a way he really understood it. And that's what I don't know that we're completely there yet, but that's what I would hope for our organization, is that a new person comes in and someone can explain our organization by those behaviors and that aligns with what we say and put on the walls.

Jill Barber

The other thing I would say is that you should compensate for those behaviors, right? We're revamping all of our incentive comp to put more of these kind of things in. There's a technical component to it as well. But how are you supporting the culture of the organization and moving it forward and not working against it, which again, I think works against? Then you being able to be successful in meeting your strategy. So those are just a few things we're doing to try and solidify this intentionally into who we are. I love it.

Kirby Rosplock

It's so powerful and it provides so many great insights to little things, right? Little things you can do to start moving the needle and defining and actually putting meat on the bones of a family office's culture which is going to solidify for the people who work there, but also how they can show up, as you said, to the community, about what that identity means to them, but also what it can mean to the community at large. As we wrap up here, are there any sort of takeaways or things that you want to reinforce about what family office executives or owners looking for guidance on developing strong family office culture might want to think about?

Jill Barber

Yeah. So I really reflected on this question when you gave it to me earlier, and I think it gets back to something we talked about a little earlier, and it's this idea of empowerment. So if I'm empowering all the people below me, if we're hiring really good people, you empower them to do the jobs you hired them for. These families are able, and I know many of them, they're hiring the best of the best of the bunch. So give them the autonomy and give them the box they're playing in, but then let them play there. If you allow that to happen, then your upper leadership, your leadership team, your president, your top executives can really focus on this. And that opens up so much potential around innovation. And that empowerment will create great ideas that two people or five people on a leadership team won't necessarily think about because they're not in it every day. So I would say that empowerment is really important to that. The other thing is coaching, mentoring. And that is external, but that's also internal. So how do you create a culture that's about mentoring? And I'm doing a good job.

Jill Barber

I'm exceeding expectations when the people below me and around me are doing the same. So if I can support the whole organization wherever I sit in it, in that development and teaching someone, a tax staff person can teach an investment CIO something about tax, that happens. Like, I learn a lot about it when I sit and talk to our It manager. So how do we it's not cross functionally learning their jobs, but you can just learn more every day. And how do you build that in? And then that gives the leaders the time to spend on walking that walk and talking that talk every day, which is what I spend a lot of my time doing now, is really trying to make the connection back to the culture and making sure that we're moving that strategy forward and there's nothing blocking the success of it. And the family is the key to that. Family is a real key to that and supporting that. Our family supports this endeavor 100%, which then gives me the empowerment and the freedom to do what I need to do to make it successful.

Kirby Rosplock

That's fantastic. Jill, I am so grateful for having you here today sharing your insights and your wisdom. There's so much more in The Complete Family Office Handbook with that strategic planning case study that was just brilliant. It's a great addition to this second edition book. I just want to thank you for giving us your time, sharing more about CYMI digging into family office culture. And I really know that the continued success and build out will just follow as you hold on to these core values and put them into practice every single day. So again, thank you so much for being here today on the Tamron Learning Podcast. Kirby Rossblach, your host, and I look forward to many more, hopefully podcasts and opportunities to work with you.

Jill Barber

Thank you very much. Thank you for doing these. These are really important for the family office community.

Kirby Rosplock

It's my pleasure.