The Soft Side of Estate Planning 

Debate is a cherished sport in my family. A pastime that may have originated hundreds of years ago between the Fords and the Fitzgeralds, who were, I once discovered, neighboring clans in Ireland that didn’t get along.

As peasant stock, we favor speaking plainly – i.e., bluntly. We say what we mean. And expect our interlocutors to do the same. During family debates, euphemisms are eschewed and ad hominem attacks are fair play. We don’t cotton to touchy-feely experiences or sit comfortably in the presence of people that wear their hearts on their sleeves.

Two years ago, I hired Tom and Cathy Rogerson to assist me and the family with our estate plan. I had earlier assembled a team of lawyers, financial planners, investment specialists, tax accountants, and non-profit experts to help us design the structures we needed to meet our goals. The Rogersons were going to help with something less technical, something they called “corporate governance.”

Corporate governance, they explained, means “how to make group decisions.”

Our first meeting with them was a two-day workshop where we took a series of tests to determine our individual love languages and leadership styles.

We were uncomfortable with these topics, and did our best to derail the Rogersons with crude and corny remarks. But they pushed us through it. And that, I thought, was the end of that.

What happened afterwards surprised me. In the weeks that followed, we began farcically employing the terms we had learned. (“You know my love language is affirmation. Praise me!”) But then, as the months passed, we began to use these terms seriously. And that, over time, elevated our debates onto higher ground. The intensity of our arguments was still very high. But the bluntness and ad hominem attacks diminished.

Buoyed by this welcomed result, we hired the Rogersons to do another workshop with our boys and their spouses, and it had a similarly positive outcome. I felt good about our progress as a family.

The following year, the Rogersons suggested we should have a third workshop. I wasn’t sure. I felt that we had mastered the “soft” skills we needed, and I was ready to move forward with the “hard” stuff – the wills, trusts, FLPs, QPERTs, and other serious aspects of our estate plan.

But since my expectations had been exceeded by the first two, I cajoled the family to set aside two days for another one while we were all in LA.

I figured that this third workshop would cover some of the basic organizational and financial issues. But the topics were even more touchy-feely than those we’d covered before. We talked about how to “mirror” the comments of someone we disagreed with, how to “validate” their thoughts, how to express our own thoughts in non-threatening ways, etc.

As you might imagine, this work, for the Fords and Fitzgeralds, was uncomfortable to the nth degree. Over those two days, there were several minor emotional meltdowns, including my own. (“It’s a waste of time to try to change anyone’s behavior! You just have to learn to live with it!”) But we persevered, and made more real and identifiable progress.

A happy additional outcome was that the spouses – who had come from less verbally combative families – were able to have their voices heard clearly and distinctly for the first time. And by the end of the second day, we had arrived at an agreed upon method for discussing and resolving family issues. We had learned what “corporate governance” looks like in action.

I still struggle a bit with some of the techniques we learned. When I practice them, they feel awkward and unnatural. But they work. They really do work. And that’s a pretty darn good thing.

In fact, I believe that if we forewent these lessons (as 99% of families probably do), all the time and money we are putting into the “hard” and technical stuff would do little if any good.

The purpose of estate planning is not just to preserve wealth over time. A more important goal is to preserve the family through shared values and good family relations. I’m going to recommend the Rogersons to some of my book club members that are doing estate work now. I expect that they may think, as I did, that they don’t need this sort of training. I hope to convince them they are wrong.