Delta Training Deficiencies

Alphas aren't the only ones having a tough time handling successions

A reader writes about his experience of a family succession failure:

My father is a delta and runs a small excavating/ surface mining company he inherited from his alpha dad. He runs the business as a task completer and not a big picture kind of guy. Anytime he was asked about training one of us to take over, he would say neither of his sons wanted to take over the family business. Anyways, now the business is critically understaffed with three older guys retiring, and he is thinking of liquidating since he’s at retirement age himself. Only now do I realize the SSH explains this circumstance.

I went to school for Geology and Accounting. After graduating, I would show up every day and he would have me sweep the floor. The faster and better I did it, the more clear it became that he had a hard time figuring out what to do with me. He would be too busy to answer when I asked about our products and sales. I remember many times my mom would ask “what are you doing today?” to which the response almost always was “I don’t know.” One day he explained to me how “we don’t get work if the phone doesn’t ring.” I only worked for him for a few years before I met my wife and moved.

My older brother still works for my dad after 20 years. He went to school for Diesel Mechanics and Heavy Equipment Operation, was kind of overkill due to his natural abilities and interests. Even after he finished school, my dad just had him driving truck. Maybe he thought that was more efficient than teaching about bids, spreadsheets, software, etc., or maybe it never entered his mind to teach us anything because he sees it as a series of obvious tasks. Eventually my brother started moonlighting trucking for a dairy. This kept him from joining my dad when he worked longer hours in the good weather. My dad started to say “he doesn’t want to run the business, he just wants to sit in a truck” using his lack of working extra hours as evidence of his lack of interest.

It sounds rather like both sons attempted to help their father in the business - one doesn’t just randomly study both Geology and Accounting - but he was too protective of his inherited role to be willing to step back and permit them to learn the business. Now, I do question whether this was more a Delta thing or a Boomer thing, since Boomers were notoriously terrible about not teaching their sons and daughters the same skills that their parents taught them; many women of my generation were either self-taught cooks or were taught by their grandmothers.

I would also point out that there is a distinct sense of Delta in the sons, by which I mean their inclination toward only doing what they were told to do. When the reader describes how “he had a hard time figuring out what to do with me” and “my dad just had him driving trucks” it becomes apparent that we’re not dealing with a pair of self-starters here. Which isn’t to say they’re lazy or incapable, only that Deltas never seem to understand that permission is not required to learn something new, no one is obligated to teach you anything, and no one is going to stop you from figuring out anything on your own.

One day, son, all of this will be yours…

I’ve had the “you didn’t teach me X” charge levied at me on occasion as well, and it’s always tended to puzzle me. No one ever showed me how to do anything, and it’s really not that hard to figure out the basics of any business simply by paying attention and asking the occasional question to fill in any blanks you can’t puzzle through on your own. Take ten minutes a day and use it to figure out anything you don’t know. Also - this is very important for Gammas - if you have any tendency to argue with people, you can forget them ever trying to teach you anything. If you want to learn something from someone, then shut the fuck up and listen. Don’t even think of arguing with someone who is simply telling you how things are. Stop trying to understand - and especially don’t “just try to help” - take notes, and pore over them later.

If anything about everyday business operations doesn’t make sense to you, then the issue is almost certainly that you’re too stupid and/or ignorant to grasp it the first time around, not that you’re a Super Smart Boy who has magically identified a nonexistent problem that has plagued an existing industry and business until the moment you came along and began paying attention to it. And I say that despite being someone who has learned to never listen to expert advice about specific applications because I am far more intelligent than they are. When it comes to general principles and standard operations, you can always trust the men with the relevant experience to know how things are done, and usually, why they are done that way even if it doesn’t initially make sense from a superficial perspective.

Same thing is happening with my wife's father, owns two farms plus does a lot of custom equipment work, does everything himself. Her brother drives a coal bucket 4-6 days a week and spends all his spare time at the farm. Her father turns down help from her brother because “your mom can just help me run the hay rake for a few hours.” My wife said she would always hear her dad saying he would really like to “see his son get out of that coal bucket” and telling stories of equipment fixes his son figured out before he did. He’s also at retirement age, working on slowing down, plans to just keep one farm property. He already sold several farm properties to her uncle and was surprised when her brother wasn’t happy about it. Talking to the guy, he doesn’t see that this could be his son farming full time, he just sees it as a series of tasks.

Being that both of their views are the same in the face of overwhelming evidence, I would have to conclude it is delta narcissism.

Could be. It definitely could be. But perhaps the problem is compounded by none of the sons ever bothering to tell their fathers that they wanted to continue the business. Certainly, the fathers have been telling others the exact opposite, though of course we have no idea if they are genuinely under the wrong impression or if this is just the all-too-common Boomer generational performative posturing.

However, both examples are illustrative of why multi-generational wealth is so difficult to build. Ideally, an Alpha father would pass things on to an Alpha son, but since most men aren’t Alphas, that’s simply never going to be possible. But it’s clear from both of these examples that SSH does have a role to play in the succession problem faced by businesses and families.