Developing a Family Council and a Code of Conduct

Listen as Lena Jungell describes the process by which her family council was created.

We talked a lot about ownership, and of course I got carried away with the emotional part which is so important, but that’s a very important part in organizing everything, and in developing a structure for the family governance. And somehow I think at that point when we started, it must have been 25 years ago, it was my mother’s cousins who came up with the idea, or obviously felt the need when they realized that the family was growing. So we started with a family council, which was quite strict and quite formal in the beginning, so the meetings were quite formal so we had a very strict, again, agenda, we had the CEO visiting the meetings, and we didn’t have so many issues since that was quite new for us, and we did that for some maybe 6-8 years and at some point we then realized that ok, now there’s a lot of new, kind of new people, or people who have grown up and want to participate and also there was a new need, so how will we, as a larger family, work together and own together? So we developed a family council to be a little more like, how would I say, maybe a livelier forum? A little bit more discussions, we did some more benchmarking with other families. Then we re-wrote the family plan and made it a physical booklet, the Fazer’s little blue. What goes in there is actually everything we had been talking about, everything we had written down when we started with the family council, like code of conducts, I think that’s the whole idea and whatever that code of conduct might include, will be for us, it started by, we had like communication, what would I say, of course the mission and vision, how we act together as a family, how we want to develop our governance system, then maybe rules or decisions about working in the company, and everything that has to do with the family, in relationship to the business.