Entitlement vs. Meritocracy

Listen to Adele explain how her family business preaches meritocracy rather than entitlement with each new generation of family members. The training associated with the meritocratic approach has proven to be an effective learning experience for the rising generation.

So in our family business at home, meritocracy, as an example of how it’s working each day in our business lives, is when each of our third generation come to work in our business, they are required to spend time training on reception, as a receptionist. And that applies to both the boys and the girls. One of the very interesting things is listening to them after they’ve done their training on reception, how much they learned about the business. Because as the calls are coming in, they need to know where to direct, they need to know who the people are in the departments, who performs the function that the person, the caller, is actually asking about, etc., etc. They also learned about external people calling in, suppliers or other businesses, they needed to know what they were calling about, what their problems were, there was a lot of problem solving, a lot of trying to deal with sometimes clients or suppliers that perhaps had issues, good and bad, and so there was a lot of learning involved in that.