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Annie Gleason

Annie Gleason

Annie Gleason, Ed.S. is a Business Psychology Associate at Dr. Donna Marino & Associates, a Chicagoland family-business consulting firm, and a Ph.D. candidate in Business Psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Sep 22, 2026

13:24
So what would you recommend as sort of the tool to start with?
13:30
Yeah.
13:31
And again, this is done, but this practice of engaging in regular low stakes, structured check-in, I think one of the pitfalls that we see, we come in when there's a crisis, right? And yes, we can come in and deescalate and provide some of those structures.
13:51
But a lot of the structures that we put in place, if they are there, they're before, you know, like I said, the company sees exponential growth or we're faced with a need for succession planning, a shared and explicit understanding of what's expected and who's responsible for what, you know, I'm a fan of making it as formal as possible, be it a family charter, quarterly family meetings.
14:23
Sometimes it's also beneficial to just own that we benefit from having non-family members in this room to cut through the dynamics.
14:34
that typically get in our way, be it board members, be it a family, business advisor or consultant.
14:41
But when you make these regular low stakes meetings a norm, it doesn't feel as much of a hot button issue as it is when we only do it in crisis.
17:35
So if we go back and just talk quickly about the birth order and that, you know, studies have shown it's not really, you know, proven but what are some of the sort of consistent things you say you see with birth order or is it is there anything sort of consistent although maybe not proven um but what do you find from that um you know birth order because there is always i mean when you think about it the first one doesn't get away with anything and there's more children you have they get away with more and more right yeah So you can see how that sibling rivalry sort of happens, right? So tell me a little bit more about that age, you know, birth order.

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