Doug Gray, Family Wealth Advisor, Succession Planning Expert, and Founder of Action Learning Associates, is passionate about helping leaders flourish through agency, curiosity, and collaborative frameworks.

We discuss Doug’s ADFIT Protocol for Leadership Development, a simple and effective framework that assumes people don’t need to be “fixed” — they need the structure to grow. Doug also explores how family businesses can navigate succession by understanding emotional dynamics, empowering Next Gen leaders, and shifting from control to collaboration. His latest book, The Success Playbook for Next Gen Family Business Leaders, gives rising leaders the tools to step into their future with clarity and confidence.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Doug Gray, Family Wealth Advisor, Business Change Management Agent, Organizational Leadership Facilitator, Succession Planning Advisor, and Executive Coach. He’s also the founder of Action Learning Associates and the author of three books on leadership. Doug, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much, Steve. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, great to have you. And let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and how do you manifest this in your practice and in your activities?

I like to go big. So, to serve tens of thousands of leaders, I’m not sure how to quantify it, but I think the idea of serving others in their leadership development journey is the most important “Why” I can imagine.

Yeah, well, that certainly can be rewarding. Any particular reason it’s important to you to serve others?

We don’t use the verb serve enough. I live in the south where Chick-fil-A is abundant and people will openly ask, how may I serve you? Which is a delightful question. Greenleaf was an academic and a Quaker who asked, how may I serve you? And service servant leadership emerged from that philosophy. And I think we need to do a better job of serving one another’s needs.

Yeah, I love that. Really, this mindset of looking at the other person and thinking about the other person rather than ourselves and not be self-serving, but be other serving. It’s definitely a resonance with me.

It’s primary also in leadership development, but also in learning. Curiosity is the result of, like you worked in executive coaching for a long time. And curiosity is the currency of learning. To what extent can you become curious about the other person on the call? Similarly, right now, your podcasters are thinking, oh, this Doug Gray guy, he’s fairly weird. And they get curious about various things. And they ask questions or they invite you to do so. And that curiosity is what impels us to learn. It’s what enables us to use tools like AI. Coaches are great at writing prompts, thankfully.

What I love about AI is that anything that comes to mind, I’m a very curious person. And I hear a word, I say, where does this word come from? And then I can immediately ask AI and then I can go about my business. It doesn’t take any effort and better insight. So yeah, I agree. I was talking to a client just the other day, a new client, and he asked whom should I bring to the team into discussion? And we went through different perspectives and still there was some uncertainty in his mind about who has the potential to be leader. And I asked him, which of these people are curious? He says, oh yeah, some of them are not curious. And then he connected the dots that if they’re not curious, they’re not going to learn, they’re not going to grow, they’re not going to be leaders.

That’s right.

Yeah, totally agree with that. Okay. So I’m very curious about the framework that you’re bringing to this show. And we discussed in the pre-interview about this idea that people don’t need to be fixed because they have agency and capacity. And this is something that you’ve done a lot of work around. So first of all, I’d like you to explain to me and our listeners, what do you mean by people not need to be fixed and the agency thing, and then talk about your framework that is addressing this, the ADFIT framework.

Sure. Probably representative of all of us who have tolerated schools, we’ve tolerated educational systems where there’s a gap. Here’s Doug, here’s what Doug needs to learn. That’s a competency gap of some sort. Same with most companies, especially top-down hierarchical structures, where there’s a skill gap, a competency gap. Doug needs to learn this before he can be promoted, let’s say, or exceed expectations and get a significant bonus at the end of the year. Well, that model is dominant in our culture and it needs to be, probably. There’s always going to be hierarchies that look like this. There’s going to be managers and direct reports. It’s ancient. Thankfully, it creates a sense of order in the world.

If we didn’t have it, that’d be a whole different problem. But what is also emerging is that those without agency, without the capacity or the belief that they can speak, too often feel oppressed or suppressed or repressed. And boy, there’s so many examples of this throughout history. We can look at every feudal king and the kleptocracy that emerged from that and the protection they provided, but the servitude they created. And we see it today in countless examples. We mentioned privately, our girls are 29 and 30. We encourage them to be articulate about their thoughts and emotions. They’re both happily employed in large companies and they have agency. They’ve selected companies that are unique in that way. And I’m so proud of them. But not every woman who is that age in our country can say that. And not every father can say that. Agency is a thing. It’s quantifiable. I’m a business psychologist, so I can assess it, measure it, develop it. And when people do a better job of expressing themselves, this disappears and this appears, which is more of a collaborative discussion.

In literature, the use of women’s voices in art, the articulation of marginalized groups is more and more expressive. In politics, so when we think about the need for people to express their voices and affect change, I think it’s dramatically shifting. I’d like to hope that at least because then

more people will be involved in their own leadership development and then they need a little structure.
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Very good. So, the ADFIT protocol helps people leverage their agency or recognize their agency and then manifest it? What does it do?

It does in part. Here’s the backstory. I’ve managed executive coaches for a long time and been one since 97. I had two partners in the DC Metro who said, Doug, you’re an executive coach. I said, really, what’s that? And I’ve been ever since trying to answer that question because there are people who say, I’m a coach and they’ll say, here’s your skill gap. You need to step up and here’s what you need to do. Adhere to my plan. And I think that’s fraudulent. It’s absurd. It’s sanctioned and it’s unethical. What if instead we define the client’s agenda and use that to create a process that assumes that they will flourish? I’m a business psychologist, but I’ve studied positive psychology, which is a shift in how we describe behavior.

It used to be we’d focus on three things, anxiety, depression and violence. We needed to. So most of the psychological literature described that up until roughly 25 years ago. The shift in the published research now asks questions like how do I lead a fulfilling life? How do I flourish? And how do I serve others? How do I support others so that they might flourish? When I was at doing a bunch of that research and at an international conference, I emerged from that and hastily coalesced all my notes into the ADFIT model. And then I validated it in my dissertation, which I did in my fifties. And the reason I did it is because I met too many people who said that they were coaches but did not assume the best in others. They did not assume that people would flourish.

The A and the D are what defines the client. In other words, if I were working with Steve, I would want to assess your strengths and your capacities. And there are many validated assessment tools. Many are free, many are good, and I can give people lists. And then the D is to define a meaningful outcome. What is it that Steve thinks is important in his leadership development? We have the A and the D, then we can work together for a period of time and stay focused on Steve’s agenda. And that’s why they needed to be trademarked. In each session, I’ll ask, what do you want to focus on? That’s the F. And then often the presenting concern is not the real concern. It’s a concern, you go a little deeper. And then the I is what’s the intervention or interaction you might consider doing next. And intervention is just a psychological term for some validated process. It could be practice empathy with an AI assisted coaching tool that I’ve developed. It could be choose to speak with your brother or sibling in private about the family’s wealth, things that people have not considered doing and don’t have the skills to do.

So we practice that. And the T is what are you taking away from this call you’re going to do next? So the F and the I and the T, focus, what are you focusing on? Have you considered this intervention or not? And the T, what are you taking away from this call? So in my notes, that’s what I do with each client.

And now I provide AI summaries to those who want them.
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Yeah, I love it. It’s very simple. And if I think about it, this is also my experience that this is what a coach needs to do. In fact, I’m kind of doing this with my leadership teams, different words, but assess, we always look back the last quarter, what they accomplish, assess against their goals, which we have defined the strategic planning, then focus is, okay, what is it that we need to figure out together and what is it that they need to learn? And then what are the action items that come out and the rocks, quarterly rocks, and then the takeaway is really the insights. Maybe I could improve on the takeaways and make them, I mean, do I ask them to, yeah, kind of ask them at the end. But it’s great to see this in that simplified form because especially for an executive coach, this is a very useful mind trigger. So assess what is their goal, what are they trying to achieve, their own agenda, define how to get there. And then each time, what to focus on, what to do, what’s the action item and what they learned. That’s very powerful.

So I’ll give you a simple hack that’ll make this easier for you to practice with your leadership team or anyone. Near the end of your call, the 10% close. If you’ve got a 60 minute session, the last six minutes, I often will say something like, I’m aware of the time. What do you intend to do next? What are your takeaways? They articulate them. They write them down. They do the work. If they don’t do so, I’ll nudge them because that’s what we are here to do. And if I’ve got something else that they said that they haven’t recalled, then I might remind them of that.

So what we're doing really is having them do the work.
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And thankfully, if you use an AI note taker, then you can send them a copy of the notes.

With their permission. That’s the ethical piece. Yes. Some don’t like it and want it, and that’s just fine.

Yeah. Love it. So, when you apply this framework, what is the typical life cycle of a client that you can keep the relationship fresh with this framework?

Very significantly. I’ve been doing this since 97. So what I often say is that there’s three buckets where I make money, and then there’s a fourth where I’ve not yet made money, and that’s the AI coaching stuff. So we’ll see if that leads to anything. But the individual engagement is at least six months and varies, but could be as long as two years. It depends on what is needed. I never press that, and I certainly don’t want extensions with certain clients because they don’t do the work. I’m not the guy. With team and family consulting, succession planning is an example, at least a two-year engagement typically. And it needs to be because it’s a process driven too often by financial and legal experts without the psychological expertise that I bring.

I played hockey in college. I ref a lot of hockey games. That gives me eminent skills to bring to the emotional complexity of a succession planning engagement. It’s a joke, but it’s partly true because they don’t have the 360 assessment tool that I’ve developed. They don’t have the protocols. So that takes a little time. The third that sometimes I think people skip out on is organizational complexities. An example are family offices that need to become more formalized. There’s a myth. You’re probably aware 70-ish percent of our GDP in new job creation is defined by family-owned businesses, closely held enterprises. And the myth is that they’re loosely organized. The reality is sometimes they’re perfectly organized and they don’t need more structure necessarily. They’re able to increase employee engagement, serve their clients and perpetuate wealth transfers, usually quietly, but not always.

The stuff you might see on HBO television, like the succession movies and the Landman and King Lear, all those violent stories are a small fraction of the asset transfers that I experience. And I think the myth is overstated. It’s not a formula that the G3s or G4s are necessarily going to dissipate the family’s wealth and reputation. It’s not statistically true. However, the fear of loss is the number one motivator of human behavior. Number one,

we know that from a lot of behavioral economic research.
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It is challenging because the founder or whoever the patriarch or matriarch who runs the business, if they are founder, it’s their baby. Even if they inherited the business, they’ve been doing it for decades. So their identity is wrapped up in it and then you transfer it. And what if the next generation doesn’t make a success of it, then that impacts your own identity. Plus you lose the power to control. It is very, very tricky. So when I saw that you are dealing with family succession and family businesses, I thought, wow, I’m impressed because it’s not an easy type of company to deal with.

It tells me that you’re the smartest guy in this conversation, Steve. Other smarter people avoid it. It is emotionally complex. There could be material abundance, but lots of emotional complexity.

Yeah, and it’s not easy to fire your family members from the business if they don’t perform. What did you find to be the biggest bottleneck for family businesses from growing the business?

Yeah, fear. Psychologists know that fear motivates most human behavior. So when I think about the possibility of growth, elders are responsible for the traditions, protecting the assets. Thank goodness they are. Next gens of whatever age are responsible for innovation and growth, thank goodness they are. So there’s an inherent tension, it’s ancient, biblical. It’s in every one of your clients’ stories if they’re closely held businesses. So that fear is a huge motivator, but they’re also fearful of the external predators. The best example are the venture capitalists and the equity firms who are targeting family-owned businesses. And they’re not just looking at the auto mechanic down the street or the dentist or the lawyer. They’re looking at consultancies and pharmacies and every manufacturer you can imagine, every retail client you know of who’s being acquired by Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, pick a gas station.

Those acquisitions are sometimes managed responsibly, not always. And the PE owners have a different goal. It’s to extract value for their shareholders within five years and then to leave. The net result for a small town, you’re in Richmond today, near Asheville, North Carolina, is a loss of social capital. When the family doctors are displaced by a staff doc at a bigger hospital, or when a CPA no longer has that access to all your information, then they’ve been acquired by a larger entity, who then dictates how much access to provide and what to charge and all kinds of things. What we lose often is social capital. You don’t know who to trust and it creates chaos in the marketplace. And we’re seeing a lot of examples of this, particularly in the central US where people are leaving the smaller towns. It’s a problem.

Yeah. So that means that family businesses are afraid of losing social capital in the process of the business succession? I mean, I understand if it gets bought out by private equity, then they just going to look at the numbers. They won’t care about the tradition, the people in the business. I understand that the environment would be the customers, the suppliers, if they get taken over, then that weakens the business’s social capital. Is this what you have in mind?

Yes. And they’re not as articulate or expressive as you are because they wouldn’t attribute it to social capital. They’d say, I don’t know if my kids are capable or interested. And that fear drives them to retrench sometimes and talk to a valuation person or an exit planning person who is inclined to provide an inflated value. Think of every client you’ve ever had. I don’t know anybody who’s ever said, yeah, I’ve got a notion of the valuation of my business and it’s down here. No, they do the opposite. They have an inflated view of the value of their company, their assets and their future earnings always. So, if they’re not able to get objective assessments, there are digital tools now that provide numbers and they have an inflated view of their assets and they don’t know who to turn to, then I think they need experts like you and I to facilitate that process. I don’t know if this would interest you, but they need experts who can provide more guidance about asset transfer.

Yeah. And by the way, so in my previous life. I was an investment banker, I had a banking business.

Yes.

I experienced a lot of what you explained and what I found was that the better the business the more realistic the valuation, the owner was. The worse the business, the more unhinged the valuation was. So client selection was an important thing, but I digress here.

No, it’s a perfect example. In that example, as you think about that cohort that had a higher valuation, did they also have more advisors, legal and estate and financial and tax and such?

Yeah, that’s true. I mean, they tended to have more because they didn’t know all the answers themselves and they recognized they were aware of that and they were listening to other people. Yeah.

And as an investor, you knew that most of the wealth in our country is tied up privately in some of those banks, which we don’t need to name in this recording. But the net result is that they have access to more assets for acquisitions and for different financial terms than ever and probably will continue to have even more.

Yeah, possibly. So I’d like to switch gears here and talk about your books because you also is an author. Your recent book is actually about this very topic that we’ve been talking about, the success playbook for next-gen family business leaders.

So what made you write this book and what is the gap that this book is purported to fill?

A patriarch and his son made me write the book. And the gap is pretty easily explained. If you think about a model, how does the individual fit in the world? That’s the backbone of social psychology. You’ve got kids, we’ve got kids as well. How does the individual fit into the family? It’s an ancient question. And most of the time in the world of family business advising, people talk about three systems and they need to talk about the fourth. So they talk about the family system, to what extent are people supporting that individual? And there’s lots of examples and research there. They talk about the business system, to what extent are people supporting that individual may or may not be a good fit this generation or generations from now? And they talk about the ownership system, which is what defines every succession and success. The owners define the future.

So you got the family house or room and the business house and the ownership house. But the fourth house that I think you know, that we share this belief is in the learning system. And it’s Peter Senge’s systems thinking approach. 100% of my clients have a growth mindset and probably yours as well, Steve. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be clients. So the question becomes, how does the individual learn and fit into the learning system? And that’s the model that is the backbone of social psychology and parenting and most family enterprises, including family offices and family firms, even if they get more diverse. So let’s go back a click. About three years ago, I partnered with Kent Rhodes at Pepperdine, who’s a brilliant psychologist and runs their doctoral programs. And we created a family business assessment process, a 360 process, because there’s a gap in the market. And it was validated globally and had 50 behaviors based on those five systems that I just described, 10 for each. And then that led to another client asking, would you please create a peer group so that those behaviors could be practiced by my son? I said, sure.

And two years ago, we launched nextgenpeergroups.com. And it was in that where I created a bunch of digital content that was hosted on a platform called Kajabi. It’s a learning management platform that the participants could access and they could see 50 different behaviors if they needed, and they could develop based on the research and resources, any of those skills, and they could assess them and develop them over time. And then that program, one of the participants said, Doug, this is good digitally, but I’d really like it in paper form. And that’s why I wrote the book last January-February. And it’s available in all kinds of formats, audible and digital and paper, obviously. It’s like this, it’s pretty simple. The idea is that

people need to know a short summary of what the top 10 behaviors are, the top two for each of those five systems I just mentioned.
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So the idea is that the individuals, the next gen and also maybe the current gen, who is still owning or running the business, they need to behave in certain ways in order to optimize these relationships, the family business ownership and learning systems? Is that what it is about?

Yep, exactly right. Yep. In part, because they don’t have such a list. They don’t know those behaviors necessarily and we do based on research.

Yeah, that’s fascinating. So give me one of the behaviors which is counterintuitive.

It might not be counterintuitive, but it goes back to an earlier point. The individual system, if you remember, was surrounded by these other four. And individuals define their own leadership careers and their capacity and their stories.

So the number one behavior overall is for people, individuals to express their thoughts and emotions on important topics.
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Yeah, so it’s a lack of awareness. I mean, the next gen cannot do that on their own, can they?

Not in my experience. It can’t be successful. They need skillful facilitation. And too many attorneys and well-intentioned attorneys and well-intentioned investment advisors just don’t have the social-emotional skills that we know are the most important thing in family wealth distribution.

Love it. That’s a very clear explanation of this. I mean, I always wondered about the family business dynamics and how it can be handled. And I mean, obviously these are very difficult dynamics, but I like how you articulated the behaviors. And so I should translate this, depersonalize these problems and put them on a systems that generate the behaviors and the awareness so that they together can solve this. So that’s fascinating. So what is the most important question that a family business owner should be asking themselves?

I’ll give you a loaded one. And that’s how do I build my team of multidisciplinary team of advisors? The reason I asked you earlier about the investment expertise you bring to this call is my experience is that teams of advisors perpetuate the successful wealth transfers. The legal stuff, I don’t know the financial stuff, but I know a lot about the psychological stuff.

Yeah. And then how do you create a harmonious relationship between the team of advisors? Or how does the owner, the business owner, family business owner, make sure that the same dysfunction doesn’t appear between the advisors and him or her, then appears between the family members and them?

What an insightful question, because we do know that negative genotypes and behaviors can be passed through generations and they can be passed across in one generation. For instance, if somebody’s cut somebody else off and is rude and that’s tolerated, I have a client in New York right now who is, I think, G4, and she is in a very volatile family environment where her voice is not being heard and arguably she’s the most capable. So in that example, she needs a team of advisors to support her family in a bunch of ways. Legally, they need a board of advisors that will eventually have fiduciary capacity. And then interpersonally, she needs to work with an individual coach and her parents also need to work with individual coaches.

It's a complex system, but I often think that it's at two levels if we simplify it, individual and team.
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Yeah. And ultimately, if the owners, the founders, the first gen or whatever we call the gen before the next gen, the current gen, if they are not able to solve this, resolve it, then they’re not going to be as fulfilled and they’re not going to feel that they have been good stewards of that family business. Because they essentially left the mess after themselves and no one wants to do that. Fascinating. So if someone listening to this and maybe they own a family business or they are an ex-gen in a family business and they like to contact you and learn more of how you might help them. Where should they go? What should they do? Other than read your books, which is the success playbook for next-gen family business leaders available on Amazon. So definitely go and buy that book and read it. But if you still have questions, then how can you be reached, Doug?

Well, back to the earlier idea of trying to be a servant to try to serve others. There are lots of free resources. Action-learning.com is my mothership, my website. And then there are eight others. So they each have a specific function for specific concerns, but they’re all linked to action-learning.com.

All right, so go check it out, action-learning.com. So Doug Gray, Family Wellness Advisor, three times author and entrepreneur and many other things, trusted advisor. Thanks for coming to the show and sharing your wisdom. And those of you listening, if you found this an insightful conversation, then stay tuned because every week we have another entrepreneur or thought leader coming on the show. Make sure you follow us on YouTube, you give us a review on Apple Podcast, and you follow us on LinkedIn as well. Thank you, Doug, for coming and thanks for listening.