I got the title for this post from James E. Hughes Jr.’s Family: The Compact Among Generations. A strict, literal translation of the phrase would render it as “persons of confidence.” But the meaning that Hughes wants to convey has to do with “persons in whom [a family] can have confidence,” “trustworthy persons,” or, in brief: “confidants.”

Hughes suggests every family needs personnes de confiance, and he goes into some detail describing their duties, responsibilities, and characteristics. In sum, he says, personnes de confiance fulfill “the role of the great ‘number two’–the person whose mission is to make others great.” These are people who subordinate their own ambitions to help promote the concerns and interests of those they serve. [p. 247]

Hughes lists a bunch of personnes de confiance: Aristotle, Confucius, Cicero, Seneca, Boethius, Lao Tzu, Thomas à Becket, Thomas More, Machiavelli, Metternich, Bismarck, Hamilton, Madison, Van Buren, George Marshall, Chou En-lai, Thomas Gates, John Gardner, John O’Neil, and others. “Each in his own way served another, and none sought to displace the patron he served. Each sought in service to others a high calling, and none sullied the life of the person he served.” [p. 248]

Hughes lists what he calls “characteristics” of personnes de confiance. I would say they are not only characteristics, but they help to define the unique roles of personnes de confiance and why one might want them at one’s service. The four primary characteristics use lists: “an interest in the art of governance”; “a belief in orderly evolutionary change”; “skepticism without contempt”; and “subordination of ambition to a higher calling.” [pp. 248-249]

With respect to the art of governance: “a society drifts into chaos unless all of its members share a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities to each other in making the joint decisions necessary for their mutual well-being.” [p. 248]

Good personnes de confiance, therefore, will seek to help family members gain clear understanding about their unique roles and responsibilities one toward the other.

Hughes describes his process in this way:

I try through dialogue with each family member to determine how their individual personalities coalesce to create the personality of the family. I explore where the family’s strengths lie, where its weaknesses are, and how its family system works. I learn where the individual journeys of each family member are leading.

When I feel that I understand the family’s character, its processes, and its strengths and weaknesses, I attempt to mentor its leaders. . . . I help the leaders appreciate how to offer guidance that will enhance the individual life journeys of each of their family members.

I also help them appreciate how the family’s governance system can assist the process and thereby assist the family’s positive evolution. . . .

Finally, I offer them suggestions on how to assist family members in achieving their personal happiness by finding the educators and mentors necessary for the growth of their individual human and intellectual capital. [pp. 256-257]

As for orderly evolutionary change: Hughes’ idea has to do with contrasting gentle, incremental evolutionary change over against the far more harsh and jarring change of revolution–the kind of change that occurs when a government is out of touch with the governed and/or when it has become sclerotic.

The highest purpose of government, says Hughes, is “the preservation of order.” And so, in families, the purpose of the family government is to help maintain order in the family, even as the family necessarily moves from one generation to the next. How to manage that change– 1 generation to the next–is the major question that the family government needs to address.

“All too often today, I observe professionals who offer advice to their clients based not on what their clients need for orderly long-term change to meet new conditions, but rather on a product that the professional has developed and wants to sell,” says Hughes [p. 257]. Whether it is a matter of products that so-called “professionals” want to sell or not, Hughes has convinced me he is correct when he urges us to look further down the road than is our society’s wont.

In Family: The Compact Among Generations, Hughes urges us to aim for the seventh generation: more than 200 years into the future. In his previous book, Family Wealth: Keeping It in the Family, he urged us to pursue the very modest goal of preserving and growing our families for merely “[a] period of more than one hundred years, or four generations of the family.”

Obviously, whether we’re talking about four generations or seven, if we are to follow Hughes’ advice and seek a family dynasty that lasts so long, the family government and the family’s personnes de confiance must take a much longer-term view than is common.

Healthy skepticism, Hughes says, “is not about viewing others through dark, anxious glasses or seeing human beings as fatally flawed. It is rather about viewing with compassion the truth of the human condition. It requires actively supporting, from a place of humility, each individual’s struggle . . . to achieve deep spiritual happiness.

“Personnes de confiance bring to the families they serve a deep awareness of human behavior and the truths, realities, and subtleties that such behaviors represent and exhibit. . . . The most effective personne de confiance brings to . . . family members a worldly, wise view of human behavior and gentle mentoring in the arts of human interaction.” [pp. 258-259]

And so the personne de confiance provides uniquely useful counsel that the family is not likely to find anywhere else.

Finally there is the matter of the personnes de confiance’s “subordination of ambition to a higher calling.”

“This phenomenon of service to others in the role of a great number two has been underappreciated in modern times,” says Hughes. “We in the West have decided that leadership can come only from first achieving a position as ‘number one.’ [However, all of the examples of personnes de confiance I provided] give the lie to that proposition, and it’s fascinating that in many cases the number two is the man history remembers, while the man or woman he served is less well known.” [p. 249]

As I think about what Hughes has said, I realize only very few of us can afford such personnes de confiance. But all of us could benefit from close proxies of such people. And/or, in the first generation of what we hope will become a family dynasty, perhaps the personne de confiance is a role we ourselves need to pursue.

Do you have a personne de confiance for yourself and your family? Are you such a person for your family? If the answer is no for both questions, do you think your family might be benefited by seeking a personne de confiance? What will you do now to find such a person?

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 5:50 am and is filed under counsel, family governance, family relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.