What 1,587 Family Enterprises Just Told Us About Why Succession Stalls

Deloitte Private just published “Family Business Succession Planning and Next Generation,” their 2026 global succession report. 1,587 family enterprises surveyed across 30 in-depth interviews. The kind of data that gets cited in boardrooms and buried in footnotes.

I read the whole thing. And the number that stopped me is one most people will scroll past.

Everyone will focus on the confidence gap. 63% of current leaders aren’t fully confident in the next generation’s readiness. It’s a big, familiar number, and it confirms what most advisors already perceive in the room.

The number I can’t stop thinking about is 29%.

That’s how many families named family dynamics as a direct succession challenge. In a survey of nearly 1,600 family enterprises navigating one of the most complex transitions a family can face.

Twenty-nine percent seemed low. So I looked at what else they reported.

Deloitte reports these as separate categories. I read them as the same thing showing up in different language, wearing different labels.

A founder who won’t step back from decisions they’ve owned for forty years. That gets coded as “resistance to change.” But sit across the table from that person, spend an hour with them, and what you’ll see is someone whose identity is fused with the company they built. The business is their proof of worth, their daily structure, their body of work, and letting go means losing all three at once.

Then there’s the son who presents a strategy and watches his father’s gaze drift to the window before he finishes the second slide. Down the hall, a daughter who has run operations for six years still gets introduced as “my kid.” The competence has been there for years. The family’s way of seeing each other just hasn’t caught up, because those patterns, who gets taken seriously, who gets listened to, who still gets treated like the youngest, were set long before anyone sat down at a board table.

The sibling group tells a different story in similar language. The oldest was groomed for leadership, the middle was overlooked, and the youngest was protected from the hard conversations. Thirty years of that kind of positioning, and now they’re supposed to govern together. An inherited structure nobody chose, nobody questioned, and nobody has named.

Families say “resistance.” They say “credibility.” They say “we just can’t find a successor.” Behind each of those words is a family that hasn’t been able to have a conversation, build trust across a generation, or let go of a position that defines who they are.

There’s another number worth sitting with. External CEO adoption is doubling, from 13% to 26%. When a family that built something across generations decides to hand leadership to someone outside, that decision carries weight. It means they looked at their own family and saw something they didn’t know how to solve. And in many of those cases, the conditions for the next generation to lead were never built. The family didn’t know how to ask for that kind of support, and nobody in the room was trained to offer it.

The advisory team handled the structure beautifully. Trust documents drafted, governance outlined, ownership transitions mapped, and every piece of that work was excellent. The trust work, though, helping a parent see their child as a leader and helping that child step into the role without carrying thirty years of unspoken expectation, that kind of work was never on anyone’s scope. A blind spot in the model, not a failure of the team.

About half of these families have a thorough succession plan. And still, the family can stall. The father goes quiet in meetings he used to run, the daughter stops presenting ideas, and the siblings start routing everything through their attorneys. Nobody around the table can point to the moment it went sideways, because it didn’t go sideways. It went underground.

Succession dynamics is the word for what’s operating under all of it. The trust patterns, the unspoken expectations, the inherited positions that have been running since long before anyone mentioned the word “succession.” Those dynamics were already in the room when the advisors walked in, and they’ll still be running after the documents are signed if nobody addresses them.

If you advise family enterprises and you’ve watched a well-built plan stall in ways the plan couldn’t account for, I’d welcome a conversation about what might be happening underneath it. The work I do sits underneath the advisory team’s architecture, strengthening the foundation the whole thing is built on.

More on this soon.

Stephanie Zenker

P.S. 47% of advisors name family dynamics as their number one succession challenge, and 4% have structured training to address it. That gap is where I spend my days.