Most families have feuds at one time or another. Maybe yours began with your kids when they were two years old. That’s such a famous time in a parent’s life that’s there’s a name for it: the terrible twos.

The next opportunity to feud with others is when they begin school. In America, report cards used to have a place where teachers could indicate if a given child “played well with others.” Most did, but there were exceptions.

Maybe your kids got on really well with you and each other until they became teenagers. Seemingly overnight, the battle lines were drawn.

It’s surprising that families can go through all of that and then reach a point in life where they want to go into business together; yet, it happens all the time. Somehow the feuds of the past don’t seem to matter so much.

There are difficulties, however, that family businesses face and which seem to be less of an issue for others. Here are four common problems. Any of them can threaten the health of your business; and that means that just because it’s all in the family doesn’t mean that they can be ignored. It only means that it could be even more difficult to deal with them.

If you see yourself in any of these, then don’t ignore it. Don’t assume it will go away. It won’t. Discuss it together or bring in an impartial third party to help you through it. Your business may depend on it.

The first one is a lack of communication. This is not the same thing as saying that you don’t talk to one another. You can talk about the weather, the football, or where you’re planning to go next summer; but none of those things has anything to do with your business unless they are your core business.

For example, is someone a bottleneck in the business? Is someone spending more than they’ll gain on a particular efficiency? Is someone else placing unreasonable demands on staff or being discourteous to them? Such things will breed suspicion and discontent among other family members, and this can also spill over into the organization’s culture. Employees, for example, may wonder why other family members won’t rein in the verbal or emotional abuse that they suffer at the hands of a relative.

The second one is incompetence. It’s great fun to work with your family if you all get along; but if someone is underperforming, then all of you need to be grown-up about it. Identify it for what it is and then take steps to correct it – either remedial training, delegation, or out-sourcing. There’s no shame in any of those; only in pretending it doesn’t matter.

The third one is the failure to prepare for succession. This is a real problem today. In some industries, the rising generation has no interest in taking on the family business.

Farming is a good example. It’s jolly hard work, and only the biggest ones have a hope of surviving. Between the CAP and the economy, the chances of making a profit year-on-year are decreasing. Many young adults want to get off work at five or six and go home. They don’t want to be on duty 24/7, and who can blame them?

The problem, however, is that small business owners aren’t willing to let go of their businesses to the extent necessary to let someone else learn how to do it so that when the time comes they can either take it over or buy it.

The fourth one is seniority or, to put it another way, who’s in charge? In non-family businesses, responsibility tends to be determined by expertise. Often the person who knows the most also happens to be the oldest or to have been with the company the longest; but not necessarily.

Family businesses, on the other hand, tend to be patriarchal. The father is usually in charge. If it’s three brothers, then the oldest of them is the boss; three sisters; the same thing.

It’s essential to set aside all of that and to base roles and responsibilities on expertise alone. That’s because the goal of the business is to stay in business and to change the lives of others. If you go out of business, it won’t matter who was in charge at the time.

Family businesses can become family feuds when members fail to have meaningful discussions about the work, to deal with incompetence, to plan for succession, and to assign responsibilities on the basis of expertise. If you treat your family business like a business, then you’ll be able to avoid these pitfalls. Then, instead of family feuds, you’ll have happy families.

Happy Families.