There is a fine line between supporting and enabling. I find this is true as much at home as in business. When one of our children asks for help with a homework assignment, I tend to provide it to be supportive. But I am mindful that I might just be enabling a bad habit of not learning a particular skill. For instance, our older son has had a series of assignments that he had typed up on the computer and that required a lot of formatting, which is surprisingly hard past the simplest adjustments to font size (in fact, I know many adults who are stumped by advanced formatting). After walking him through it several times I asked him to do it himself and he got quite frustrated and upset. It was really tough not to jump right back in at that moment, but in the end he figured most of it out and was the happier for it. I can’t claim that I always succeed that way at home and in business there is often more at stake and the situation can get just as emotional. But it is equally important as a board member to try to distinguish between supporting an entrepreneur in his or her vision and enabling some organizational or strategic dysfunction to persist. Sometimes the distinction is far from obvious and it is those moments when being a parent, or a board member (or for the matter a friend or a spouse) is toughest.

There is a fine line between supporting and enabling. I find this is true as much at home as in business. When one of our children asks for help with a homework assignment, I tend to provide it to be supportive. But I am mindful that I might just be enabling a bad habit of not learning a particular skill. For instance, our older son has had a series of assignments that he had typed up on the computer and that required a lot of formatting, which is surprisingly hard past the simplest adjustments to font size (in fact, I know many adults who are stumped by advanced formatting). After walking him through it several times I asked him to do it himself and he got quite frustrated and upset. It was really tough not to jump right back in at that moment, but in the end he figured most of it out and was the happier for it. I can’t claim that I always succeed that way at home and in business there is often more at stake and the situation can get just as emotional. But it is equally important as a board member to try to distinguish between supporting an entrepreneur in his or her vision and enabling some organizational or strategic dysfunction to persist. Sometimes the distinction is far from obvious and it is those moments when being a parent, or a board member (or for the matter a friend or a spouse) is toughest.