The risk in family succession isn't the handover plan. It's that you and your successor don't agree on where the trust came from.

You handed your daughter the authority to sign off on vendor contracts over a certain dollar amount, or you finally let your son take the call with the bank alone. You told yourself something like: I built this. I trained her, tested her, watched her earn it, and now she has it. That moment feels solid. It feels like trust, transferred on purpose, on your terms.

A new study out of two Korean universities suggests the person across the table from you may be telling herself a different story about where that trust actually came from.

Hayul Kwak of Chung-Ang University and Giseob Yu of Hansung University published "Building trust during succession in family businesses: a qualitative case study of Korean incumbent-successor dyads" in the Journal of Family Business Management on August 28, 2026. It is a small, deliberately exploratory study, not a survey with a margin of error: eleven interviews, five sitting CEOs and six successors, from seven Korean family firms in manufacturing, traditional medicine, and services. Only four of the seven firms provided both sides of the relationship; the other three gave just one person's account, which the authors treat as incomplete cases rather than padding the sample. The interviews were broken into 344 narrative episodes, coded independently by three analysts who agreed with each other 84 percent of the time — a reasonable bar for consistency, though it says nothing about whether the people interviewed were describing events accurately, only that the coders read the transcripts the same way.

Three things came out of it. First, trust in these dyads was narrated as starting emotional — rooted in the parent-child bond — and moving toward what the authors call managerial trust, grounded in demonstrated competence. The authors say that direction runs opposite to what dominant Western models of trust development predict. The abstract does not spell out what sequence those models describe, and Emerald's paywall kept me from the full paper — everything here comes from the published abstract — so I am not going to characterize them. Second, the two forms didn't replace each other; people described holding both at once. Third, and this is the part worth sitting with:

"an interpretive asymmetry emerged across the four matched dyads: incumbents narrated actively cultivating trust, whereas successors tended to describe trust as an inherited endowment of family membership."— from the published abstract, Journal of Family Business Management, August 28, 2026

In the six interviews with successors specifically, the person most often named as a third party in disputes wasn't a lawyer, a board member, or an outside advisor. It was the incumbent's spouse.

Here is why this lands differently for the person at the top than for anyone else in the building. Every other relationship you manage, you can renegotiate the terms of trust explicitly — a new manager earns it in ninety days, a vendor loses it after one missed shipment. With a successor who is also your child, you are the one person who cannot treat trust as a line item, because you are also the source of the thing your successor believes they were simply born into. The incumbents in this study talked about trust the way you'd talk about a hire: I built this, I extended it, I can point to when it happened. The successors talked about it the way you'd talk about a birthright: it was already there. Those are not small differences in emphasis. They are two different operating theories of what happens the first time the successor makes a call the incumbent would not have made.

The authors are careful about what this study can and cannot support. It is retrospective — people describing, after the fact, how trust formed — and cross-sectional, one interview at one point in time rather than anything tracked over years. They frame their own findings as exploratory propositions for future research on larger, longitudinal samples, not settled conclusions. Eleven informants and four matched pairs is a foundation for a theory, not proof of one. That caution is theirs, stated in their own abstract, and it should travel with anything built on top of it — including this.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: if you are mid-succession right now and assuming the trust between you and your successor is one shared thing you are both looking at, you may be planning governance, compensation, and authority around a story only you are telling. Your successor may not be lying to you or hiding resentment. They may simply believe, in good faith, that what you experience as something you built, they experience as something they already had — which changes what a "test" of that trust means to each of you, and who gets to call it broken.

Here is one thing to do this week. Ask your successor directly: where do you think the trust between us came from? Not "do you trust me" — where did it come from. Don't supply the answer or correct it in the moment. Write down what they say. Then write down what you would have said before you asked. If the two accounts land in noticeably different places, that gap is not a problem to smooth over before the succession agreement gets written. It is information the agreement needs to account for.

If you're the one carrying that succession and you're not sure your read on how you operate under pressure matches what the people around you would say, the Leadership Profile is built for exactly that gap.