Beyond helping families achieve more harmony and improve how they achieve their goals, the value of helping clients communicate more freely also makes for a healthier wealth advisory industry, Christina Wing argues. She has a new book out, and talks to FWR.

The need for families to get certain topics “out into the open” so that disagreements, frustrations and hopes aren’t left unattended is increasingly important as people grapple with business and wealth transfer. 

Christina Wing (main picture), of Wingspan Legacy Partners, a business she founded in 2019, is well placed to explore these topics. Wingspan was created to help business founders and families manage family dynamics, business operations, wealth, legacy and philanthropic impact. Wing has now published a book, Unspeakable: The Taboo Topics We Avoid and How To Talk About Them. 

Drawing on stories from families, classrooms, workplaces and leadership settings, the book examines how people approach sensitive matters, even taboo topics, such as health, succession and values, to have more meaningful conversations. For wealth advisors, if clients open up, they become easier to serve or, in some cases, help advisors realize that they should move on.

When families can be torn asunder by disagreements, all the more so in this politically polarized time, working out how to get conversations going is not some “soft” nice-to-have topic to be handled once the investment and tax stuff is squared away, Wing told Family Wealth Report in a recent call.

“This is about the topics we avoid, and why, and the consequences of that,” Wing said. 

“I am trying to get people to understand that they can have very different views about what they are going for,” she said. “We all want a company to grow, and we can have a conversation about that.”

If people avoid talking through personal issues, for example, that is unkind in the end if a problem continues to build, she said. “People are smarter than we all give each other credit for.” 

Wing, who also spoke to this news service three years ago about the tough family conversations that can happen when succession is on the agenda, wears several hats. For example, she’s been on the faculty of the Harvard Business School since 2016. Before her teaching and Wingspan roles, Wing was a president and CEO of a family office and worked in finance and operations at a startup venture formed by several of her Harvard Business School classmates. She began her career mainly in equities and energy investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Kidder Peabody.

Her work around family dynamics can sometimes be described under the "soft" label, but promoting family harmony, handling disputes and ensuring smooth transfer of assets and business are hardly trivial tasks amid multi-trillion-dollar wealth transfer. In recent years, a number of organizations and individuals have addressed such topics, for example the Merrill Center For Family Wealth (see here). The practice of guiding advisors on how to handle families’ complex needs is also a driving force behind the US-based UHNW Institute. A related matter is intra-family communication, as highlighted by this RBC Wealth Management survey from 2025.

A problem with families failing to discuss 'delicate' issues enough is that they might hang onto an existing advisor rather than find a more suitable one. 

Wing described a recent conference in New York at which she spoke and asked delegates to say if they’d been fired by clients, and only a few hands went up. In a healthier climate where client families had more conversations, changing advisors should happen more frequently, she said. 

“We have to have an industry that is on an equal footing with the industry that we serve,” Wing said. “Otherwise, we are not going to move them through a [family/business] transition.” Wing added that at the same New York conference referenced previously, few delegates responded in the affirmative when asked how many of them had ever fired a client.

A fear of asking families to examine what they really want can also have poor consequences, she added.