Briar Hall's CEO says family office hiring puts leadership ahead of technical skill

Briar Hall LLC employs roughly 60 professionals, and its two most recent senior hires carry titles that few family offices have used: chief relationship officer and chief learning officer. John Benevides, the Chicago single-family office's president and CEO, treats both appointments as deliberate choices, his account of them doubling as an argument about what a family office has become. A family office, in his telling, is a business, and a business needs leading.

The conviction reflects a shift in how family offices hire. They have traditionally filled their professional ranks, Benevides says in an interview with FO Pro — The Family Office Professional, by taking on a trusted confidant: the family's CPA, its attorney, the chief financial officer of the operating business, or perhaps an investment advisor, adjacent specialists drawn from professions the family already trusts. In his view the dedicated, established office has outgrown that pipeline, because the job reaches well past the technical work those professionals were trained to do.

The old arrangement had its own logic: a confidant arrived with the relationship already built and the family's confidence already extended, which lowered the risk of a bad hire and shortened the settling-in period. But it left untested whether the person could build and lead an organization as the office's headcount grew and its mandate widened, the quality Benevides now screens for first.

He separates the requirements into two columns and then adds a third. Leadership covers vision, strategy, inspiration, change management, people and communications; technical work covers taxes, estate planning, investments and risk; and the third set — family dynamics, family education and family engagement — he calls arguably the more important of the three, the one with the least formal training path behind it. The composite sits closer to a general manager than to a filing specialist.

Benevides puts the order plainly: "When we hire for the mid and senior ranks of our team, we look for leadership, domain expertise and technical skill — in that order." Leadership, as he defines it, is the ability to manage, to drive successful change and to develop people; domain expertise means having operated at this level of wealth and having an understanding of the family dynamics and other issues that come with it. Technical expertise in tax, estate, investment, risk, education and philanthropy arrives last, and he presents the sequence as a standard rather than a preference.

The two recent hires show where the priorities land: the chief relationship officer oversees all of the office's advisory activities and the family's client experience and leads the full team of advisors, while the chief learning officer leads education and family engagement. Benevides notes that neither role was often seen in family offices and that both are becoming more common, a read on the industry his own hires illustrate rather than prove.

The titles point to a mature office's hardest problems: keeping four generations engaged with the family's wealth and managing the relationships that surround it. Those tasks surface once the investing and the estate planning are competently handled, and they are the tasks least served by the CPA-and-attorney hiring reflex Benevides describes moving past.

On the candidate side, he sees improvement: understanding of the family office industry is far more widespread than it once was, he says, because the industry itself is larger and more mainstream and candidates arrive knowing what the work involves. The bottleneck is the supply of people who clear the bar. He calls the combination of skills the job requires rare at this level of wealth, and describes the market's central difficulty in his own terms: "the amount of talent needed vastly exceeds the demand in the market."

Finding the right person, he adds, is hard, not least because everyone is looking for similar candidates — a thought the published excerpt cuts off before he finishes it. The shortfall, on his account, is not interest but fit: plenty of people understand the industry now, and far fewer combine the leadership, the domain exposure and the technical grounding the role demands.

If the pool is no longer drawn mainly from the family's accountants and lawyers, it would likely shift toward operating executives and managers from larger firms, people trained to run organizations rather than to administer trusts or file returns. Benevides has made two such hires and says his 60-person office will keep screening leadership first. Whether that order becomes the industry's default or remains one well-run office's preference will show in how often titles like chief learning officer appear elsewhere.