The paper aims to analyse the succession process of Hungarian family businesses with a new, dyadic approach, examining both the founders’ and the successors’ (i. e. children of founders in these cases) point of view. The study focuses on two major notions: paternalistic leadership and the successors’ human capital. Following the summary of the results of two empirical research conducted at Budapest Business School, the paper highlights the relation between paternalistic leadership style of the founder and professional readiness/human capital of the successor in the context of the multigenerational Hungarian family businesses. Our research identified three dimensions connected to the readiness of the incumbents to successfully hand over the family business that could be examined during the process of takeover, and these are: successors’ human capital, socio-emotional wealth transfer and successors’ potential. The paper gives an overview of paternalistic leadership and analyses the aspects of successors’ human capital.