During my sophomore year in high school, my parents, who were also cofounders of my dad’s company, separated after 20+ years of marriage. My dad was to move out only after they agreed on how to fairly divide their total assets.
Big mistake.
For six months they argued daily. For reasons my dad could never convincingly explain, splitting it all right down the middle was out of the question. Along similar lines, my mom could never coherently articulate why whatever my dad was willing to give was, even though it left her rich, not enough and not fair.
Worse, they both tried to convince me to take their side in this fight and I got caught up in wanting to figure out who was right. Only with decades of hindsight can I see that my parents were both wrong and in pain.
They had both lost sight of what mattered most.
Breakups are brutal and can plunge us into bouts of bottomless despair making anger feel like a life preserver. Ditto for righteousness. When feelings run amok and the stakes are high, it’s tempting to get laser-focused on fighting to win every single battle. But this blinds us to the fact that we are failing the mission by losing the war.
The mission during divorces involving children should be to separate in such a dignified way so that everyone lands on their feet financially while also keeping the family union, i.e. everyone’s relationship with each other, intact.
In turn, the mission of the founding team of a company is to cooperate to become profitable while also creating a decent workplace, at least if the company hires human beings. This is probably why investors often tell cofounders that they should have a good relationship.
If only Amazon or Target carried that. They’d be printing money.
As it turns out, having a good enough relationship with one’s cofounder is much too high a bar for many of us. Research by Harvard Business School professor Wasserman and others shows that cofounder conflict is one of the primary reasons high-potential startups fail.
This doesn’t surprise me one bit. Whenever I am in a tiff with a loved one, I instinctually turn to two north stars:
- I am right, which means you’re wrong
- Proving that I’m right is what matters most
I’m stuck there until I recall a guiding principle I heard at a relationship workshop held by a therapist couple, who had been married 30+ years: You can either be (always) right, and be alone, or…
When it comes to cofounders, it might be more like:
You can either be (always) right, and go broke, or …find another way.
Like children caught in a bitter divorce, a company and its employees need the people at the top to work together especially when there are hurt feelings, small injustices and even mega disagreements. Respectful collaboration simply yields better results, never mind more fun.
But luckily, there are two heavily researched strategies, receptiveness and perspective-taking, cofounders can deploy while talking through disagreements to set themselves up for success.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention you actually have to talk to each other.
Cofounder Sync Exercise
- For a few minutes, casually ponder your weaknesses. Maybe it’s something your first girlfriend complained about or your mom has been bugging you about since you were five. Or something you just see in yourself.
- Reflect on how these have played out in your life, professionally or personally.
- Ponder how they might have affected the people in your life.
- Then ask a loved one, someone who you trust wants nothing but the best for you, what they think your blind spots are. Promise them that you won’t talk back. Schedule these types of meetings monthly…
- Listen. Compare it to your own list.
Follow this structure to work through points of tension:
- At the beginning of an uninterrupted one-hour meeting, play rock paper scissors to determine who goes first.
- Let’s say Founder A wins so she gets to first detail her opinion in regard to the disagreement and why.
- Then, Founder B repeats what Founder A said, in his own words and as many times as necessary until founder A says, “Yes, you got it! That’s what I think should happen and why. You heard me.” Now comes the most important step.
- Founder B tries to find the kernel of truth or wisdom in Founder A’s position. Maybe founder A is dead set against any type of pivot because her previous startup imploded within months of a pivot while Founder B feels a pivot is existential to the company. This step seeks to coax you into approaching your cofounder’s point of view with enough open-mindedness and respect to at least entertain the possibility that it’s a valid position, albeit not yours.
- Then, you flip roles, Founder B gets to explain his vision and Founder A works through steps 3 and 4 (receptiveness and perspective-taking).
I would aim for each turn to take about 15–20 minutes. If you allot about 5–10 minutes for setting up and step one, you should still have between 10–25 minutes left to discuss possible ways forward. But, don’t put pressure on yourselves to reach a final decision, just yet. You both need a cooling-off period to process what you learned. Instead, I would set up another meeting a few weeks down the road to revisit everyone’s thinking and then make actionable, trackable decisions.
This exercise has two main goals:
- Learn a system to talk effectively through disagreements
- Use this system to eventually make decisions on a path forward.
Like in the above example, maybe you decide to not pivot at this point and instead stay the course. So for how long and what metrics will make you both feel that was the right course of action? In turn, what evidence might make you reconsider and decide to pivot?
Schedule these types of meetings monthly to check in with each other, no matter what is going on. And last but not least, resist the human impulse to recruit employees into any disputes or lobby them to take sides.
In other words, don’t act like my parents.
Citations & Further Reading
If you want to dive deeper into the behavioral science and startup data that informed this strategy, explore the foundational studies below:
- The Founder’s Dilemmas: founder/team dynamics and startup consequences
- Conversational Receptiveness: how people communicate willingness to engage with opposing views
- Why It Pays to Get Inside the Head of Your Opponent: what happens when people deliberately try to understand the other party’s perspective in negotiation
