Conflicts between co-workers can make the workplace challenging to navigate. But conflicts between startup co-founders can put everyone out of a job. Unfortunately, an estimated 62 percent of all startup companies will go this route, thanks to co-founder conflict. In most cases, co-founder conflict can be handily avoided by selecting the right co-founders. But also in most cases, by the time conflict arises, it is far too late to take this precautionary step. In this post, find out 3 tricks that really work for resolving conflicts between startup co-founders. Trick #1: Understand your co-founder’s conflict style. Imagine one co-founder has a “competing” conflict resolution approach while the other co-founder has an “avoiding” approach. It isn’t hard to picture the outcome of such negotiations. And, unfortunately when this occurs, it is the workforce that typically suffers the most. Learning a little about the 5 basic types of conflict management styles can help determine what is going wrong in the conflict negotiations and how to resolve it:
- Competing****. Competing is a “winner takes all” approach where the strongest or most determined party wins.
- Avoiding__. Think “ostrich in the sand” and you have a good idea of how this approach works.
- Accommodating__. Accommodating puts one party first in the conflict - deliberately.
- Compromising__. Compromising can be awesome when it works, but when it does, often the conflict will cycle around to rear its head somewhere else later on.
- Collaborating__. Collaboration puts the company’s wellbeing ahead of any single party’s wellbeing. This one can be tough to pull off, as well as time-consuming, but it can also save the company.
Trick #2: Don’t let today’s tiff become tomorrow’s life sentence. There may be an upside to winning a temporary conflict, but there is no doubt the loser now may remember later when the tables are turned. In other words, rather than drawing can’t-take-it-back lines in the sand too early on, a wiser move is to find a middle ground that will get the workflow back on schedule and allow for amicable future relations even if a separation does occur. Oddly enough, the advice Entrepreneur gives to arguing co-founders is similar to what is often offered to married couples:
- Trust. There was a time when each co-founder trusted the other - after all, they founded a business together! Remembering what brought the founders together can help keep them together in tough times.
- Don’t pass judgment__. There are two sides (at least) to any conflict. Looking at the conflict itself from all sides can transition the conflict away from emotion and towards more rational negotiations.
- Keep it clean__. Calling in favors, using secrets or personal tidbits, playing off a marked deck - this is the stuff of movies…and jail sentences. Best not to use them.
- Make up quickly__. For co-founders who are able to resolve the issue at hand, a failure to make up quickly and get back to building the business points to a conflict that was never really resolved. If it is done, then act like it is done.
Trick #3: Bring in a mediator. The biggest challenge with co-founder conflict is that all parties to the conflict hold “buck stops here” status. Who can break a tie at that level? In these cases, calling in a mediator - an impartial, objective, outside conflict resolution expert - is the smartest move for all concerned. Using these 3 tricks may or may not be able to bring an end to co-founder conflict, especially if there is a serious mismatch of goals or vision. But using these tools gives the best possible chance of achieving a mutually agreeable resolution, and one that will save the startup everyone has worked so hard to launch.