Why founder teams fail (and how to make sure you don’t)
Throw your mind back to when you first got together, you were the dream team. You loved spending time with each other. You shared values, beliefs and ideals and you were going to change the world while constructing a utopia together. Something like that anyway.
You had a mutual admiration for each other's skills and you strongly believed that together you could go further and faster than you could alone. You complemented each other in the best way imaginable.
The business that you were going to create was going to be fun and seamless, because you could almost end each other's sentences. You were so excited to get started because you knew how much fun it was going to be, and the incredible things that you could accomplish together.
Just like a new romance, you couldn't foresee EVER doing anything other than completely clicking with each other. And actually, that seemed to be true for quite some time.
The group of you, or even just the two of you occasionally stepped on each other's toes or found yourselves working on the same task, but for the most part, when you noticed those things, you resolve them quickly and moved on stronger for it.
Everything worked really well. You were all together around the same table, hustling together, laughing, and creating a strong culture, from the beginning.
Then, the reality kicked in
It wasn't going to be quite the seamless relationship that you expected it to be.
Maybe it was the first thing. Maybe it was the fifth thing. But one of the things you had to do before you started taking investment, creating scale and building out a team was to decide on who would be the CEO.
Regardless what we say here or what story we create around it this creates internal conflict. There is always some level of resentment as a result of the choice CEO. Humans are complex, we can be happy for someone and happy for ourselves and STILL hold resentment at the same time.
A vote FOR the eventual CEO is a vote AGAINST every other candidate, particularly if others put their hat into the ring too. This comes with resentment and grief. Grief is really a loss of an imagined future and we all imagine ourselves as the hero. As the person creating that freedom, leading the way and the person with the best ideas.
Even if we perhaps know or suspect it isn't true. There's a large part of us that believes that it is. So now there is a degree of resentment inside the organisation, even if it doesn't feel that way. Decisions are being challenged and questioned or perhaps silently doubted building evidence for why it was the wrong appointment.
New people are coming into the company and now, you and the rest of the founder team has less time to spend with each other, more urgency is creeping in, more stress is creeping in because STRESS is all about expectation management and more people means more expectations.
More overwhelm is creeping in and overwhelm really means that we're carrying a whole bunch of stuff. Our arms are full, and we can't imagine carrying more tasks or responsibility.
And what we do in this uncomfortable situation is we look outwards at the other founders and we guess at how much THEY are carrying to see if we have been unfairly burdened and then questions start to enter our minds.
Why can't they see how much I'm doing?
Why aren't they doing more?
Why are they doing it like that?
Why aren’t they doing their fair share?
We unconsciously ADD our feelings to our perceived load and we DON”T add their feelings to what we see because we can’t. We just see what they're doing and when. Then assume that they have it all together bringing more resentment into our minds.
We start to re-evaluate who they are and we create a stereotype for them.
This is just how our brain works. We stereotype so that we can make sense of people. This is what's good about them. This is what's wrong/ unpredictable/ unsafe about them. Then our brain puts what's wrong with them at the top of the list, because our survival needs are met by knowing what's most threatening so that we can take action to avoid them when they seem to be appearing.
The reality is that you are overworked, and perhaps don't feel like those around you have got your back in the way you would like them too. Particularly if you're having disagreements or can't work out why they're doing certain things.
The impact of this reality on your life is stress and strain in your relationships. At home you feel like your work has become the primary topic of conversation and its less and less often positive.
In the office there is growing resentment between you as you move further and further out of alignment with each other or at least that’s how it feels. Sleep perhaps begins to suffer as you feel a responsibility to ALWAYS be available which brings with it a sense of constant alertness oddly coupled with exhaustion. This alertness manifests in a number different ways, you’re attached to your phone, you stay up late or find it difficult to drop off to sleep. Perhaps you even wake up a couple of times a night.
Sound familiar?
You may have started to make changes in the way that you operate based on the way the other founders do?
A side effect of the mammalian brain encouraging you to be the same or similar enough to avoid criticism or even avoid appearance that you might be doing less than anyone else.
Maybe you cut out exercise so that you can be seen in the office more. Maybe you are eating at the desks so that you can be seen at your desks more. That's the dynamic of peer groups. We don't want to be operating too far outside the lines of the others.
And if we are. It brings in more conflict. So, we live in silent internal conflict, which is what creates stress and overwhelm in and of itself as we begin to feel like a prisoner to the actions and judgements of others.
There are a number of causes behind this difference between the fantasy and reality.
The brains tendency to stereotype is the first as it bluntly characterises people and has us communicate through that filter unconsciously.
The second bizarrely is our admiration of them and their intelligence. Again what our brain does is mistake intelligence for interpretation. The short cut the brain makes is, ‘They are smart, they think like me, therefore they MUST see and interpret things the way I do’.
From this position we mind read and make statements about them, that usually aren't true, but support the narrative of, they are smart and intelligent.
If your assessment of them is true and you have evidence that it is THEN their actions must be malevolent or selfish. You think.
They must be acting against me in some way or not considering me and we and they do the same. We have this internal conflict, that is, I really like these people, or this person, but I can't understand their behaviour?
And then we GUESS why a smart person and friend would be behaving, out of alignment with how we believe they should behave. This creates a sense of betrayal and often loneliness.
This gap between fantasy and reality persists because of this, we have an invented story in our mind that we build, and grows and develops, and we can't see ourselves having a conversation with them about it that doesn't create further resentment and disconnect.
We make a monster in our mind of the unspoken side of our relationship and the magnitude of the misalignment.
But all the while still kind of having fun together. Still getting on with each other. Just having a dark corner of our relationship that we don't talk about that rots into the rest of the relationship.
The common advice for closing the gap is, bringing it up, face each other and tell them what they are doing.
Take the conflict. But when we do, we hand them further resentment because the natural thing to do under accusation is defend. The way that our brain works, is that when we receive judgement, criticism, or someone tells us we are failing to meet their expectation is to go into a fight, flight or freeze response. We defend ourselves against attack. And it's very difficult to not let that happen. So we go into defence mode, and that makes things worse. Now, we have even greater dark areas in our relationship. So, we try harder to be nice. We bring more levity and more enthusiasm to each other, which is great.
Then we ignore this dark area and become more and more stressed because of it.
Now we start seeking stress coaches, start trying to squeeze in meditation, we start blaming ourselves for the way that we are feeling, because again, we're looking at them and thinking that they are not feeling the same way, the overwhelm grows. We decide that silence is a better policy because the friendship IS important to us and too much is a stake to risk the conversation.
The reality is the reverse...
What the founders needs to do is STOP ignoring these things, they are incredibly important. We have been convinced that relationships work like Disney movies, they don’t. Alignment takes effort. Disagreements need facing, in fact disagreements are a good thing.
Relationships are hard. To have any chance of success you MUST stop mind reading or making declarations about others.
What a more effective approach would be is to start frequently having strategic conflict, strategic conversations that follow a very specific agreement of how the conflict will work, a very specific trust agreement, and a specific set of steps to know that the conflict has been resolved.
These simple steps help to creates a company that will move forward rapidly. It stops gossip in its tracks and it keeps the founder team on the same page becoming stronger and stronger.
This approach creates a lot of opportunity too
It creates a truly robust culture. A conflict free culture is not a good culture it is a superficial culture that builds silent resentment.
A culture of deliberate conflict makes work quality better, work flow better. Better products and better relationships.
Conflict is a word that conjures up aggressive argument and not surprisingly, the origin of the word literally means to fight.
But skilled conflict is about extraction of, better ideas, and a much greater quality of work and freedom for all of the founders to create a life they want. True company conflict should be like a private joke that you want the whole company to be in on. Relationships go wrong when we avoid conflict because that require us to live a lie. The avoidance of external conflict is the EXACT method for creating INTERNAL conflict. Founder relationships go wrong when they avoid conflict, companies fail when we avoid conflict.
Conflict is a skilful communication around what needs to be better. It is the transformation of feelings into data and data into new action.
It start from a position that EVERYBODY is awesome. People are usually quite aware of what’s holding them back or what they are doing thats out of alignment. If you can hold the space for them to think clearly about it they will usually work out how to improve upon it themselves. It’s starts with approaching them with the knowledge that they are awesome, just like you.
Awesome doesn’t mean perfect.
It just means that they want to do their best, they want to keep improving, they want to feel fulfilled, competent and masterful and they have proven time and time again that they are those things. It also means that they value you and want the best for you too.
This isn’t about hiding from reality either. One of the founders may not be a good fit any more. The company may not be what they or you imaged it to be, but it faces these things openly and honestly rather than suffering them indefinitely.
3 things you can do RIGHT NOW to benefit from the paper
A founders expectations document with a vale of ignorance. A vale of ignorance means that you know nothing about the lives of the founders whether they have children or not, a partner or not or will have. You know nothing about the actions people are or aren’t taking. But what you must do is agree on a founders responsibilities, behaviours and expectation and output. Then what actions or behaviours are out of alignment with this agreement and what actions are in-alignment and what courses of action should be taken in each circumstance. Data to work from prevent drama from clouding the situation and gives everyone a base for ‘conflicting’ as friends. This system will highlight stress and overwhelm earlier and highlight subjects of discussion that we typically avoid because they are hard. Sometimes a founder doesn’t want to be a leader, sometimes a founder needs to not be a leader, sometimes a founder is unconsciously sabotaging the business. This document is the easiest way to start the conversations that WILL need to be taken.
Start having frequent founder meetings with conflict on the agenda. Introduce with idea that conflict is there to strengthen connection and make things better and we ALL want that. The aim of the conflict is it to move from drama, feelings and assumptions to clear data and specific action. This is done through a questions dominant conversation. Less knowing, less defencing and more curiosity.
STOP mind reading or making declarations and instead, when you do not understand something ASK your co-founder to explain something to you because you currently have uncertainty and be open to the reply and then collaborate to create a solution.
The role of a founder is not easy. Much of the things we can navigate away from in the ‘world’ we have to face head on as a founder. Thats both the pain of it and the opportunity for growth. If you would like to explore more deeply how you can rapidly transform your communication and your experience of life then get in touch.
