Couples-Counseling-for-Startup-Founders-in-Conflict.txt

Couples Counseling for Startup Founders in Conflict
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You've probably heard the expression that starting a company with someone is like getting married to them. As someone who's been married for more than six years, having also started a bunch of companies with different people, I can tell you that that expression has a lot of truth to it. You've got to have chemistry. You've got to have mutual trust and respect and a commitment through good times and especially bad times. 

Now, as a coach, I am sometimes asked to work with founders in conflict. I've done my best to help, but I've always felt like there's something more that I can do. So, I've gone down this rabbit hole on couples therapy research and best practices, especially the Gottman method because look, if co-founder relationships are similar to married relationships, then we should be able to take a lot of the lessons from marriage and couples therapy and apply it to co-founders. So, if you are a startup founder dealing with some conflict or some difficulties in your relationship with your co-founder, this video is for you.

John and Julie Gottman, if you haven't heard of them, are basically the gold standard for couples therapy. They pioneered a lot of the work that is being used today, having done a ton of longitudinal studies on thousands of real-world couples and having had decades of experience in clinical practice. And they've written 40 books between the two of them. You may have heard of them because they've been in the media for this somewhat sensational headline of being able to predict your marriage's likelihood of survival based on a 15-minute conversation. Anyway, we'll get into all of that, but I recently completed the Gottman Institute's 11-hour couples therapy training program. As someone who is an executive coach who works with founders, who has done a lot of research on psychology and relationships, I feel like there is in fact a ton of information that can be helpful to you. So, let's get into it.

One, strong partnerships invest deeply in knowing each other. This is about understanding perspective, internal experience, what matters to your partner. For co-founders, this means knowing what drives your partner's decisions about the product, the team, the strategy, what keeps them up at night, what gets them excited. That is an important foundation for you to lay with your co-founder.

Because two, conflict and complaints are normal and healthy. The issue isn't whether you disagree. You're always going to do that from time to time, but how you disagree. Disagreement is inevitable. Complaints about things that bother you are normal. What kills a relationship is personal attacks, showing contempt for the other person, and being overly defensive or stonewalling or not talking at all during a conflict. Gottman calls these the four horsemen because they're predictive of relationship failure.

Speaking of conflict, the third lesson is that most conflicts are perpetual problems that never get solved. Gottman's research finds that 69% of the time when couples are talking about relationship conflict, these are things that are perpetual. These are disagreements that are fundamental to a person's personality or values. One founder always wants to move faster in general, while one of them always wants to emphasize craft and quality. One of them is always sensitive to spending money. One of them always wants to lean in and spend more. This is okay. This is not a sign that your partnership is doomed to fail. You have to accept that you may be on opposite camps of a given issue all the time.

Number four, you have to accept influence from each other, both of you. The goal is not to solve the fundamental differences by forcing someone to change their core self, but by moving from what they call gridlock, where you're butting heads and using inflammatory language, to dialogue, where you learn to have a kinder, more curiosity-based conversation about the disagreement. Back to the knowing each other thing. When you understand why your co-founder thinks or acts the way they do, what dream or values behind their thinking, you can generally learn to live with the problem, maybe find ways to make it a little better, but mostly just accepting that this is who your co-founder is and that's okay.

So, lesson number five is that compromise is not a bad word. In the 31% of conflicts that are situational that can be solved through compromise, i.e. which feature to build first, which customer to prioritize, how to allocate the budget for the year. You have to first articulate for each of you what you absolutely will not yield on, and then look for areas of flexibility, timing, approach, scale, scope, and finally, accept influence, which means give and take with your partner. You might think that digging your heels in is a sign of strength, but actually can backfire because even if you win a particular issue, you may damage the relationship long term. Sometimes this fact can be really hard for smart people to accept who are used to knowing the right answer and fighting their way to the right answer. A lot of the challenges in business do not have a cut and dry right answer.

This leads to lesson number six. Learn to argue with warmth. The Gottmans found that successful couples maintain a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative micro moments within a conflict conversation. That means that even when you are disagreeing about something, you're injecting enough warmth, humor, validation, and respect that the conversation doesn't feel toxic. Like making a joke or laughing together, saying things like, "I can see why you'd be frustrated." Or, "That was a little harsh. Let me try again." Or just acknowledging your own contribution to the conflict. You might still snap and say hurtful things sometimes. But the goal is to stay connected in an authentic respect and appreciation that you have for your co-founder even during an argument so that the overall balance stays not just positive but mostly positive.

Number seven, repairing after a fight is a skill. So when things do go sideways, you have to learn to recover and actually process what they call the regrettable incident. Just like you would do a postmortem for your site going down, you need to do a postmortem for your relationship interactions. Let's say you don't hit that 5 to 1 ratio. Let's say you both said things that were pretty hurtful and that you regret now after the heat of the moment is over. You can't just sweep that away under the rug and be like, "Let's just move on." You need to talk about it. And there's a way to talk about it that doesn't make anyone out to be the villain. That creates a better understanding of both sides. Takes responsibility for your contribution, your part of the conflict and then figures out things that you each can do better next time. That doesn't resolve the conflict completely, but it makes sure that the two of you are really good, not just moving on. By talking about these things, you actually strengthen the relationship over time.

And that leads me to lesson number eight, which is that you need to actively build friendship, not just manage conflict. Strong relationships need more than just good conflict resolution skills, which are important, but you also need active friendship building. Many struggling co-founder relationships focus on fixing problems and then forget that you can't just have less bad. You need to have more good. So, three ways you can do that. One, respond to bids for connection. When your co-founder sends you a link to something, check it out. Listen to them when they share ideas or express worries. Respond quickly and thoughtfully. Don't ignore it. Don't shoot it down. Engage with it. You might still disagree, but you can at least hear them out and pay attention. Two, express appreciation. Thank each other for things that you do regularly. Celebrate wins together. Point out what each of you are good at. Build a culture of calling out what you do right, not just what needs fixing. You might think that you don't need to say it. But the fact is people are emotional. You are emotional. Your co-founder is emotional. And it feels good to hear that the other person that you're working with, especially if you are in times of conflict does value things and appreciate things about you. And then finally, create enjoyable experiences together. Go on a founder date night, dinner, board games, hikes, things that you like to do, especially when things aren't going well. You don't have to be best friends, okay? You don't. But you need to create a shared pool of enjoyable experiences, especially when you are arguing about something in the business. Try to find something outside of that that you don't talk about business that you can enjoy because this becomes a reservoir of goodwill that you can tap into and it's like insulation on electrical wires. It protects the wires from getting fried and this reservoir of goodwill makes conflict feel less painful and easier to recover from.

Having shared all those eight lessons, I think that the natural question to be asking is, is all this relationship work worth it? Should you just find another co-founder or be a solo founder? And I don't think so. Finding a co-founder who is competent, who is trustworthy, and complimentary to you is one of the hardest things of actually starting a company. Most of us spent months searching for someone or chose someone that we already had a history with. That connection is rare and valuable and it's worth investing in. A deteriorating co-founder relationship damages your company. Even when you try to keep it civil publicly, there's always spillover impact on your employees, your customers, your product, and your growth rate. So these relationship habits that we just talked about take work, but they are effective. The skills also transfer to your relationship with your spouse, your family, and anyone else you work closely with. So I feel like it's worth it. I have learned a ton about working with people through my relationship with my wife that I've applied to business contacts and vice versa. I think most startup founders tend to be more invested in developing their technical abilities or their business skills compared to interpersonal communication and connection. Which is why the conflict sometimes feels really intractable and unresolvable. But what I have seen is that conflict doesn't have to end the partnership if you know how to shift gears and change how you relate to your co-founder.

So here are some takeaways. If things are mostly good with your co-founder, don't take it for granted. Schedule quarterly state of the union check-ins where you share what's working and what's not. Keep investing in the friendship and in getting a deeper understanding of your co-founder. Talk to each other about your current stresses, dreams, worries. Make regular deposits in the emotional bank account through appreciation and through shared experiences. And if you're in high conflict, start small. Try to say something positive even in the middle of your next argument. Or at least try to avoid saying too many harsh things. You can send them a link to this video or do the dreams within conflict exercise that I'll link in the description down below. That can be really helpful to understand why you might be gridlocked in an issue. Or you can watch the repairing after a fight video to smooth things over after a bad interaction. Remember, you started your company with your co-founder for a reason. They didn't just become irrational, incompetent, or malicious overnight. There's probably a way out of this if you're willing to work through it.