Lacking Shared Vision: How to Solve Co-Founder Conflicts

When you start a business, do you stop to think what impact it makes on your customers? This is called a vision, seeing the long-term goals and objectives to achieve in the future. If you’re building your business single-handedly, it’s all good, but if you have co-founders, you need a shared vision. Without a shared vision, you and your partners will drift away. There are ways to mitigate this.

Start with an open, honest dialogue

“Mash, I wanted to let you know that I’m completely in-sync with the vision I have for our business. I’ll tell you why this isn’t anything personal but a genuine long-term concern I have for the business,” and you proceed to go ahead and explain your motivations and values. What are motivations and values?

Motivation is the internal process that give you energy, direction and persistence. It’s either intrinsic or extrinsic.

• Intrinsic motivation gives you inherent satisfaction or pleasure for doing something. It could be learning a new skill or playing a game for entertainment.

• Extrinsic motivation involves external rewards and punishments, such as profits, bonus or a personal loan that’s racking up interest. Find out what your co-founder’s motivation is.

What’s motivating your co-founder? Is it personal wealth, family or pure control?

Find out what their values are. Values could be moral, aesthetic, instrumental and terminal.

• Moral distinguishes between right and wrong.

• Aesthetic talks about what’s tasteful and artistic.

• Instrumental discusses ambition or responsibility.

• Terminal values talk about freedom, happiness or wisdom.

Value conflicts lead to internal clashes between founders or lead to ethical dilemmas.

Your co-founder might not like white lies, even for the sake of the company. It simply goes against their morals. You may not like yellow lighting. It goes against your aesthetic tastes. You stop mixing white lies. They switch to white light for you. That’s the kind dialogue that opens up boundaries for both.

Save this e-mail. It might save your relationship with your co-founder.

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Have a Founders’ Agreement ready

Take a day-off to prepare your agreements, responsibilities and visions in a formal document. Restate that the friendship should sustain but the work-life relationship should be different. This document should outline:

• The mission and the vision of the company. If yours is different from your co-founder then this is a great time to identify differences between all of you and accommodate each other.

• Roles and responsibilities of each founder.

• Decision-making processes, including how to handle disagreements (for e.g. write an e-mail and have a meeting the next working day).

• Equity distribution and exit strategies for all.

Now none of you have an excuse for disputes without a method to resolve it.

Learn to collaborate and compromise

You don’t have to be best at every department. Let go off the ones where your founder can excel with his vision while you go hard-in on those fields where you have confidence with your vision. Just make sure at the end of the day both of you put the company first.

What does collaborate mean here? You and co-founder work on tasks where both your inputs may lead to a better output. Collaboration may also mean helping each other out in times of weaknesses. When you’re facing a meeting you don’t want to attend alone, that’s when you collaborate with your co-founder. When it’s time to let a team member know their underperformance has been hurting the business, that’s when you collaborate.

Compromise on the other hand, means you sacrifice something for your co-founder. Perhaps a field that they excel and you don’t, or you excel and they want it. Striking a compromise means you can bargain something from them as well. Personally, the earlier you learn about compromise, the better for you. You give something to get something.

When all else fails

Your startup needs support and guidance to function as a team. When you are chasing after revenue growth, you need to function as a team. The reality is not every view or action will be welcome by your team but make sure you let them you know that you are putting the business first. Aligning with your goals and objectives for the long-term should be the focus of every founder and doing so with your co-founder may be no different.

Lastly, analyze the disputes that you and your co-founder has. I have listed out three crucial ways to resolve disputes. If all else fails, find an arbitrator both of you agree on and mediate the discussions if they are too heated or complex for all of you. Ideally, this should be a neutral third party and should always focus on all parties points of view equally.

Co-Founder conflicts are a leading cause of startup closure. Picking your co-founder is like picking your husband or wife. You shouldn’t take the decision lightly without putting checks and balances in places, even for yourself.

If push comes to shove, always put the company first, even if it means letting go of some of your points of view. You are growing together. It’s a journey. You can only facilitate growth when you are working harmoniously.

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