Peak Performance Newsletter #18 | Conflict vs. Drama + A Founder’s Guide to Everything
Conflict vs. Drama
This is from an exchange with a founder that I work with. It’s relevant not only to anyone thinking about starting their own startup, but also for anyone experiencing conflict on a team thats’s doing anything worthwhile.
When you’re trying to do something worthwhile, conflict is the rule. It’s how you think about, relate to, and work with the conflict that matters. Onto the exchange.
Is a high level of conflict normal for a start-up?
The rule for startups is that there is always conflict. If there's no conflict in the present, it means that there's a really big conflict somewhere in the future.
The only companies I worked with that were "conflict-free" were led by repeat founders. Though they weren't conflict-free, they were drama-free.
To risk oversimplifying:
If conflict = disagreement
Then drama = taking disagreement personally and projecting those feelings onto people
Skilled leaders develop the skills for effective, drama-free conflict. These skills are usually developed on a training pile of drama-ridden, ineffective conflict. The repeat founders I mentioned above had the skills to guide the company into conflict without it turning into interpersonal drama (though being a repeat founder by no means guarantees this).
And so the goal isn't to be conflict-free, it's to be drama-free. And frequent, healthy conflict is the best antidote to drama. Nothing gets too big, and emotions don't get repressed. The best analogy that I repeatedly come back to is that of a healthy marriage. It's not conflict-free, the participants have just learned to skillfully navigate conflict.
Though I also don't want to stigmatize drama. Every culture has some degree of drama. The best cultures don't make that drama evil; they know how to work with it and get back to healthy, depersonalized conflict.
Based on all of this, I think your real question is: is this amount of drama normal for a startup?
To which my answer is absolutely, yes. Every startup I've been at has had a key member of leadership leave during or after my tenure. That departure was never healthy, it was always the result of intense and personal conflict that ruined relationships.
The reason we never hear about drama at startups is because the startup mythos is plagued by survivorship bias and narrative fallacy. It's taboo to talk about startups killed by drama or even the drama at successful startups. The startup mythos only talks about the glory of world-changing success.
This was one of my primary motivations for becoming a coach - these problems tend to dominate startup's ability to focus on business and many leadership teams turn away from them. This inevitably destroys the team or company.
The drama is normal. Your willingness to tackle it head on is abnormal, and that's a good thing.
Should the going assumption be that the team won’t stick together and should that change our behavior (the amount of energy we are willing to invest)?
My answer to both of those questions is a strong no, but with nuance. I think a lot of how one should relate to this is dependent on their personal psychology, but I'll share how I think about this:
For a group of cofounders to be successful, everyone needs to be committed to making it work. If everyone isn't all-in, the group will avoid doing the work necessary to repair, maintain and improve the relationship or fall apart at signs of struggle.
That commitment can be leveled up if everyone has an optimistic realism that is interpreted through the commitment: an openness to and an understanding that things might not work out, and that is precisely why the commitment is so important. In this case, the realism reinforces the importance of the work rather than detracting from it.
This realist commitment is important for another reason. It might eventually be the case that it is best for the company for a cofounder to leave. It might also be best for the cofounder. Being open to that reality allows for that to happen with minimal pain if that is the right thing to do.
I've advised several early stage founders who have a high preference for the early stage scrappiness to maintain an openness to the possibility that it may be best to eventually replace themselves with someone else as CEO. This option allows them to move onto start something new and operate in their zone of genius while giving the company they've created the best shot at flourishing (along with their wealth). Many CEOs have famously removed themselves and became president or board chair (Naval at Angellist or Phil Libin at Evernote most famously) to much success.
The realistic commitment puts everyone in the frame of doing what is best for each other and the company: working on the relationships while also being open to the fact that what might be best at many points along the journey is for someone to depart. The alternative, commitment at all costs, frames any departure as devastating, even if it makes sense for person and company.
We want to avoid the team separating because they weren't committed or didn't do the work, but allow for the possibility if it's what's best for everyone in the long run.
Also, many founding teams DO stay together! It's not the rule that leaders and founders depart, and we shouldn't assume it so.
To pre-empt the logical followup question, what's a sign that its right for someone to leave? A few signs amidst conflict:
Sustained gridlock, a near total inability to healthily move through any conflict
An inability for any interventions (coach, therapist, board, etc.) to move the needle
Even amongst progress, a chronic unhappiness at work that starts to spread to life
Basically, if there is no chance of improving or the negative effects are starting to meaningfully effect general wellbeing outside of work, it's probably a good sign that someone should consider leaving.
Another alternative outside of conflict is if a cofounder keeps getting distracted by other opportunities or is really no longer enjoying or motivated by the work. If the opportunity cost of the startup is starting to become increasingly seductive to the point where productivity is suffering, it might be time to open that can of worms. Its normal to consider the alternative to running your startup, startups are hard! But if it's becoming a serious distraction, it's a sign that the commitment might just not be there
New Project: A Founder’s Guide to Anything
One of my new projects in 2022 is to create a reference guide for founders that I’m calling A Founder’s Guide to Anything.
The tl;dr: The goal of startups is to innovate. It’s to get into novel problem spaces and create novel solutions. Yet huge amounts of energy get taken up reinventing the wheel for reliable company-building challenges and questions. The goal of the guide is to provide foundations for the reliable to free up more resources for the novel.
There are two completed topics so far:
Company Handbooks (Your handbook is like the constitution for your company)
Financial Modeling & Management (You should be making every nontrivial financial decision with your financial model in front of you)
There’s also a list of future topics. Let me know if there are any topics that would create additional value for you.
My goal is to codify more and more as I cover different topics with founders over the course of the year.
Happy New Year to all! Looking forward to an abundant 2022 for all of us.
- Justin
I love the idea of a "founder handbook"