3 Tricks to Resolving Conflicts Between Startup Co-Founders

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:

  1. Competing. Competing is a “winner takes all” approach where the strongest or most determined party wins.
  2. Avoiding. Think “ostrich in the sand” and you have a good idea of how this approach works.
  3. Accommodating. Accommodating puts one party first in the conflict – deliberately.
  4. 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.
  5. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

carol