“At the office, my co-founder and I argued publicly in front of our employees. By the time we realized that we had an audience, we were already neck-deep in throwing jabbing words at each other. I felt ashamed because my co-founder also happens to be my wife.”

In every kind of human relationship, conflict is an inevitable consequence. Even as individuals, we sometimes have conflicts within ourselves. A basic litmus test is this: how often has your tongue been bit by your teeth? If this is an occurrence you’ve experienced more than 5 times in your life, why should conflict with others be any surprise?

No individual is the same. Our uniqueness comes from a compendium of differing growing-up experiences, value systems, ethics, thought processes, biases, and cultural inclinations among other things. Divergent opinions will eventually come to the fore in any kind of partnership and how well you engage those dissenting thoughts will determine how well your relations will be. If you are co-founders and spouses rolled in one, chances are quite high that some of those conflicts could happen in the presence of your employees, and these conflicts, though work-related, may put a strain on your husband-wife relationship but this is a conversation for another day. For this article, there’s just one important question to tackle:

“When co-founders argue, whom does it hurt?”

One is inclined to respond that the co-founders are most likely to get hurt, more so, given their particular situation as spouses but I daresay that both employees and co-founders do get hurt. In the past, some persons had dispelled fears and reassured leaders that there is no damage done to employees when watching their leaders fight as long as it’s not about the employee. However, recent findings in neurological research debunk that notion. Predictably, when employees witness angry yelling, their stress hormones shoot up and it takes time to decline [and you can infer that stress and creativity do not work quite well]. Therefore, research already confirms what any employee can tell you without any shadow of a doubt, which is that they find it terrifying to hear their leaders screaming at each other. It ushers in a sense of insecurity. This insecurity is powerful enough to make your employees’ emotions go higgledy-piggledy and rightly so. After all, the author of The Founder’s Dilemma, Noam Wasserman, predicts that 65% of startups fail because of co-founder conflict. Who wants to work in an organization that’s showing signs of crumbling?

“How often has your tongue been bit by your teeth? If this is an occurrence you’ve experienced more than 5 times in your life, why should conflict with others be any surprise?”

It may sound weird that we are looking at your employees’ emotions, right? Are you wondering how ‘how they feel’ affects your organization? Essentially, the argument is between co-founders, why should employees feel anything about it, yeah? It’s simple! Your organization depends heavily on how your employees feel. Employee loyalty, psychological safety at work, workplace toxicity, and even performance are all derivatives of emotions — how they feel. How your employees feel when they walk into the office or the emotions that encapsulate them when they think about their time in the office, are very important tools to test how motivated your employees will be as there is a direct correlation between productivity and emotions. If it’s negative energy all the way, you can expect that productivity and performance will not only drop but you could experience soaring rates of employee turnover.

“Your organization depends heavily on how your employees feel. Employee loyalty, psychological safety at work, workplace toxicity, even performance are all derivatives of emotions — how they feel.”

Of course, as co-founders, you not only determine your organization’s culture, but you are also the culture. Your personal strengths will become the strengths of the organization and so will your weaknesses. Many founders and co-founders do not realize how much their own actions shape the organization’s culture. If you’re competitive as a person, chances are quite high that your organization’s culture will be competitive in nature. Your employees also feed off your mood as well. If you’re happy, the atmosphere is generally relaxed. If you’re angry, it’s going to be a tense environment. Constant fights and disagreements between co-founders will leave in its wake a perpetuity of toxicity where employees’ performance drops and their creative energy is spent walking on eggshells and taking sides. The energy that should be channeled into productive use will be spent playing office politics. Unfortunately, it is common for co-founders to, intentionally or not, wreck their organizational culture. The sad part is that they often don’t even realize there’s a problem until it’s too late.

Two terrible consequences of witnessing co-founders yell at each other are, first, the unintended message of disrespect it signals to the employee. In such disputes, one party usually emerges as the hero and the other, as the villain. Deliberately or not, employees are being forced to take sides. Employees begin subconscious profiling — “who will get me what I want the fastest?”, “Co-founder X seems to hold all the power, it may be better for me to cozy up to her to win favors”, “Co-founder Z is so unkind and unfeeling, I hate him”. This kind of thinking will lead to disrespect and insubordination to at least one of the co-founders eventually.

The second consequence is the effect on the co-founders themselves especially spousal co-founders. You’re projecting publicly that you see your business partner [and spouse] as inferior. You’re also sending a sublime message that your relationship as spouses may be on the rocks. Female co-founders may feel slighted and disrespected especially because it’s a man’s world out there, a dog-eat-dog system that traps women in subservient roles; a patriarchal system that women have had to navigate for centuries. Having this backlash from someone who’s supposed to have your back can feel like the rug is being pulled from under one’s feet. The result is a defensive attack. On the other hand, male co-founders may feel threatened and disrespected because it could come off as a direct onslaught on their ‘manhood’, especially in this African clime. Such arguments in the presence of an audience could cause the male to try to assert his dominance just to score points. It’s an ego thing but a very reckless trade-off. But that begs the question, is it altogether bad for co-founders to disagree in the presence of their employees?

A straightforward answer is “YES!”

You can have a go at each other behind closed doors but with an understanding that your co-founder is the key person you turn to for help to manage the emotional ups and downs of your startup, and that the success of your relationship is directly correlated to the success of your business. Arguments and conflicts were not designed to wreck relationships. They were designed to ensure that the best ideas get implemented. So, always remember to attack the issues and never the person. If you have built a culture of toxicity stemming from constant fights with your co-founder and your employees have been audience to this, you can remedy the situation by doing the following:

1. Apologize Privately and Publicly:

Privately apologize to your co-founder for being a willing participant in degrading conversations. Before you go public, you must have sorted out your issues privately otherwise, there will be recurrences. Having tidied up loose ends, it’s time to apologize publicly. Is there any need to apologize publicly [both to your co-founder and to your employees] since your fight was not with your employees but with your co-founder? By public apology, I do not mean a press conference. I simply mean that a special meeting can be held where all employees and co-founders are in attendance. In this meeting, apologize to your employees for witnessing such toxicity. The goal of this apology is to help re-write the ‘toxic script’ that has been woven into the organization’s DNA. But an apology must also be made to your partner in that same meeting. One of you has become the villain and the other, the hero. That must change. A heartfelt apology should wipe the slate clean and create an avenue for both of you to be seen as equals, an unshakable force that cannot be split. When you put up a strong force, it instills confidence in the hearts of those you lead.

“To rewrite the toxic script in your organization’s DNA, old wounds must be revisited and a genuine apology tendered in order to bring about healing and succor.”

2. Spell Out Your Roles — in Detail:

This is a preventive measure to ensure that you do not descend into organizational anarchy. I can tell you for a fact that employees take advantage of these loopholes. For example, an employee could say, “When I have a question, I ask Susan. But if I don’t like her answer, I go to John, because I’m sure he’ll tell me something different.” This is already a disaster brewing because it undermines your authority as co-founders who should be speaking with one voice. It’s only a question of time before you lock horns with each other. It is incredible the number of co-founders who do not clarify their roles and the reporting structure. Who mans what? I am a co-founder myself, but I am in charge of the operations, and day-to-day running of the organization. My co-founder [who is my spouse] provides strategic oversight and direction. I handle the fine details while he ensures that the holistic picture is not disjointed. We seek each other’s opinions, but we know who is boss per time in whatever project or role is on the ground and the reporting system is well spelled out.

“If you don’t spell out your roles to the detail, it can be exploited by your employees, and you’ll get to lock horns over who mans what.”

3. Brainstorm Future Scenarios:

While it is impossible to prepare for every eventuality that pops up in the future, it is very important to plan possible scenarios and your responses to them. You can lay the groundwork for an effective communication process by anticipating these situations and discussing them openly and objectively before they occur. When time-sensitive decisions are required, this preparedness will help to maintain your strong relationship because you are assured that the decision taken is agreeable to both co-founders. For example, what kinds of job offers will you immediately turn down [or accept] without having to wait to converse with your co-founder, especially when they are time delineated? Have a lot of “what do we do if…” questions. Here are a few to get you started:

• What do we do if we get an acquisition offer and one of us wants to take it and the other doesn’t?
• What do we do if we have an awful dispute over course of action or strategy?
• What do we do if one of us wants to fire an employee who is the other one’s friend?
• What do we do if one of us starts to get a lot of attention from the media and the other doesn’t?
• What do we do if one of us wants to leave?

4. Spend Unstructured Time Together:

It’s a given that regular business meetings will occur but for the purpose of strengthening your personal relationship, you need to spend unstructured time together. Informal time helps you grow your trust in each other. It also helps to strengthen other dimensions of your relationship that are not work-related. Don’t spend all your time on work, work, work. What happens if the business fails, what other cement glues you together? Marriages have crumbled because no time was spent developing the spousal relationship. Great businesses have shattered because co-founders ignored carving out time for themselves alone, to unwind. In the early years of business, this may not seem like a big deal but as you expand and more of your attention is constantly demanded, you’ll have less time for your co-founder. When that happens, you’ll discover that little things can build up into something cataclysmic when there’s no unstructured time to synergize, share thoughts, vent agitations, and just remind each other why you decided to birth the company together.

“If all you do is work, work, work, with little or no time to find other avenues to bond and grow your personal relationship, there’s a ticking time bomb waiting in the distant future. Its effect will be catastrophic!”

5. Hold “Conflict Meetings”:

To be honest, I shy away from disagreements. It puts me in an uneasy state but I have learned over time that conflicts can be healthy and are very important as a matter of fact. Many co-founders shy away from disagreements or any kind of conflict because it makes them or their co-founders uncomfortable. While I can totally relate to this, the downside of avoiding conflicts is that you are unable to use constructive disagreement to talk out problems when there are thorny issues to resolve. Conflict is inevitable, and practicing is the best way to prepare for it. Proactively schedule time each month [or as frequently as you can] to discuss tough topics. Initially, it may not seem like much of a problem, since you haven’t yet got a lot to disagree on – but it becomes more critical as your business expands.

Summary:

When you start and grow a company with a co-founder, that person becomes your most intimate relationship in business. It is double bliss to have this same person as your spouse. Therefore, it is crucial that you think carefully in advance about how to make these partnerships work. Do not forget to take care of all the dimensions of your relationship so that you do not sacrifice great business strides on the grounds of spousal conflicts and amazing spousal relationships because of work conflicts.

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Personal Message from TBOG:

While co-founders can generally glean a thing or two from the wisdom pearls here, I need to reiterate that this article is specific to co-founders who are also spouses, hence, the writing tone. I have a newsletter, especially for workplace executives, employers, and their employees, where I share workplace-related gems. To subscribe, you can sign up here. If this article was helpful, I encourage you to share it with your friends and on your social media pages. Also, please feel free to write me as I thoroughly enjoy reading from you.

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