Co-founders, you gotta learn how to ask each other, "what happens if we can't make things work together?"
A CEO I coach has a co-founder with a temper. Otherwise, he's a great guy. Smart. Driven by the mission. But every couple of weeks, he chooses violence. He'll blow up at a team member in Slack, derail a session and my client has to drop everything and clean it up.
The team has quietly adapted. Some days they just... don't include him. They route around him to make decisions. Which, if you're a CEO paying attention, is a box of flags. And all the flags are red. And the box is on fire.
My client is deeply loyal. He wants the resolution to come from the co-founder himself. He's talked about the temper thing plenty of times. Nothing sticks.
Here's what I told him.
When you have a concern about a co-founder, don't declare it to them. Get curious and solve the problem together.
The conversation has four beats:
- State the concern as a question.
"Hey man, I am concerned about this thing. Do you share my concern?"
You've got to figure out how to frame the concern for you. In his case: "The way you're showing up with the team is causing people to stop including you in key information. Do you see that?"
Then shut up. Let them talk.
- Agree on the fix.
"What are we going to do about this?"
Not what am I going to do. Not what should you do. What are we going to do. This has to be a joint answer or it isn't an answer. Your co-founder has to feel like they were a part of the solution and something wasn't foisted on them or else they won't own the fix.
- Set the check-in.
"How long are we going to give this? When do we check in and decide if it's fixed?"
Without a date, you don't have a plan. You have a wish.
- Pre-negotiate the failure case.
"Obviously we want this to work. But what happens if it doesn't?"
This is the one every founder skips. Because it's terrifying. Because saying it out loud makes it real.
But here's the thing (and I mean the actual thing, not the AI "thing").
If you can't agree in advance on what happens if the situation doesn't get fixed, you will allow yourselves to cross that Rubicon. You'll just keep having the same conversation every eight weeks until one of you burns out or the team quietly rots.
Culture is whatever the CEO permits. A friend of mine, a better coach than I'll ever be in some ways, says that all the time. And he's right.
If you're permitting blow-ups every two weeks at 100 users -- when the only pressure is "we still haven't figured this business out" -- imagine how your co-founder will act when you have 100,000 very demanding users.
Have the four-question conversation. All four. Especially the fourth one.
Hat tips to both Joseph Logan and David Mandell for teaching me so many things about coaching over the years.