Tools for founders to navigate past struggles

The stakes are high for any founding team, so conflict should be expected, even encouraged. However, company culture is built on real feedback and interactions, not values ​​you put up on the wall. If team members see the co-founders or leadership team getting stressed out and falling into unproductive fighting, this does not set a respectful, growth-minded tone.

Fortunately, it is possible to fix this dynamic and do the work to learn how to deal with conflict in a healthy way. Ian Schmidt is a strategic consultant at Trimergence, a consulting firm that coaches leaders to become more effective from the inside out. In a recent episode of Build Mode, Schmidt discussed how founders and teams need to modernize their personal operating systems.

“Companies have a human operating system, and that human operating system needs to upgrade over time, just as a product and go-to-market strategy does,” Schmidt said. “So we work with leaders and teams to map their operating system, how they think, how they manage conflict, how they make decisions, and really provide them with what we call a denoising algorithm.”

In practical terms, this means founders can create frameworks for working through conflict and change when the team is only two or three people, and if executed correctly, can scale with the company.

Schmidt offered a framework that any founder, leader, or even team member can implement when conflict arises:

Pause and do an “internal 360” on what just happened

When a conflict isn’t going well, it’s important to evaluate the conversation and own your role in it. Maybe you attacked, escalated the conflict, or created a bad moment for the team. Don’t try to rush to a solution, take a second to examine yourself, name what happened, and try to imagine how it affected others.

Connect this incident to a pattern

When conflicts become intense, it is rarely a one-time problem. Take the time to see the pattern in this behavior. “How does this relate to something I know about myself? Oh, my partner tells me this all the time, or I saw this over time growing up, or I received these comments before. So you have both the situation and the pattern,” Schmidt said.

Go to others who have been affected

After you’ve thought, turn to your team members to make any personal repairs needed. In this conversation, it is very helpful to state what you think happened and how it affected them, openly acknowledge your role in it, and ask them how it came to them. Be open to their experiences and feedback and let that conversation lead to a recalibration.

This openness and ownership will lead to more trust in the team and more constructive conflict in the future.

Listen to the full episode of Build Mode for more tactical tips for building your team.

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Isabel Johansson is our host. Build mode Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience development is led by Morgan Little. And special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.