65% of High-Potential Startups Fail Due To Conflicts Among Co-Founders.1
Co-Founder Risk: The Unseen Threat to Your Startup’s Success
Building a successful startup is hard enough. But what if one of the biggest risks to your vision isn’t funding, competition, or market fit? What if it's your relationships?Known as “Co-Founder Risk,” interpersonal conflicts between co-founders and key employees can be a hidden danger that leads to misalignment, missed deadlines, stress, and, ultimately, failure.Startup founders who once shared a common vision find themselves divided over key decisions, values, or simply how to communicate under pressure. When met with avoidance, these conflicts erode trust and threaten everything you’ve worked to build.That’s where the Risk Assessment comes in.
Co-Founder Risk is a solvable problem.
I help early-stage mission driven organizations engage in productive conflict through training, mediation, and conflict training.Conflict is not the problem: It's how we approach it.Most people learn early in life to either seek to dominate those around them or to avoid conflict entirely. Neither strategy surfaces the critical information at the heart of every significant conflict.Conflict is essential to your business. It represents a potential for synthesis. For internalizing more knowledge and wider perspectives.But in order to benefit you, the conflict must be transformed into a usable format. Like what nitrogen-fixing bacteria do for plants. Or what vitamin C does for human absorption of Iron.(Enter the Ombud...)
My Conflict Services
An Ombud is an independent, impartial, informal, and confidential resource to help your organization transform conflict from Risk to Resource.The five primary tools I use are:
- Risk Assessments
- Training
- Mediation
- Facilitation, and
- Conflict Coaching
Risk Assessments
The Co-Founder Risk Assessment gives a clear portrait of the current state of Alignment on key issues like:- Vision
- Values Priority
- Communication Style
- Conflict Style / Conflict Style
- Division of Labor
- Feedback Language
- "Work/Life" Expectations
and more.It sets a baseline for future work and gives you an immediate risk level.
Conflict Trainings
Building a truly collaborative team means equipping everyone with the skills to recognize and engage in conflict constructively. Advanced conflict resolution skills allow your team to turn potential disputes into opportunities for growth.
Confidential Mediation
Mediation gives the participants a space to move on from the past and make agreements about the future, rooted in an understanding of what each person needs. The mediator serves as an omni-partial resource, helping each side understand their own needs and the needs of their fellow participants.
Facilitation
Complex multi-party discussions, whether about strategic planning, crisis management, or organizational healing, benefit from skilled omni-partial facilitation. I leverage the group's wisdom and commitment to maximize the likelihood of long-term follow-through and success.
Conflict Coaching
For most of us, transforming conflict means developing new skills and patterns. I work one-on-one with founders and key employees on specific conflicts and conversations to help them respond in a way that improves the overall situation while strengthening the underlying relationships.
It's not easy, but it works...
It's generally easier to ignore our differences, pretend everything is fine, or walk away.Investing in the relationship is a miracle cure. I see it as risk mitigation through unconditional love.
Get Ahead of Co-Founder Risk
Don’t let the specter of interpersonal conflict take down your startup.The easiest way to defuse Co-Founder Risk is to create a safe container to surface disagreement early and often.The lowest-hanging fruit is taking the Co-Founder Risk Assessment to evaluate your current risk level.Contact me via the form below or schedule a call.
Contact Ankur
I do mediation, conflict transformation, and community-building in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.Click here for my bio. Use the form below to get in touch.
Note: The stat in the headline is a quote from Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman, as reported by Bryce Colan on Entrepreneur.com.