The stakes are high for any founding team, so conflict should be expected, even encouraged. However, company culture is built on real reactions and interactions, not the values you put on the wall. If team members see co-founders or the leadership team getting heated and falling into unproductive fighting, that doesn’t set a respectful, growth-minded tone.
Luckily, it’s possible to repair this dynamic and do the work to learn how to navigate conflict in a healthy way. Ian Schmidt is a strategic adviser at Trimergence, a consultancy that coaches leaders to become more effective from the inside out. On a recent episode of Build Mode, Schmidt discussed how founders and teams need to update their personal operating systems.
“Businesses have a human operating system, and that human operating system needs an upgrade process over time, just like the product does and your go-to-market strategy,” Schmidt said. “So we work with leaders and teams to map their operating system, how they think, how they manage conflict, how they do decision-making, and really provide them with what we call a noise-reduction algorithm.”
In practice, that means that founders can create frameworks for working through conflict and change when the team is just two or three people, and if done correctly, it 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 doesn’t go well, it’s crucial to take stock of the conversation and own your part in it. Maybe you lashed out, escalated the conflict, or otherwise created a bad moment in front of the team. Don’t try to rush a solution, take a second to self-audit, name what happened, and try to imagine how it may have impacted others.
Connect this incident to a pattern
When conflicts get heated, it’s very rarely a one-off issue. Take the time to see the pattern in this behavior. “How does this relate to something that I know about myself? Oh, my partner tells me this all the time, or I’ve seen this over time growing up, or I’ve received this feedback before. So you have both the situation and the pattern,” said Schmidt.
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Go to others who were impacted
After you’ve reflected, go to your team members for any interpersonal repairs that are needed. In this conversation, it’s most helpful to state what you think happened and how it may have impacted them, explicitly own your part in it, and ask them how it landed for them. Be open to receiving their experience and feedback and let that conversation lead into a recalibration.
That openness and ownership will lead to more trust on the team and more constructive conflict down the line.
Listen to the full episode of Build Mode for more tactical advice for building your team.
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Isabelle Johannessen is our host. Build Mode is produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience Development is led by Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.
