How does a co-founder avoid a nest?

Absrtact: Experience shows that the founders should manage their employees internally before managing them. In fact, during the initial period of the company's creation, the internal contradictions of the few founders became the source of the company's failure. However, the founders were managed and

Experience has shown that founders should manage their employees internally before managing them. In fact, during the initial period of the company's creation, the internal contradictions of the few founders became the source of the company's failure. However, it is not easy to manage the founders.

Most management advice is directed at your subordinates or superiors, and such advice is practical, but in the process of creating a company, the first thing you encounter is the management of a co-founder. The proposal to address this issue can be summed up as "a good relationship with the co-founder", which is right, but has limited effect.

There are a number of reasons why managing the co-founder becomes a difficult task.

1. First, there is no good definition of who should report the matter to whom. Perhaps one of the founders has the role of CEO, but that doesn't mean he's the best person for the manager, or that he's also fit for engineering, sales and products.

2. Few co-founders have managerial experience. They are all in the process of doing it while learning. There are many good management methods that require them to spend time learning and exploring.

3. The founders always believed that they were a team moving towards the same goal and therefore did not need to be managed.

4. Startups are filled with high pressures, and stressful environments make the wrong decisions and get angry. Even a small error can be magnified in such an environment.

5. Communication is more difficult than you think, even when there are only two people.

6. It takes a lot of confidence to start a business from scratch with the goal of building hundreds of millions of. So the founders generally have more confidence than the average person. When they are successful or reported, their self-confidence expands, and once they suffer setbacks or criticism from all walks of life, they suppress themselves. In such ups and downs, they strained their nerves, which in turn led to strife.

7. An ambiguous distribution of responsibilities leads to turf battles, and when one party feels violated, it takes a micro-management approach and defends its power.

8. It is often difficult to make decisions on the details of a team that is equal to everyone, especially when there are violent disagreements.

In addition, there are many factors that make it difficult to manage the co-founder. But fortunately, such problems can be easily addressed from the root causes.

Communicating openly is the simplest, but also the most important. It can not only create a better working atmosphere, but also let the founders like each other more. It is not enough for the founders to just agree to communicate, or to start a conversation when the problem arises, and they need to regularly exchange and confirm their status in the company.

Situations outside the office can help with this kind of communication, especially when employees are not present, which makes the conversation smoother and creates some psychological tension, especially when you are making some big decisions. Next to our office is a coffee shop, a restaurant downstairs, and a bar across the street. These places came in handy when I needed to communicate with other founders. Of course, we later realized (albeit a bit late) that it was not good to disappear in the office too frequently during the day, hurting the feelings of others in the company. But if you find that you have no such candid communication with other founders, you should be wary.

In the early stages of entrepreneurship, the company is slowly moving from an idea to maturity, and you may encounter the first conversation that is difficult to define: how to divide responsibilities, set goals, and assign tasks based on those goals. Will eventually be based on individual expertise and the company as a whole to assign tasks, and some will fall on the CEO, but also in the product, engineering or sales in charge of the body, a person may be a number of positions, but the responsibility is based on the role of the Division, not the specific who.

In the process, quarrels arise when people feel they have been deprived of their proper discretion. It is true that giving up power is not an easy task, but in order to create a manageable structure, someone has to give up power.

So make a conversation about role assignment as early as possible, write down your decision, and review it from time to time.

The reason for this is to give you and the other founders a position. You should realize that managing the founder is not an easy task, such as deciding who has the final say on the product is a difficult problem, in the past when I unilaterally changed the product, I and another founder often have a fierce quarrel. But when he gave me the final word, he stopped caring about my idea of the product and I didn't set the right expectations for product decisions.

When you work with others you will find how difficult it is to manage. One must have the right expectations of himself, know that he will struggle in the process, will be discouraged for some time, but will eventually struggle to do it. Having a correct understanding of this degree of difficulty will make everything in the process meaningful before you can work out a strategy that will not destroy your company.

But smart people can't come up with all the strategies alone. Management is not so much an individual's performance process as a repeatable proof process. You can certainly learn these management knowledge from books, but in my experience, it's better to find a mentor that the whole team can trust, so that not only the whole team will be able to get the same content, but when there is a disagreement, the mentor can also act as an arbitrator.

Finding a good mentor is tricky. It's certainly a good way to pass the incubator, but it's not the only way. The ideal situation is to find someone who has experienced what you are going through. In addition, you will need different guidance at different stages. The difficulties you encounter are different when you just set up a company and you already have hundreds of employees in charge, so the advice you need is different.

Even with such a framework, managing co-founder will not be easy, and will only become more difficult as the company expands and the pressure increases. When there is disagreement, you will not only quarrel over major decisions, but also chatter about trivial matters, which is normal, and the company is moving forward in this constant communication and change. Your goal is not to avoid disputes with other founders, but to keep these relationships in control.