How to spot and create shared objectives
Most people can tell that they are in a relationship, but most people have a very difficult time describing the relationships they are in. Being able to spot and create shared objectives underpins the ability to knowingly form meaningful and powerful relationships; this ability is key to mastering the relationship building skillset.
Spotting shared objectives
The challenge in describing relationships is that we tend to recognize only our most important relationships, with friends, family and co-workers. Each of these relationships are complex combinations of relationships at different levels and of different types. As we tend to only think about the highest-level shared objectives, the complex combinations often obscure the adjustments we can make to shared objectives required to improve outcomes.
Take friendships. At the highest level, friendships form because two individuals make one another feel happier. Among close friends, there are always a multitude of ways each friend makes the other feel better and each reason is a different shared objective and a distinct relationship. The specific enjoyment of being with a person you call a friend could be caused by some combination of the these and other examples of shared objectives and pay offs:
| Level | Shared Objective | Example Pay Offs |
|---|---|---|
| Highest | Friendship | We both make each other happier |
| Feelings | Feeling funny, ‘in-the-know’, fashionable, angry, belonging, … | Laughing, “did you know…,” sharing fashion tips, sharing reasons to be angry, ‘membership’ in a community of two or more, … together |
| Tangible Goals | Achieving a specific mutual goal | Higher grades by studying together, doubles tennis partners, shopping for bargains, putting on a party, cooking a good meal, … |
| Status | Higher social or familial or work status | One friends ability to create conversation with ‘cool kids’ helps the other hang out with a group they wouldn’t otherwise be accepted by. The ‘conversationalist’ friend’s social status is benefitted by her quiet friend’s loyalty, appearance, work status, money, or familial status. |
| Safety | Mutual protection from threats | Shared resources and abilities put to use to defend against adversaries, illnesses, the elements, overcommitting, … |
| Intrinsic motivations (including values) | Mutual support of one another’s motivations | Encouragement, ideas, resources, adherence to values |
| Play | Fun, friendly competition | Disconnection from responsibility, skill enhancement |
These examples of pay offs are phrased to imply that the friends agree on how the pay offs would be shared, even if the payoffs might be different for each.
Tensions lead to having to adjust some shared objectives
Tensions will arise if there is any shift in the how either party feels about their payoff from achieving their shared objective. This could come from perception that the chances of achieving the objective have shifted. This would cause either or both parties in the relationship to ask:
how much additional work or investment is required to reach the objective, or
what the outcome now likely be, or
how will the new expected payoffs be split.
For example, tastes may change and cooking together may no longer be as pleasurable for one as for the other, leading one person to want to retreat from the activity and the other person retaliating by not being in a good mood. Or, one friend could accept a job at another company that leads them to seek status with another group of co-workers, resulting in the other friend feeling lonely and sad.
These tensions, due to shifting shared objectives, pay offs and/or overall priorities can only be identified and resolved by discussing the shared objectives and respective pay offs.
These conversations can get convoluted, particularly when two people have lived or worked together for many years and have many shared objectives that they have not necessarily thought about or itemized. This leads to a co-mingling of payoffs in the minds of one or both the parties and a shift away from cooperation in one shared objective could induce the other party to retreat from, or start competing on a totally different shared objective. Logic such as, “You did this to me so I am justified in doing this back to you,” is used to justify ineffective behavior.
The key to preventing productive relationships from getting unproductive when a tension arises is to sit down and write out all the different shared objectives and expected payoffs. The shared objective of this exercise is for both parties to help one another create a map of what exists and what has changed. If tensions are too high for the two parties to feel good about helping the other be successful, then an experienced outside moderator is needed to facilitate the discussion.
Enticing strangers to share objectives with you
In sprint 3 we described how to create shared objectives with potential customer strangers based upon a shared interest of accomplishing some task your product or service can do better. While no one strategy works every time, here are three other examples that are broadly relevant to startup founders:
Share the objective of increasing the social status of an individual on social media. If you are among their most ardent followers or one whose comments receive the most likes, then you might get noticed eventually and invited to help individually promote that person.
Offering an unexpected and meaningful gift has been used for millennia to get attention and potential support of higher status individuals. In the 1950’s Estee Lauder accelerated the growth of her cosmetics company by giving her best lipstick away in beautiful gift bags at charity balls. The wealthy ladies all wanted to know who this “Estee Lauder” lady was. Many companies have copied this technique since. Agents routinely use gift baskets to meet potential clients. The busier and wealthier the stranger, the more unique the gift needs to be. This method can get very expensive.
Understanding a potential mentor’s payoff: If you want a person you admire to be your mentor, then you have to offer a shared objective and payoff that is specific to what makes them feel good. Since everyone is different, you need to understand all you can about any person you plan to ask for help. While the internet is a good starting point, the more you can understand this person’s motivations, the better you can pitch them to cooperate with you on a shared objective.
Ultimately, most people want to feel good about themselves, so giving a person a ‘freebie’ taste about how you can make them feel good—say, by explaining briefly and sincerely how much you admire their work and how using them as role model has helped you. They may then listen to a brief question from you where their answer to the question could make them feel even better. For example, even if you think you know the answer, ask them what they did in some situation you face. Let them know their input will help you start a company that improves the lives of scores of other people. They are likely to remember the interaction, particularly if you reference it in your next outreach.
At some point after you have achieved some results for taking an action related to the person’s advice, you can turn the initial brief shared objective into a full-fledge mentor relationship, by telling them how you sincerely followed advice they gave and used it to create value for many others. You are then in position to briefly ask for more advice. If you then follow up with a thank you note relating how their specific advice led to your success, then you are in position to ask for yet more advice. You do this a few times and the stranger will want to know who you are, which then starts building a shared objective of making the mentor feel good about themselves by helping you be successful. Remember, sincerity is key because people are very good at sensing someone being disingenuous.
Powerful startup relationships require a mix of cooperation, competition and retreat.
To explain how you weave together cooperative, competitive, and retreating shared objectives with individuals that play a big role in helping you make your dreams come true, I will share a personal example. My success as an entrepreneur would not have been possible without a deep and productive relationship with my second-in-command. My chief operating officer (COO), Lloyd, ran day-to-day operations at iSuppli, and was somebody with whom I had a long-term, powerful, successful, and mutually supportive partnership based on a spectrum of specific relationships. These shared objectives influenced how we worked to create a valuable global market intelligence company from scratch.
Lloyd and I cooperated on an overriding shared objective: to build the valuation of the company.
I made sure I understood Lloyd's core motivations for joining iSuppli even before I extended an offer to work together. We talked frequently over lunch about how the success of iSuppli tied into fulfilling his dreams of being financial independent to the point that he could pay off his mortgage, pay for his two kids’ college tuitions and help their future families have homes, with still enough left over for he and his wife to live comfortably for at least 40 years. No small aspiration. It was sometimes a struggle to envision our shared objective having good enough payoffs when our business was under financial stress. The fact that I demonstrated how critical this objective was to me by doing whatever I could to meet it, including sometimes foregoing my salary so he could receive his, built enormous trust between us.
We had many other shared objectives that were critical but subservient.
We frequently competed on the shared objective of how value would be created in order to test the quality of our ideas. We would openly debate our points of view before our leadership team so we could listen to their analyses of whose value creating strategies were strongest, which we would then set off to do.
I often retreated on shared objectives relating to how we set pay levels or commission structures. To make sure Lloyd felt autonomous and motivated, I needed to share these objectives but retreat from making decisions that involved Lloyd's areas of expertise.
We competed on the shared objective of setting a reasonable compensation plan for Lloyd. We always had different opinions, and we always had to find ways of adjudicating between us so we both felt the outcome was good for the company.
We cooperated on the shared objective of creating a specific corporate culture. We both understood the importance of having a coherent culture at iSuppli, which meant we had to have similar visions of the culture we were working to create. We always coordinated the important actions we took so everyone at iSuppli could see we acted consistently with our vision.
Lloyd and I often competed with how to deal with specific employee issues, and would set up tests to determine the best way to handle each issue for the company and the employee.
We cooperated on shared social objectives, with each of us doing the social tasks with which we felt most comfortable. (Lloyd always did the golfing.)
We cooperated in keeping our board of directors informed, because we both understood the importance of effectively sharing information and emotions with this critical group.
This is not a complete list, but it is representative of the shared objectives we felt were important.
The list of distinct relationships that formed our general CEO-COO relationship grew in complexity as the company grew in size and scope. I was thoughtful, although not always successful, in creating specific new shared objectives with Lloyd. I wanted the competitions to be confined to areas where we did not agree but were important to increasing the value of iSuppli. The competitions were structured to be tests for which of our proposed solutions would be best for the company.
We competed frequently, as we had very different perspectives on how to market our services and how much time and money we needed to invest in expanding our product offering. These disagreements always resulted in getting other people or groups to choose between our alternative visions.
If I had simply mandated my solution, then if it wasn't considered best for the company by either Lloyd or others with better perspectives than mine, that could call into question the trust we had that we all were working toward building the biggest valuation for the company.
As you would expect of unbiased competitions, Lloyd would sometimes win, when his desired outcome was objectively judged better than mine. Because the rules I set were judged subjectively “fair” and objectively “effective” by all those affected, the results were well accepted. The company benefitted from these competitive tests, and I learned through the judgments of others more expert than me.
Ultimately you want to construct your competitive relationships such that the competition filters out inferior outcomes, leaving the superior shared objective outcome as a benefit to others and as a learning experience for yourself. Setting up fair tests of ideas did not mean handing control to Lloyd or some committee of judges. I retained full responsibility for the outcome of whichever solution we implemented.
In many cases I acted selfishly with Lloyd by retreating on objectives that we absolutely shared but that I didn't want to spend time doing. As part of the important requirement of maintaining trust, we let each other retreat from activities if it would help keep us refreshed for more critical ones. We never retreated when either of us asked the other for help in achieving any specific shared objective.
The evolution of our relationship was consciously implemented but was not planned—it evolved as required by the exigencies of the moment. I kept close tabs on Lloyd's objectives and desired outcomes and made sure he knew where we were in making progress toward achieving our objectives and realizing the expected benefits. To have withheld information would have harmed the cooperative relationship. Sometimes the news was bad, which led Lloyd to question his commitment to achieving the shared objective—that is natural and to be expected and is not traitorous; fortunately, he never did retreat.
Changes or additions to specific shared objectives were always made on an as-required basis, in a way consistent with improving the chances of achieving our most important shared objective. If at any time either of us had felt the other was no longer committed to doing everything possible to maximize the value of the company, the web of interrelated relationships would have begun to unravel, which in turn would have led to a crisis in our ability to work together.
We had to survive many crises over the decade we worked together: two economic meltdowns of the technology market, the September 11 attacks, unforeseen rapid changes to our end markets, intense competition and completely unreasonable requests from clients. Only a web of thoughtfully constructed cooperative, competitive, and retreating relationships could have taken us through a dozen years of value creation.
My partnership with Lloyd serves as a role model of relationship building. By using these methods of identifying shared objectives and forming relationships using the right category of cooperation, compete, or retreat, we created over 100 million dollars of value.