How conflict averse are you?by Derek Lidow Do you avoid giving bad news, or choose not to engage in conversations that lead to bad feelings or differences in opinion? Being conflict averse is a potentially fatal problem for startup leaders. Startups are necessarily filled with strong differences of opinion, unexpected crises and strong unrealistic or counterproductive desires. Conflict averse leaders cannot create strong cultures or productive workplaces. Unreconciled differences of opinion lead to poor quality and unproductive processes, which can cause lost customers, needless crises and uncompetitive products or services. Unexpected crises cannot be resolved quickly without a tight and rapid coordination of actions and subsequently lead to a great deal of argumentation around blame and survival strategies. Team members with unrealistic or counterproductive desires create uncontrolled tensions and emotions, which spawn complaining and whining that hurts productivity and morale. Research shows that there are no single personality traits that prevent someone from being a successful entrepreneur, including the trait of being conflict averse. Being conflict averse is a trait and that means it is a hard-wired part of someone’s personality and extremely hard to fundamentally change. So how do conflict averse individuals found successful startups? Many conflict averse entrepreneurs intuitively choose to be solopreneurs or to work only with a close friend with whom a conflict resolution method has de facto been worked out long before founding the startup together. Of course, as we discuss in our sprint 16, founding a startup with a friend can cause other problems, even if it solves the conflict aversion. Some successful entrepreneurs consciously develop a cognitive (i.e., mental) skill that specifically and effectively mitigates their conflict aversion. In this case, the entrepreneur consciously or intuitively uses their relationship building skills (which we describe in sprint 8, 9 and 10) to restructure most conflicts into unemotional discussions about shared objectives, thereby localizing disagreements into a cooperative fashioning of a better outcome than a confrontation or unresolved contest of whose idea is best. This is a skill and therefore it always requires practice, preferably with some good coaching, to make it a skill that can be relied upon even under crisis conditions. A third way successful entrepreneurs mitigate their conflict aversion is to partner with someone who has great people skills and delegate or assign the bulk of the people management tasks to them. This is the more common method when the organization being created will grow to more than a few employees. Finding a partner with great relationship building skills, benefits an organization beyond its ability to defuse conflicts but it also carries risks as we outline in sprint 16. A much less effective version of the finding a partner method, is to hire a Human Resource manager and delegate all conflict resolutions to her or him. The problem with this solution is that it doesn’t work for resolving conflicts with or among the senior leadership. This is not a real solution. The truth is that many founders let their conflict aversion profoundly impact the performance of their startup, resulting in a counter-productive culture, quality problems, poor growth and profitability. If the entrepreneur receives funding from a VC, once this is identified as a trait of the founder, will try to remove the founder from any direct supervision. Even if you fund your startups entirely yourself, you want and need to take action to mitigate this problem. With gratitude, Derek and Ben P.S. If you like what we’re doing, please consider recommending this newsletter to another person you think would benefit from us. It really helps us build out our free content platform.
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