Of Icebergs and Elephants
By Nina Kaufman, Esq.One of the advantages to blogging on business partnership issues is that it’s a wonderful conversation catalyst. Everyone has a story to tell!
As I was waiting on line to get coffee at the recent BlogHer for Business conference, I was regaled with a sad tale of woe, disappointment, and destructive passive-aggressive behavior. Seems that “Sally,” who had started a business with “Jenny,” wasn’t pulling her weight (Jenny, of course, was telling the story). Over time, Sally stopped showing up to the office as often, wasn’t prioritizing her work properly, and the quality of her work was slipping. Jenny was tired of shouldering the burden. She had tried talking to Sally about it, but to no avail. Finally, Jenny and Sally had a serious sit-down, when Jenny read her the Riot Act. They agreed to put certain systems in place, but the end result, Jenny said, was that “if this didn’t work, we had to talk about going our separate ways.” Jenny was headed out for vacation, and the two planned to have a follow-up conversation when she came back. Jenny came back to altered email passwords, the removal of the company website, and changed locks. Their next conversation was held in court, to dissolve the business.
Which leads to the question: is there any way to protect yourself in advance from a sabotaging business partner?
I spoke to Sharon Horowitz, PhD, and principal of CenterNorth, a multidisciplinary leadership and strategy consultancy focused on the technology industry. Sharon sees a lot of business partnerships in the course of her work. She also has a background in organizational psychology, which helps her understand the quirks of human behavior in the workplace. I asked her whether there are warning signs that something poisonous is brewing with business partners that people can spot in advance. Here’s a bit of what I learned:
- There usually are warning signs . In most business situations, people don’t suddenly act out. There are changes in behavior that are noticeable, and if they are not attended to in a productive way, can deteriorate over time.
- We can get locked into childhood roles . On the surface, Jenny and Sally’s situation seems like a business problem, but this may be the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface may lurk a host of reasons why the business relationship is floundering. People push each others’ buttons. For example, Jenny may have been playing out the “motherly shrew” role to Sally’s passive-aggressive teenager within. Without a mechanism to tease out their issues, the conflict had no place to go but to boil over.
- The conflict may be symptomatic of other issues : “The root cause of the conflict was probably not Sally’s performance alone. Focusing on one person’s behavior makes that person a scapegoat and avoids addressing the deeper, systemic issues,” Sharon noted. People’s needs and desires change over time. One scenario may have been that Sally was no longer interested in staying with the business and was too scared, or felt too guilty, to leave. Or, there may have been financial stress in the business. The growth model may be inadequate; additional skill sets may be needed. It could be that neither partner knew how to address this in the open and they were afraid to admit not knowing something, so they avoided it. Their inability to formulate a robust strategic game plan could be the elephant in the room that they couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge and therefore address.
So what can business partners do? “Because of the intimacy in a partnership structure, many intense emotional reactions get triggered, that may not otherwise happen in larger companies,” Sharon noted. For this reason, she recommends that a neutral, outside consultant be brought into the mix. A third party can provide a thorough assessment as to the root causes of the conflict, and then provide a road map to resolve them. The consultant does not take sides, but rather provides a more objective viewpoint, and therefore can help diffuse tensions, and get a meaningful dialogue going. “If someone has both business knowledge and psychological training, so much the better,” adds Sharon. “The business issues may be the immediate elephant in the room. But they can’t get resolved holistically without at least some exploration of the underlying psychological factors –that lurk beneath the surface.”
Most importantly, a consultant can let business partners know they are not alone in what they’re going through. Many entrepreneurs are ashamed of finding themselves in a less-than-prosperous, less-than-harmonious business situation and feel that somehow they are doing something wrong. Usually, they’re not. There is a normal trajectory to growth . . . and within that trajectory, there are growing pains (not to mention the attendant emotional roller coaster ride). By developing insight into the nature and context of the feelings that are evoked within and between the partners, people can take charge. They can then become less reactive. They can then build in process and procedures to mitigate the “emotional messiness.” All of which helps prevent the relationship from spiraling into cycles of blame and destruction. According to Sharon, “The relationship of a partnership needs just as much attention as the business model. The two go hand in hand.”
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