Cofounder Chemistry: 5 Insightful Lessons From Marital Conflict Research

Boosting Team Performance by Understanding Relationship Dynamics

Have you ever heard a founder say their relationship with their cofounder is like a marriage?

Perhaps you have noticed the similarities yourself. You may spend more time with your cofounder than your significant other. You may have moments of bickering and frustration, as well as moments of appreciation. This type of relationship is special. You spend years with this person—for better and worse. You have the opportunity to learn more about yourself through the interpersonal challenges that arise while building your company. But difficulties often emerge.

As a cofounder coach and licensed psychologist, I work with startup cofounding teams daily. In the process of writing a book on mastering cofounder communication, I uncovered several unique insights from reviewing martial conflict research applicable to cofounding team dynamics. I’ll share five with you today in hopes of teaching you something new, deeper than the simile alone.

For context: My focus of reviewing the literature focused exclusively on meta analytic studies. This type of research methodology uses quantitative designs to systematically assess the current state of research in the area of investigation. These studies analyze many — sometimes hundreds of — studies in a particular domain. As such, they help derive conclusions about that body of research. They are an authoritative, impactful perspective.

Here are five key takeaways of marital conflict research and their implications for founding teams:

1. When one person is unhappy, the entire marriage suffers.

In marital research, even if one person thinks there is strain in a partnership and the other does not, both parties are subject to increased psychological distress.

I imagine the same is true in cofounding teams: If one of you is having a rough go of it and is dissatisfied with the partnership, all parties will feel the impact and notice increased psychological distress as a result.

Therefore, if one of you is upset, the team is disturbed.

2. Marital distress negatively impacts physical and mental health in a significant manner.

Several studies have demonstrated distressed marriages negatively impact several individual health factors.

These negative impacts include contributing to heart disease, delayed wound healing, metabolic syndrome, long-term immune dysregulation (up to two years after conflict ends), and premature mortality. Therefore, it is likely that cofounder conflict has wide-ranging negative impacts on physical and immune health for founders.

Additional research demonstrates high martial quality relates to better health including lower mortality and cardiovascular reactivity during marital conflict.

My guess is future research will demonstrate healthy and robust cofounder partnerships are likely to improve health outcomes and decrease cardiovascular reactivity during cofounder conflict. On the other hand, it is likely cofounders in higher states of conflict are more likely to experience quick cardiovascular escalation, thus increasing the intensity of the conflict.

3. Work problems negatively impact marriages & marital conflict negatively impacts work.

Research shows conflict at work negatively impacts personal wellbeing and the quality of personal relationships, which in turn negatively impact work.

This data demonstrates cofounder conflict likely has negative indirect impacts on relationship quality in the individuals nearest to the founder in their personal relationships. And these negative interactions, in turn, may fuel more work-related issues.

Examining this with more precision, there are two ways of describing this interrelationship between work and personal distress: spillover and crossover effects.

Spillover effects are described in the research as a within-person process in which you carry your psychological state from work to home, whereas crossover effects are defined as between-person process where one person’s state at work negatively impacts a different person at home.

Both spillover and crossover effects are shown to exist in marital research.

To put this in context, when you are upset with your cofounder at work, this upset stays with you as you leave work and disrupts your personal relationships.

Research proves these spillover and crossover effects increase psychological distress of the individual directly involved, the one indirectly involved, and contribute to lower family satisfaction in their personal life from the professional stressors.

Therefore, I hypothesize cofounder conflict negatively impacts personal wellbeing (spillover) and increases distress in personal relationships outside of the professional cofounding partnership (crossover).

Professional problems related to role stressors (job stressors, role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload) — all of which are common issues among startup cofounders — negatively impact relationship with family members, which fuel further work related issues. Life stressors negatively impact conflict at work.

The interrelationship between these two domains reveals the corrosive impact of cofounder conflict: it negatively impacts your work and personal life.

Previous research demonstrated that employees with stronger work-life boundaries and segmentation reduced crossover effects. This is often difficult for founders, who tend to live possess less work-life separation. This means work-related stressors are more likely to disrupt your personal relationships in a negative manner.

4. Negative behaviors in marriage such as expressing hostility increase relationship dysfunction.

One key pattern many cofounders experience is one individual expressing frustration or criticism to the other partner, who may avoid conflict, not respond, or go silent for a few days. This is the same underlying pattern contributing to distress in martial couples. As such, it is likely that when this dynamic is present, there are greater communication and relationship difficulties in the founding team.

The overall importance of this study is that hostility, which based on the definitions used in this study are often seen in cofounding conflict situations, contribute to greater relationship dysfunction.

Here’s a brief summary illustrating the problem:

• If one of you is unhappy → your entire partnership suffers

• Relationship dysfunction (conflict) → negatively impacts your physical and mental health

• Problems at work → create problems at home; problems at home → create problems at work

• Expressing hostility and frustration → amplifies relationship dysfunction (conflict)

These hypotheses lead to an important conclusion:

The cofounding partnership is an amplifier.

When things are going well, your partnership likely amplifies resilience by buffering you from the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship. But when things go wrong, conflict becomes inescapable: Conflict with your cofounder negatively impacts you and your personal life, which amplifies issues with your cofounder. Unaddressed, this cycle further disrupts your mental and physical health, which leads to burnout, worse decision-making, and less time spent on what matters most.

As a pallet cleanser, the final insight offers hope.

5. Preventative educational programming on marital issues created long-term improvements in healthy couples & improving a couple’s ability to navigate conflicts created long-term improvements in distressed couples.

Based on research showing marriage and relationship education provides immediate and long-term change for well-functioning couples and short-term gains for distressed couples, it is likely that preventative, informative programs may improve outcomes for cofounding teams.

The book I am writing will be one such resource. My eBook, Stop Cofounder Conflict: The 10 Core Causes of Ineffective Partnerships And How To Fix Them, is a small step in the right direction. And I’m in conversation with other coaches to create something even more scalable.

Similarly, robust research findings support the notion that marriage and family therapy have a positive impact on couples compared to no treatment. As such, it is likely that cofounder coaching is better than no coaching whatsoever (at the minimum).

One study demonstrated behavioral interventions were less effective than relational-based treatment interventions in couple’s therapy in improving long-term outcomes. This offers support to the notion that while many cofounders come to coaching wanting specific skills to add to their partnership, these behavior-based interventions may be less effective in the long-run than working on improving their relational interactions by coaching how to engage differently with one another.

It is important to note that the key role in many empirically supported couple’s therapies involves helping partners improve conflict navigation. This is what contributes to the efficacy of cofounder coaching — it focuses not just on behaviors, but creating relational changes in how teams communicate.

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In case you were unaware, there are no published peer-reviewed studies on the cofounding relationship in psychological academic journals. These hypotheses from adjacent areas of research, then, represent the groundwork for future study.

Thank you for giving this important topic your attention. I hope I delivered on my promise of teaching you something new about your cofounding partnership.

I have heard time and time again that the relationship with your cofounder is like a marriage. After discovering these insights, I better understand the comparison.