This Key Psychological Insight Immediately Improves Your Cofounder Relationship
Discover how attachment styles impact your communication and can lead to more effective interactions within your organization
Founders are under immense pressure to demonstrate the perseverance required to overcome the obstacles inherent in entrepreneurship.
When cofounder teams work well, their personal and professional relationships thrive.
They have clear focus, roles, and expectations. They discuss disagreements in a manner that leads to greater insight for themselves and the company. And being in sync helps them apply leverage to their specialized knowledge and problem-solve at scale.
But when cofounder dynamics are off, it sends a ripple effect through the entire organization.
Former friends build feelings of resentment and anger towards each other. Family members gossip. And this personal tension is felt by every team-member in the organization, tainting the culture and reducing productivity.
Like a marriage, when things go wrong, they can escalate quickly.
When you’re in a relationship that’s protected — whether through business or law — it amplifies the likelihood that your emotional baggage will show up in moments of difficulty.
That’s why marriages are challenging. And that’s why cofounder partnerships can lead to headaches and sleepless nights, if left unaddressed.
But before your partnership becomes one of the 65% of high-potential startups that fail due to co-founder fall out, take the time to identify your unhelpful patterns of engagement, and then do something about it!
The patterns of connecting with one another are first created in childhood. In psychological terms, we’re talking about attachment.
Understanding attachment theory
Attachment theory was first developed by a psychologist named John Bowlby (1969, 1988).
It has several key components, as summarized by Dr. Sue Johnson:
1. Attachment is an innate motivational force
Developed through a biological perspective, the drive for connection with others is considered innate within each person.
This underlying motivation to connect with other people is part of how we’re wired.
2. Secure attachment creates autonomy
When you are effectively connected to the other person, whom you perceive to be reliable and consistent, it allows each of you to function with greater autonomy.
Emphasizing your interdependence rather than separateness leads to greater individual and relational health.
3. Attachment creates trust and security
Going through the ups and downs in life requires that you have something consistent to come back to.
When you’re connected on an emotional level with someone you trust, it reduces the anxieties and stressors you encounter and helps you better navigate conflict.
4. Fear and uncertainty increase attachment needs
When you feel threatened by outside stressors, your attachment-seeking behaviors increase.
You seek to connect with someone to re-regulate your emotional system and protect against feelings of helplessness.
5. When attachment needs are unmet, it results in predictable distress
Bowlby viewed anger in relationships as being an attempt to connect with someone who is inaccessible.
When someone feels inaccessible, typical reactions include: Anger, clinging, depression, despair, and eventually, detachment.
6. Insecure attachment follows distinct patterns
In relationships where attachment needs are unmet, the attachment response often involves either anxiety or avoidance.
Behaviors such as criticism, blaming, and demands are responses to attachment hurts and fears, as is avoidance, which involves suppressing attachment-related needs.
These anxious and avoidant strategies were first identified in mother-infant studies by Mary Ainsworth (1978).
Ainsworth found that attachment between infants and their mothers followed three predictable patterns:
Secure attachment
Anxious attachment
Avoidant attachment.
Securely attached infants tolerated distress when their mothers left the room and then reconnect with their mother when she re-entered the room. After this self-regulation occurred, they were able to freely explore and play.
Anxiously attached infants were very distressed when the mother left the room and then either clung to or expressed anger at the mother upon her return.
Infants with avoidant attachment experienced physiological distress but showed little emotion at separation or reunion.
This psychological insight is important for founders
Attachment styles act as templates for future relationships. Though engrained, these ways of connecting to others are considered malleable — something that can change over time.
Dr. Sue Johnson says:
“These insecure habitual forms of engagement can be modified by new relationships, but they can also mold current relationships and so can easily become self-perpetuating.
They involve specific behavioral responses to regulate emotions and protect the self from rejection and abandonment, and cognitive schemas or working models of self and other.” (p. 30)
Often, no one else on this planet can understand your emotional experience more than your cofounder.
That’s why this relationship is so important: It becomes the primary source (and frustration) of your attachment-related needs. The stressors of building a successful company lead to a necessity of greater mutual support.
Disagreements, pressure, and high expectations mold the cofounder relationship into a primary source of attachment-based needs.
Attachment theory demonstrates that a secure attachment between founders increases their resilience, perseverance, and well-being.
It shows that anxious partners are more prone to anger and may express that frustration or cling to their partner as a way to self-regulate. And it highlights that avoidant partners may feel hostile and attribute that hostility to their partners while downplaying their needs and the importance of your relationship.
The way your individual attachment patterns align often lead to one of three key relationship dynamics:
One partner criticizes, the other avoids conflict.
Both partners avoid conflict.
Both partners criticize and escalate conflict.
Which of these patterns best describes your relationship?
Identifying which pattern you are most prone to gives founders an important insight.
It allows you recognize your own attachment style, identify your partner’s, and understand how they interact with one another.
Once you’ve identified your relationship dynamic from this attachment-based lens, you can start to improve your communication.
How can these patterns help you improve your teamwork?
Read the list below.
1. One partner criticizes, the other avoids conflict
This is one of the most frequent patterns in relationships.
To fix this, the criticizer must soften and learn better ways to communicate their frustration. Over time, they need to identify their unmet emotional need and ask for it directly rather than through criticism.
The avoider needs to build safety and begin sharing more of their emotional experience, including anger and resentment that may lurk beneath the surface.
If unaddressed, the lack of cohesion leads to one person being labeled as “the problem child” and the other becoming the parent.
Aside from the frustration and exhaustion on both sides of that arrangement, employees tend to pick a favorite, leading to one partner assuming even more responsibility than the other.
That’s a recipe for an explosive disagreement and fallout.
2. Both partners avoid conflict
Safety must be built on both sides.
Both individuals need to share more of their emotional experience, including feelings of worry and frustration. Each person needs to challenge themselves to speak up and ask more questions about the other person’s thoughts and feelings.
This avoid/avoid matchup creates problems in the organizational culture, as employees follow the leaders’ down-regulation and hide their genuine thoughts and feelings. This increases anxiety, back-channeling, and hampers innovation.
Think of this matchup as the “anti-Netflix” approach.
3. Both partners criticize and escalate the conflict
The solution: Cool it.
In this situation, both people need to improve their self-regulation and coping strategies. They need to slow down, breathe, take breaks, and brainstorm how to de-escalate their level of expressed emotion.
Things are too hot and everyone feels the tension.
Through the repeated pairing of relaxation and sharing their feelings, these founders can learn to have much more productive conversations that don’t cause the entire organization to walk on eggshells.
As these inter-related processes and adjustments occur, both individuals will re-establish the relationship built on trust and security.
This more mature relationship adds resilience, improves problem-solving, and creates a healthier organizational culture.
Want to create change in your most important relationship?
Use this article to facilitate a meaningful conversation with your founder. Work together to identify your individual attachment styles and your relationship dynamic.
Making these psychological insights more explicit will be the launching point for improving your communication.