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Teams pick up tension between founders through tone, interruptions and silence.

Employees often side with the founder who holds more power, to protect themselves.

Agreeing when an employee vents about your cofounder strengthens the back channel.

Repair starts with the founders realigning before trying to change the team.

Nobody said a word about last week's fight with your cofounder. They don't need to. In Monday's all-hands meeting, your team watched you interrupt him. They watched him shut down, and they saw the look on his face. And now they're censoring what they will tell you directly and what they will say behind your back.

One pair of founders I worked with agreed with each other in private. In team meetings, one of them kept undercutting the other in front of the people they'd hired. When the first founder corrected someone's technical work, his cofounder called it micromanagement. Neither of them described what that word meant to them.

The team heard it as permission to ignore the feedback. The first founder became "the difficult one," and people stopped listening to him. He told me, "I feel like my rights are taken away."

His cofounder thought he was protecting the team from harshness. The team learned that the founders weren't aligned, and one of them could be ignored.

What a Team Picks Up From Its Founders

People read body language and feel tension between others even when nobody names it.

In a meeting, they notice who interrupts whom, who questions whom and in what tone, and whether one founder has withdrawn. The more often the two of you fight, the louder those signals get. It shows up in the work. One of you........

© Psychology Today