Why is it so challenging to maintain a partnership?
Business requires contrasting qualities to create, sustain and scale it.
There are few individuals who can harmoniously integrate polar qualities within themselves - the ability to establish relationships and think analytically, openness to new ideas and organizational skills, caring for people and being results-oriented, sensitivity to contextual changes, and emotional stability.
It's no wonder that founders instinctively choose business partners who complement them in terms of psychological type, experience, and skills. Firstly, such an alliance helps prevent frustrating mistakes by neutralizing individual blind spots. It's like the difference between holding an object with one hand versus two hands - the gap disappears.
Secondly, both partners are freed from duties abhorrent to their nature. One person can't stand active travel, meetings, and communication with investors, but for another it's as natural as breathing. Optimising processes may cause depression for one partner, while for the other it may cause excitement, like a child opening presents on New Year's Eve.
Most importantly, such a union allows for the creation of a meta-system in terms of complexity, flexibility, and resilience. This gives rise to antifragility, allowing a company to paradoxically derive benefits from everything that destroys others.
But there's a tiny detail that determines whether a partnership will succeed or not. It's an honest answer to the question: "Do you value your partner's contribution as highly as your own?" It seems that the answer is obvious. However, it is precisely what initially creates a partnership that often ends up destroying it. After all, it's not by chance that you lack certain qualities. Often, it means that there is an internal prohibition towards them, causing judgment, aversion, or fear.
It's not surprising that you feel conflicted about people who have what you don't - envy and irritation, admiration and contempt, curiosity and suspicion. Such a partner simultaneously attracts and repels you. Carl Jung quotes medieval alchemists: "In sterquiliniis invenitur," which literally means "In filth, it will be found." It is often translated as: "What you need the most, you will find where you least want to look."
My experience tells me that partnerships succeed when each partner equally:
a) recognizes the necessity of opposite qualities in business,
b) acknowledges his or her own area of deficit,
c) values in the other what they lack themselves.
In essence, a partnership is a test of individual maturity. It means thanking fate that, like yourself, your partner is exactly the way he or she is.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
Kyiv, 29.04.2022
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As a business therapist, I help tech founders radically increase the value of their companies by accelerating key decisions at the intersection of business and personality.