Co-Founder Alignment Questions
Investing in Your Co-Founder Relationship
As you and your co-founder begin to think about adding people to your team and growing the company, it’s important to spend time aligning on your vision for what a successful team looks like. It’s also helpful to reflect and share who each of you are as leaders - and how you want to operate as co-founders.
As a best practice, it’s helpful to carve out time regularly to meet and talk with your co-founder. This time should be spent not only getting timely stuff done but also periodically reflecting on how you’re doing individually - and together - in achieving the vision that you set out for yourselves. It’s productive to share what’s keeping you up at night and to discuss how you support each other right now - which may be different from what you needed last week or month. It’s also important to spend time socializing with each other occasionally - to engage in connecting with each other as humans holistically since you are bringing your whole self to work.
Leadership Alignment Questions
Here are some questions for you to think about individually and as co-founders. We encourage you to do some pre-thinking and write your answers down before engaging in alignment meetings. It’s often helpful to invite a facilitator or coach to join you periodically or regularly so both co-founders can participate equally and fully in the conversation.
Defining our roles + responsibilities
What do you think the role of CEO should look like at this company? What are the big responsibilities and tasks?
What does it look like to be a [whatever the other co-founder’s role is] here? What are the big responsibilities and tasks?
Consider creating a RACI spreadsheet at an organizational level - what needs to get done and who plays what role with each major responsibility area?
What does it look like to be co-founders here? What types of decisions do we make together? What types of decisions do we make alone?
Imagining a thriving leadership team
What kind of a co-founder team do we want to be?
When you imagine the future, what does your senior leadership team look like? Who is on it? How does the team operate? What does a highly productive C-suite meeting look like?
How do you think that you achieve that vision? What will need to happen and change for that team to exist and thrive?
What do you think are the values we should live by in this company? What sort of a culture do we want to foster and support?
Identifying individual strengths, challenges, and preferences
What are your greatest strengths as an individual contributor, as a leader, and as a manager? How do you lean into those strengths at this company?
What do you think are your challenges as an individual contributor, as a leader, and as a manager? What is hard for you?
How challenging do you think you are to work with? On a scale from 1 (super easy to work with) to 10 (extremely hard to work with), how do you rank? Think about how others might perceive you. What might they say about what it’s like to work alongside you and/or under you in the organization?
What do you need or want from your co-founder to help you or support you?
How do you prefer to communicate?
How do you like to receive feedback?
What does it look like when you are stressed out? What do you need to help you de-escalate when you are stressed?
Making an operating plan
What meetings should we hold regularly as co-founders and how should we structure them?
What other meetings should we host for different constituents in our company and how do we want to run them?
How do we keep each other informed on a regular basis?
How do we want to communicate with all of our key stakeholders and constituents - internal and external?
How do we want to handle conflict?
How do we want to manage crises?
What can I specifically do to support you?
What do I need, specifically, from you to be my best self at work?
How long do we want to try out this model before we evaluate if it’s working and make modifications?