When building a partnership, look for a skill or a resource you don’t really have.

People often forget this simple rule and start looking for “like-minded” people, with whom to share their vision or with whom to build an empire.

Don’t get me wrong, like-minded peers are very useful, especially for masterminding, for brainstorming, or for getting feedback, but a partnership must cover a part of your business that you’re not really good at. It should complete you, not necessarily compete with you.

Competition breeds innovation, that’s true, but in my experience there’s enough competition from outside your business, no need to create internal competition too, by starting partnerships based on similar skills.

Safety versus Creativity

This all sounds nice and good, but making it happen is more difficult than it seems. And the main difficulty arises because, almost always, when we reach for interaction, we’re forced to look first at the similar traits, not at the different (and potentially complementary) ones.

And the even worse news is that we’re not doing this consciously.

This is a very profound cognitive bias and it’s based on the fact that in any new interaction we need first to communicate the simple, survival-related things, to create a protective layer around the interaction. We first need to feel safe interacting with someone else.

And only when we’re safe enough we can go on with creative stuff (which will not only accept, but praise differences). If you don’t believe me, look at kids who are talking to cats and dogs. When they first encounter them, they’re basically meowing or howling. They’re trying to get their attention by being similar first, (because they know they’re different), and they resort to human language only when they think they’ve been understood.

So even if we’re consciously trying to find individuals who can complete us, what we perceive first are the similar parts. Which has a somehow strange consequence: a person could be really good for us, but his or her complementary parts may be simply hidden in the beginning by stuff that “we don’t like”. In other words, stuff that’s not similar with our beliefs or expectations.

Maybe they have a certain way of talking which is not pleasing, maybe they dress in a certain way that our internal filter rejects, or maybe they do things in a very different way. All these perceptions are happening without really being aware, their are buried deep down, at the unconscious level.

So the real challenge in a partnership is to be different enough to complete each other, but similar enough to be able to communicate.

A good example of this would be a very technical person partnering with a very business wise person, but both speaking reasonably good English. If none of them speaks English, even if they do have what it takes, the partnership will hardly happen, because there’s no similarity. The example is extremely coarse, in real life things will be more subtle.

Under Pressure

In my experience, especially in the beginning of a startup, things are happening lightning fast. There’s hardly any time to do profound behavioral analysis or complete psychological profiles. So you have to rely either on intuition, or to build some sort of a really quick assessment strategy. Something that will work even under extreme pressure.

What worked for me was always extreme honesty. That's my quick assessment strategy. Just put on the table everything you have and demand reciprocity. Be consistent. Stay there. Accept the outcome. And, most important, don’t bullshit people and don’t take bullshit from them.

Whoever goes over this filter will be a good candidate for a long-term partnership.

image source

---

This post is part of a 30 days challenge on business, you can find the entire list of articles here.

---

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.