Commonly, at the beginning of any new project or deal, you hope for the best and enthusiastically look forward to start working. You want to believe your teammates or partners feel the same, and you’re open to giving someone the benefit of the doubt should problems develop. In fact, you may not even see these initial difficulties as problems—rather they are start-up "challenges," and you hope to do all you can to promote progress. Usually, that’s the spirit to keep involvement, commitment, and motivation high. After all, if you start into something new with a huge dose of skepticism, you’ll hold back, not get much done, and put a damper on everyone’s spirits.
Yet, at the same time, keep an eye open for truly serious problems that are signs the project or deal is in trouble. That’s when it pays to surface those issues, see if they can be resolved, and halt or even end the arrangement. In other words, proceed with enthusiasm, yet carefully observe and evaluate. You are essentially keeping your watchfulness on a shelf, where it can check on what’s going on, without interfering with your participation. Yet if necessary you can always pull it off the shelf to say "Hold on," "Let’s look at this," or "Get out and move on." Another way to think of this approach is that you are finding a balance— between participation and observation, between digging in and watching yourself dig, between your right brain’s emotional excitement and your left brain’s rational analysis of what’s going on.
That’s what Delores should have done when she entered into a new partnership with Jacob. She met him at a local business networking group, and her idea was to create some personalized craft items to sell on the Internet to individuals and retail stores doing e-commerce. She had only recently learned how to create Web pages after taking an introductory Front Page class, but Jacob impressed her, since he was at a small table by the wall pitching his Web design skills. He thought her idea would be a good way for him to expand his Web development business by getting into e-commerce himself. Plus he told her, "I love setting up databases. That’s what I do. You just get the information you want to use and I’ll put it in the database."
And so they set up a simple partnership agreement. Delores agreed to provide the information for the database and handle advertising and promotion, while Jacob would provide the Web site and software. Then, since Delores already had some lists of individuals and organizations she had spent several months gathering, they worked out a graduated agreement through an exchange of letters about how to distribute the partnership proceeds—60% to Delores for the first six months, 55% for the next six months, and 50% to each of them after that. Jacob said he would incorporate those percentages into the partnership agreement he would send to her.
Based on that understanding, Delores made some final updates to her lists of retailers and nonprofit organizations, calling to check on current names of owners, addresses, and e-mails. Then, she passed on the information to Jacob to enter into the database. But after Jacob entered her first list of retailers, he told her the entry was taking much longer than expected, and while he appreciated her effort in getting the list together, he felt Delores was getting too much if they started off at 60%. Instead, he wanted to start off with a 50–50 partnership. That would be "fairer" he said, and he would feel more comfortable with such an arrangement.
What Should Delores Do?
Here are some possibilities. In Delores’s place, what would you do and why? What do you think the outcomes of these different options would be?
- Call a halt to the arrangement early on when Jacob seeks to change the agreement. He isn’t sufficiently valuing your own contribution.
- Agree that Jacob’s request is reasonable and the fair thing to do.
- Discuss Jacob’s initial request to change the arrangement more fully and work out a more detailed understanding of who is doing what.
- Insist on keeping the original agreement, even if that means ending the partnership at the outset. After all, a deal is a deal.
- Give Jacob the benefit of the doubt on his offer, since he has a clearer understanding of how much work will be involved in the future.
- Agree to the change, since you did do the work in the past and he’s contributing the work to the partnership now and in the future.
- Agree to the 50–50 split, but tell Jacob he can’t ask you to do more, and get out if he insists.
- Other?
His request sounded reasonable, and Delores wanted to do what was fair, so she agreed. Though she had spent hundreds of hours in the past gathering her material, she tried to see things from Jacob’s point of view. She also felt dependent on Jacob, since he was the one with the Web skills. She believe she couldn’t move ahead without him; and the thought of trying to find another partner, if she even could, was dismaying. So quickly and graciously, Delores agreed. "Sure. I’ll agree if you think that’s fairer," and Jacob faxed her the revised contract, which she signed.
But then, ever so gradually, Jacob started to make other requests that started changing what had been Delores’s understanding of the agreement, so Delores kept doing more and more. Initially, using sales and advertising copy Delores wrote, Jacob had set up the Web site so that customers could place their orders and pay directly online. Then Jacob would process them and send Delores the payment confirmation, so Delores could send out the items with the client’s name and picture. But some clients had questions. At first, Jacob responded to them as part of the order-taking process. But then he asked Delores to take care of this customer contact, since he didn’t have time to do that and finish the Web site. So Delores agreed, spending an hour or two providing information directly to customers who couldn’t or didn’t want to find this information themselves in one of the pages already on the Web. Then, though Jacob had done the original data entry, he asked Delores to learn how to go the Web site, so she could enter new data herself. He quickly squashed Delores’s initial objections. "It’s really easy," he insisted. "Just go there and you’ll see." Yes, it was. But it was also time consuming.
Then, when Delores got a few return e-mails from customers and forwarded them to Jacob, he immediately phoned to berate her, telling her: "In the time you spent sending me the e-mails, you could have gone to the online database and done the entry yourself."
So it went, until Delores felt she was doing almost everything now that the Web site and all the copy she had written for it was online. She was responding to the customer e-mails, gathering new information and updating the database, and writing and placing new promotional copy. So what was Jacob doing? Basically, sending out the order confirmations to Delores to fulfill, when an occasional order came in. But the process of taking on additional responsibiltiees had occurred so gradually that she didn’t realize what had happened until one day, about four months into the partnership, she went to her banker to find out what was in the bank, since Jacob had not been sending her the monthly statements.
"I can’t seem to do anything right," she complained, "and I don’t have the time to do enough advertising and promotion, because I’m doing so much else." That’s when her banker responded: "But you’re the victim here. Your partner has been taking advantage of you, so you’ve been doing his work. He’s defining your contribution to the database differently than you understood when you signed the contract. So now he’s making you do it all."
That’s when Delores suddenly understood. Gradually, she had let Jacob shift more and more responsibilities to her, and she had quietly accepted his reinterpretations of their respective roles in the partnership. He had made his requests to do more so gradually that she didn’t realize how much more she was doing. Plus she had been hesitant to challenge him and rock the boat, since he knew so much more about all the technical and financial details of the business. She was afraid maybe he might even back out. She hadn’t thought to consider whether it might have been better if he did or to examine other possibilities, such as her ability to learn to take over the few things he was doing now or her ability to find another partner.
In any case, Jacob’s actions in passing on so many responsibilities to Delores helped doom the partnership, since she didn’t have time to market and promote the business. Thus, few orders came in, and a few weeks later, Jacob announced that if the partnership didn’t start getting in more orders and making a profit in the next few weeks, he would have to leave it anyway. He had other promising business offers now, and he would be glad to turn over his share of the partnership to her. But there was very little to turn over. The partnership was worth little to anyone, and Delores didn’t have the enthusiasm and energy to continue the project on her own. And so it died.
Unfortunately, Delores’s big mistake came early on in the partnership, though she didn’t realize it until reviewing what happened in hindsight. Certainly, in many cases, a change in arrangements is in order, because as you proceed in a partnership you discover you are playing different roles and one may have more work to do, the other less. But sometimes a change in the rules can portend a dangerous road ahead when one person uses these changes to take advantage of the other. The critical difference is whether the rule change is fair and then whether the changes continue to seem fair or not. So it’s important to monitor what happens after you make a change that seems appropriate at the time.
The first warning sign was when Jacob asked to change the terms of their partnership, and did so on a basis that devalued her own past work and contribution to the project and placed more value on what he was doing now. Another red flag was that he had entered the partnership by telling her how easy it was for him to do the work he did—the database entry, so it wasn’t right for him suddenly to claim it was harder than expected and so get more. Still another cause for concern is that what Jacob was doing was a form of the classic nibble in financial and real estate dealings. He was asking for a little bit more, and after getting an agreement, asking for a little bit more after that. Here the deal was asking Delores to spend more time and do a little bit more in the business, while he did a little bit less, and since time is money, well, you get the idea. Delores’s contribution to the arrangement kept going up and up, while his was going down. It wasn’t the change in the rules that was the problem, but that the repeated changes led to an increasing imbalance in the work each did compared to the money they got. It was like they were two people on a teeter-totter, where as the one was weighted down with more and more work, the other rose higher and higher and got more and more benefit in return for what he was doing.
However, since Delores kept wanting to trust Jacob’s judgment and give him the benefit of the doubt, she never thought to question him; she never thought to say stop or get out before she was further and further into the project. So as she kept contributing so much more time and energy, it kept getting harder and harder to pull the plug.
In a classic financial–real estate nibble, there’s a one-time agreement and the nibble goes on until the contract is written which firms up the deal. But here, what made the situation even worse is that the nibbling continued on into the partnership, making the arrangement more like a classic case of domestic abuse, where the stronger partner (usually male) uses the other’s dependency to gain more and more from the relationship, while the other (usually female) accedes to his demands and gains less and less, only to be "put in her place" and abused some more.
But the dependent partner doesn’t realize this, as her own confidence shrinks and she depends more and more on her abuser. In effect, that was what was happening to Delores, as Jacob kept asking for more and she acceded. She gave him the benefit of the doubt each time and believed she had to continue the partnership because of her dependency on him. Her situation was much like the woman finding excuses to continue an abusive relationship, say for the sake of the kids, as the violence escalates. Generally, the best response in such situations is simply to get out now, while you still can, unless some effective outside intervention occurs, such as counseling to effect radical, healing change.
Likewise, if you enter into any agreement, watch for any signs that in changing the arrangement, someone is sucking you onto a teetertotter where they become increasingly dominant and demanding, and you find yourself contributing more and getting less. A first sign may be a request to change the terms of the original agreement; other warning signs may show up when the other person asks for more and more. If that happens, a good initial response is to discuss fully any changes with a partner and carefully consider his reaction. If he’s willing to discuss them and hear your concerns, that’s a good sign; but if he acts dismissive, puts you down, or reemphasizes his own contribution, that’s a warning to look more closely. When you do, seek to view the situation like a neutral third party rather than giving the other person the benefit of the doubt. How would an outside judge look at what’s going on? Then if you feel the arrangement is becoming unfair and unbalanced, it’s time to get it back into balance or to get out. Otherwise, the arrangement is likely to get more and more unbalanced, and you’ll have more and more invested in the relationship and less and less power to regain that balance as time goes along.
Today’s Take-Aways:
- If someone tries to change an agreement claiming fairness, ask yourself what’s fair from your point of view, not just his or hers.
- It can be fine to change the rules when circumstances change.But don’t let anyone use a rule change as a way to put you at an increasing disadvantage.
- Approach any new opportunity with enthusiasm and commit-ment, along with a dose of wait-and-see observation, so you can figure out if the changes really are reasonable and fair, and be ready to raise questions if you think they’re not.
- Be both participant and observer, believer and skeptic, so you can keep your balance should things start to go wrong.
- If you encounter someone who nibbles, it could be a rat.
- The longer you stay in a trap, the weaker you’ll get; so once you start to feel you are being drawn into a trap, get out then and there.
- When you start to get too dependent on someone, that’s thetime to step back and declare your independence. This way you turn your dependence into Independence Day.