The Pressure Cooker: Managing Politics When There Is Nowhere to Hide

You can feel the air change in the room.

It happens when a specific person walks in, or perhaps when a specific face pops up on the Zoom grid. The easy banter stops. The Slack channel goes silent. People start looking at their phones or typing furiously to look busy.

You know something is wrong. You know that two of your key employees are at war. They are polite to each other in the all-hands meeting, but you can see the subtext. You can see the eye rolls. You can feel the friction slowing down every decision.

For a founder, this is baffling.

You told yourself that you were building a company without politics. You thought that because you were small, you were immune to the bureaucracy and backstabbing of the corporate world. You thought you were a “family.”

But here is the reality.

Small teams do not have less politics than big companies. They often have more.

In a large corporation, you can transfer to a different department to get away from a toxic manager. In a startup of five people, there is nowhere to hide. Every personality quirk, every disagreement, and every stylistic difference is magnified by the proximity.

This friction is not just an annoyance. It is an existential threat.

When a machine has sand in the gears, it requires more energy to produce the same output. Interpersonal conflict is sand in your gears. If your team is spending 30 percent of their mental energy navigating around each other’s egos, you are effectively operating with 30 percent less capital.

Most political issues in startups stem from a single lie we tell ourselves.

“We have a flat hierarchy.”

It sounds egalitarian. It sounds modern. But sociologists have studied this for decades, and they have found that there is no such thing as a structureless group. Humans are hierarchical animals. When we enter a room, we immediately scan for status.

When you refuse to create a formal hierarchy, a “Shadow Hierarchy” forms in its place.

This shadow structure is based on things that have nothing to do with merit. It is based on who talks the loudest. It is based on who has been friends with the founder the longest. It is based on charisma rather than competence.

The danger of the shadow hierarchy is that it is unaccountable. In a formal structure, you know who is responsible for the decision. In a flat structure, the person with the most social capital makes the decision, but takes no responsibility if it fails.

This breeds resentment.

New employees feel like they are walking through a minefield. They do not know who holds the real power, so they have to play politics just to survive.

To fix this, you must be explicit about authority. You do not need to become a corporate dictator, but you do need to define who owns the decision. Clarity is the antidote to politics.

The most common mechanism of toxicity in small teams is something psychologists call “triangulation.”

It works like this.

• Person A has a problem with Person B. But instead of talking to Person B, they complain to Person C.

• Person C wants to be a supportive friend. So they listen. They validate. They say, “Wow, you are right, Person B is being unreasonable.”

• Person A feels better. They feel heard. But the problem is not solved. In fact, it is worse. Now Person C is biased against Person B. A coalition has formed.

This happens constantly in startups. It happens in Slack DMs. It happens at happy hours.

As the leader, you are often Person C. An employee comes to you to vent about a colleague. Your instinct is to listen and solve the problem for them.

Do not do this.

When you allow triangulation, you are subsidizing cowardice. You are teaching your team that the way to solve conflict is to politicize it rather than address it.

You must enforce a rule of direct feedback. If someone comes to you with a complaint about a peer, ask one question: “Have you told them this?”

If the answer is no, the conversation ends. You must push the friction back to the source. You can offer to mediate the conversation, but you cannot have it for them.

Why do these conflicts start in the first place?

Usually, it is not because you hired bad people. It is because of a cognitive glitch called the Fundamental Attribution Error.

We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by their actions.

If you miss a deadline, it is because you were overworked and the client changed the scope. You know your intent was good. If your colleague misses a deadline, it is because they are lazy or disorganized.

In a small, high-pressure environment, information asymmetry is rampant. You assume everyone knows why you made a decision. They do not.

Remote work makes this significantly worse. In an office, you see someone staying late. You see them stressed. You have context for their behavior. On Zoom, you only see the output. You miss the struggle.

Text communication strips away nuance. A direct message that was meant to be efficient reads as passive-aggressive. A delayed response is interpreted as a slight.

To combat this, you need to manufacture context.

You need to create spaces where people can explain the “why” behind their actions, not just the “what.” This is why retrospectives are critical. They are not just for fixing process; they are for recalibrating empathy.

Resentment does not happen overnight. It accumulates.

Think of every small annoyance as a charge in a battery. Someone interrupts you in a meeting. Charge. Someone leaves dirty dishes in the sink. Charge. Someone writes a sloppy line of code. Charge.

Eventually, the battery is full. And then, one day, something small happens. Maybe someone forgets to update a Trello card.

And the battery explodes.

The person snaps. They yell. They quit.

Everyone else is confused. “It was just a Trello card,” they say. But it wasn’t about the card. It was about six months of undischarged voltage.

Your job as a founder is to create mechanisms to discharge the battery before it explodes. You need a culture of continuous, low-stakes feedback.

If people feel safe saying, “Hey, it frustrated me when you interrupted me,” in the moment, the charge dissipates. If they hold it in, it becomes a weapon.

We cannot eliminate conflict. In fact, we should not want to. A startup without conflict is a startup without ideas. If everyone agrees, you are likely missing something.

But there is a difference between cognitive conflict (fighting about ideas) and affective conflict (fighting about people).

You want the former and need to crush the latter.

You need a Conflict Protocol. This is a set of agreed-upon rules for how to fight.

One effective rule is the “24-Hour Rule.” If you are angry, you must wait 24 hours before sending the feedback. But you must send it within 48 hours. You cannot let it fester.

Another rule is “Assume Positive Intent.” This sounds like a cliché, but it is a rigorous intellectual discipline. It requires you to stop and ask, “What is the most generous interpretation of this person’s behavior?”

Finally, we must talk about the founder’s role in the drama.

You are the ultimate model. If you talk badly about employees behind their backs, they will do it to each other. If you avoid conflict, they will hide their problems.

You set the political weather.

If you are seeing politics in your organization, look in the mirror. Are you playing favorites? Are you hoarding information? Are you triangulating?

The culture of your company is not what you write on the wall. It is the behavior you tolerate.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the chemistry just does not work.

There are people who thrive on chaos. There are people who use politics as a sport. In a small team, you cannot afford to rehabilitate them.

One toxic person in a company of five is not 20 percent of the problem. They are 100 percent of the problem because they infect every interaction.

We often wait too long to remove these people because they are high performers. They bring in the sales. They write the best code.

But you have to measure their net impact. If they produce 10 units of value but subtract 5 units of value from three other people due to emotional friction, their net impact is negative.

Protect the team. Protect the peace.

Building a business is hard enough without fighting a civil war inside your own office.