If you have ever attended a wedding ceremony, you probably have witnessed an exchange of wedding vows either exactly or similar to one of the samples below.
Sample Religious Wedding Vows
“I, ___, take you, ___, for my lawful wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part.” “I, ___, take you, ___, to be my husband/wife.
“I, ___, take thee, ___, to be my wedded husband/wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I pledge thee my faith [or] pledge myself to you.”
Nondenominational Wedding Vows
“I, ______, take you, ______, to be no other than yourself. Loving what I know of you, trusting what I do not yet know, I will respect your integrity and have faith in your abiding love for me, through all our years, and in all that life may bring us.”
“______, I take you as my wife/husband, with your faults and your strengths, as I offer myself to you with my faults and my strengths. I will help you when you need help, and turn to you when I need help. I choose you as the person with whom I will spend my life.”
On the wedding day these vows sound sweet, loving and lofty to aspire to, and why not, the couple is getting married.
What will happen is now statistically portrayed?
In a recent lecture, marriage expert Hellen Chen assigned a number to this inevitability when she asserted that 85 percent of relationships end in a break up. Seeing as only the elite few relationships end in marriage, and 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, this really can’t come as too much of a shock to anyone.
All of this to lay the ground work to the topic of another marriage.
The Co-CEO marriage is taking place more frequently than ever before in the history of business due mostly to the number of startups taking place.
How are Co-CEO’s like a marriage?
- both seeking to have a successful journey together
- you will spend a lot of time with each other
- each must be able to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses
- there has to be full trust between each other
- open communication with each other is a must.
In a business, if the happy couple starts to not get along with each other things may go poorly quite rapidly.
A few items Co-CEO’s should do immediately:
- similar to a pre-nuptial agreement – write up the break-up agreement and it must be fair and legally executed
- have defined roles, responsibilities and job descriptions
- each take a personality assessment and a debrief with an expert, then come together and all three conduct a debrief and create a
communication plan with each other - plan time together offsite – yes this sounds like date night – do it. This will create time away from the constant fires to be put out to review and discuss the vision and the plan and to reinforce why you both agreed to do this in the first place.
This may sound like what many refer to as soft skills. Maybe these are soft skills. However, there is nothing soft about the crash and burn of two squabbling Co-CEO’s of a business in front of their employees and customers.
It is my view it takes a tougher and wiser person, make that two people, to follow these suggestions and be prepared. It’s better to be prepared than to be the thick skulled knuckleheads who cannot be bothered with soft skills because they are never wrong anyway.
Mitch Tublin is the CEO and Founder of Wenkroy International LLC a boutique consulting company with a main focus on Strategic Business Consulting, Training and Business Coaching. Our passion is to take people to the next level in their life and in their business.
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