It Takes Two

How Often Should You Talk?

Some of the closest partnerships are between people who rarely talk to each other. It sounds counterintuitive: How can you collaborate without communicating? But it happens every day. Many partners who have created healthy, mature relationships don't feel the need to confer on every decision. In fact, they can go days without seeing each other and still feel confident about their collaboration.

"If you've done the hard work" of building a partnership, says Paul Edwards, "you reach a point where you don't need to discuss how certain things will get done. You already know how your partner will do it." In Teaming Up, he and his wife, Sarah, argue that successful partnerships pass through four stages. During the first three phases, partners sort out goals and responsibilities. Then they reach the "performing stage," when decisions get made quickly and when the partnership functions without a great deal of discussion. "By this stage, you don't need to talk so much," Edwards says, "because you've gotten over the early hurdles."

And you probably won't have time to talk anyway. Since Smith and Masterson founded US Interactive, Smith has been based in New York City and Masterson has worked out of Medford, New Jersey. Early on, the two partners spent three days a week together, taking turns making the 90-minute commute. These days, they see each other less than once a week - and most of that time is spent with the entire executive team. "There is a lot less collaboration now, and a lot more trust," says Smith. "We're working 12 hours a day. We can't bounce everything off each other."

Of course, when the pace is so fast, there's a danger that partners will drift apart. That's why most successful partners establish simple rituals to ensure regular communication and to prevent serious issues from festering. At US Interactive, for example, Smith, Masterson, and the executive team conduct a conference call every Friday at noon and convene for a half-day, face-to-face meeting every two weeks. Everyone knows not to schedule conflicting meetings at those times, since these are the periods when internal communication takes priority.

The three founding partners at UpStart Communications, a high-tech public-relations firm based in Emeryville, California, go a step further. They organize not only a two-hour meeting of the "principals committee" every Friday morning but also a three-day retreat every three months. On these retreats, the partners bring along Pamela York Klainer, an organizational consultant, who acts as a kind of group therapist. "She helps us sort out whatever issues we have as an organization," says Kimberly Fox, 36, one of the partners at UpStart. Fox emphasizes that although the retreats are serious business, the partners try not to be too serious. They always include at least one night out on the town: "We don't ever want to forget that work should be fun."

Still, prescheduled communications can't capture the magic that inspires many great partnerships - the brainstorming, the improvisation, and the accidental creativity that come from working closely and talking frequently. Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't write their music during quarterly retreats; Penn and Teller don't invent new routines in conference calls.

Which is why, at Sapient Corp., a fast-growing technology-consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, cofounders Jerry Greenberg, 33, and J. Stuart Moore, 36, share an office and sit at desks that are exactly eight inches apart. They also require each senior manager in the company to share an office with a peer from another department. The rest of the staff sit in open spaces. These arrangements "make it easy for people to take five minutes between phone calls to talk," says Moore, who notes that his partner is out of the office on business about three days a week. "They also send a message about how important we believe teamwork is."

Who Does What?

When Moore and Greenberg founded Sapient, Moore was responsible for internal operations, such as creating and delivering the software, while Greenberg focused on external matters like sales and finance. This division between front-office and back-office operations is typical, according to Sarah Edwards: "People usually team up with a partner who possesses complementary skills. Often one is the inside person, and the other is the outside person." Making that division explicit, she says, "avoids ego issues and keeps people from stepping on each other's toes."

But in the most successful partnerships, she adds, boundaries remain loose, so that partners have the freedom to take on new duties, to drop old ones, and otherwise to grow and stay fresh. At Sapient, for example, Moore says that he and Greenberg often divvy up responsibilities for hiring or marketing according to "who has the passion and energy for it at the moment." And when Greenberg, who is responsible for relations with investors on Wall Street, just can't bring himself to get on another plane to New York, Moore happily fills in for him.