I’ve spent the last two weekends sitting outside the grocery store watching Scouts sell popcorn. Selling popcorn is harder than it looks, and by hour three I was starting to question what on earth I was doing there. So, as with anyone who writes about leadership, I started to wonder if I could spin this into a list of lessons learned to share with you here. (Feed two birds with one scone and all that.)
Lesson 1: You can count the nos, but pretty soon, they’ll start to count you.
When learning to sell popcorn, one suggestion seems to come up a lot - count how many times people say “no” to you. Early in the day, this is a great motivator; your conversion rate is something like six nos for every sale. Not too shabby. But after a 4-hour shift, things start to look pretty bleak. Eventually, they were closer to fifteen nos for every sale, and I stopped counting. What was hugely motivating in the beginning was only serving to point out our failures.
But then I noticed that this didn’t take into account donations to the troop or to the purchase of popcorn for the local fire department. Our measuring stick made it seem like we were falling short, but in reality we were doing fine.
Middle managers tend to do this with every metric. How many 1-on-1s did I have this quarter? What was my team’s response time for tickets? How many projects are on-time and on-budget? These can be great when things are going well, or even when you use them as a starting point for growth, but for some, the thing you choose to count ends up being evidence of you falling short.
To put it in Positive Intelligence® terms, your Judge steps in and says - let me tell you why you failed, why they did it wrong, and why this would never work in the first place.1 The Judge may not have created the metrics for your team - that was probably senior leaders - but the Judge knows how to use those against you anyway.
But what things never show up in a metric? The person on your team that came to you before something became a problem, looking for help troubleshooting. Or maybe it was the tiny flame you put out before it could become a raging inferno. There are a lot of successes that go unnoticed because there isn’t a box to check for them.
What are you counting that used to be helpful? Or what are you not measuring that’s going right?
Lesson 2: Is the duck just getting in the way?
In the span of several hours focused on a single task, you need to try something to keep things interesting. For us, that showed up as an inflatable duck-rider costume. Anything to make it more entertaining, right? Our thinking was - you will definitely get people’s attention, and surely that will lead to more sales.
But it didn’t. Yes, people paid attention. But that did not prompt them to buy popcorn. In fact, for the hour that the duck was in play, we did fewer sales and fewer donations. (This is what happens when your mom is analytical.) Reviewing the data, it was clear - the Scouts did better selling popcorn as themselves, without riding a duck. The Scouts were better able to connect on a personal level when there wasn’t a duck in the middle.
How often do we get bored in the day-to-day of our work and reach for a new, shiny thing to try? Human nature has us looking for ways to improve (which is great - why else would we need coaches?), but are we looking because we’re tired of the humdrum or because something isn’t working the way it should? If your strongest asset as a leader is holding your team together, then trying to lead like the person next to you gets in the way. You’ll just end up putting a duck between you and the people you want to lead.
What’s your duck this week? Where are you relying on performance instead of your strengths?
Lesson 3: It’s not really about the popcorn.
Why do people buy popcorn? After all, they could have bought it at a fraction of the price from the grocery store they just walked out of. But people aren’t really buying popcorn; they’re backing the kid. One man stopped to buy popcorn because he was an Eagle Scout and remembered selling popcorn himself. He said to the Scouts - you understand that I don’t care about the bag of popcorn; I care about you. People wanted to support the kids in front of them who just wanted to go to camp. The bag of popcorn was just the fringe benefit.
As a middle manager, your team is following you. You interpret the decisions from above that neither you nor your team chose. You explain the new process and why it is important for working well with other teams. Some of those processes probably feel like a bag of overpriced popcorn, but your team buys it anyway because they trust you. Your team doesn’t stick with you because your processes are amazing (though I’m sure they are), they stick with you because you gave them a chance to show their strengths when you put them in charge of that big project. They stick with you because you listen to their input and incorporate it into the plan. They stick with you because you step back and let them do the thing they do best without hovering over them.
What is your team doing this week because they trust you, even if they’re not sure of the process itself?
Reflect and Act
In each of these cases, the scoreboard wasn’t counting what mattered. Counting nos missed the donations. Wearing the duck costume focused on attention and not sales. And it wasn’t about popcorn anyway.
Reflect. Go back and look at the questions in each section above. What measuring stick are you using on the wrong thing?
Act. Choose one of these options:
Add one line to the scoreboard. Pick one thing that’s going right but never gets counted (the donations) and write it down this week.
Name the duck and set it down. Choose one thing you’re doing for attention or out of boredom and stop it for a week. See what changes.
Ask your team. Ask one person what they’d want you to keep doing. That’s the Lesson 3 version: find out what they’re actually buying.
Stop counting one thing. Drop one metric you track for yourself (not the ones required from above) for a week and notice whether the Judge gets quieter.
If you want more real talk about leading people and yourself, there’s more where this came from. Got a specific mess you’re in the middle of? Book a free call and we’ll look at it together.
The Judge, the Saboteurs, the Sage and its five powers all come from Shirzad Chamine's Positive Intelligence® (2012), along with the PQ® assessment I use with clients. POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE® and PQ® are trademarks of Positive Intelligence, LLC. The framework is his. The conversations and examples are mine.
Love the duck part - so true and helpful! Going to keep that one!
I love this reframing here! I did my Positive Intelligence training a few years ago, and this is such a good reminder that the Judge loves a metric…even when we’re measuring the wrong thing 🤭