Before you flip the board

I was not a gracious loser as a kid.

If I lost a board game, I felt cheated. I blamed the dice. I said the rules were stupid. I was sure someone had made them up on the spot just to ruin my day. And sometimes, after all that, I would flip the board and march away.

Maybe you were that kid, too. Or you knew one.

When something goes wrong, the mind moves fast. Before we’ve even thought through what happened, we’re already protecting ourselves. Looking for the bad bounce, the unfair call, the reason it wasn’t really on us. The first instinct is rarely ownership. It’s defense.

Leaders do it too. We just get better words for it.

The market shifted. The team didn’t execute. The customer changed expectations. Leadership moved the goalposts. The competition has this or that. It all sounds reasonable. And sometimes it may even be true.

But that doesn’t always make it useful.

When I was head of retail at Bose, stores would sometimes tell me they didn’t have enough traffic to make their numbers. They’d want their goals reduced or would ask for more marketing money.

I understood the concern. Traffic matters. You can’t sell to customers who never walk in the door.

But I never started with traffic.

I started with the conversion rate. I looked at customer satisfaction scores. I wanted to know what happened with the customers who did come in. Were we making the most of the opportunity we already had?

That changed the conversation and what we did.

Traffic might have been part of the issue, but it was not where we started. We started with what we owned before we explained what we couldn't control. Once we'd done that, the explanation stopped being a defense and became something more useful — information.

Whatever challenge you're facing, start the same way.

What are the things you own?

What are you doing well?

What could you do better?

Only then look at the challenge itself and figure out how to work around it or use it to your advantage. 

What you can't do is get defensive. Or, as I once did, flip the board.