Three kinds of toxic positivity that are tanking our leadership.

Positivity is a popular trait to have, but it isn’t always productive. Here are three forms of positivity I’ve found to be toxic in leadership roles.

1. “The Spirit Award.” Altering the aim.

The Spirit award is a concept in a lot of youth competitions. It’s an award that’s basically given to the team or competitor who is having the most fun. But have you ever noticed how the winner of the competition never wins the Spirit award? You would imagine with all the other awards they’re winning they’re probably having the most fun too. I guess the judges think otherwise.

The problem with spirit awards is it the idea of rewarding good sportsmanship, but the idea of altering the objective and confusing the goal. The goal of a soccer tournament is not to have the most fun. Having fun is important, but the goal is to score the most points. Ignoring missed calls in favor of rewarding alternate achievements is the type of shortsighted positivity that builds complacency on teams.

Imagine listening to a filmmaker talk about a movie that was a commercial flop. What if he said, “Yes, The writing was bad, the acting was bad, the story made no sense, and the CGI with tacky and cheap. But as long as you had a great night out with your friends at the movies, I am happy with the film I made.”

That is not positivity. It’s delusion. Yes, having a good night with your friends is an important part of going to the movies, but that’s not the filmmakers goal. Their goal is to create a good movie. It is you and your friends who make sure that you have a good time. The filmmaker is trying to retroactively define success based on ignoring failures and highlighting what worked, whether or not what worked had anything to do with them or their original goal.

How many Spirit awards are we handing out on our teams? How many poor performers do we exhaust ourselves over trying to find new standards on which to praise them? How many products were total bombs under normal metrics, but were protected by new phantom standards invented totally to dress up failure like success?

2. “The Vader.” Punishing critics for a lack of commitment.

One of my favorite scenes in Star Wars is in A New Hope when the Empire is having its board meeting, and some Junior VP interrupts Darth Vader’s warnings about the powers of the Force. The soon-to-be-choked board member criticizes Vader’s continued reliance on the Force by pointing out truthfully that it has so far failed to produce results, the retrieval of the stolen Death Star plans. Vader responds by Force choking him in front of everyone and calling him out for his “lack of faith.”

But the critic in this situation didn’t have a lack of faith in the Empire or its goals. He had a lack of faith in the tools his leadership chose to achieve that goal. Vader wasn’t protecting the Empire there; he was just protecting himself, his own ego.

We need to get over ourselves sometimes. Critique of a plan is not critique of the mission. No one wants commitment questioned, so if we create an environment where speaking out is equated with a lack of faith, we don’t have positive teams. We have scared teams. We have teams that will never breed leaders. And worst of all, we have teams who are not married to the mission, but are just on the leash of the leader.

3. “The Extra Mile.” Praising perspiration.

A lot of leaders go out of their way to push sacrifice and tenacity as the greatest traits a team member can have. But by the definition of the word, hard work does not have to be effective.

I had a manager once whose pet peeve was when his employees left at exactly 5 PM. He equated staying past five with dedication and hard work. There’s all sorts of silly hypothetical scenarios I could come up with to poke holes in this, but I’ll choose this one: if I’d only been productive for two hours and 20 minutes that entire day but those 20 minutes came after 5 PM, he would view me as a harder worker than the person who worked seven hours and left 2 minutes after five.

In high school, I was the captain of the brass section in my marching band. One day at a competition, I realized I’d forgotten to remind the freshmen to retrieve their helmets from the bus. As the leader, I felt it was my duty to walk all the way across the campus back to the bus, retrieve each helmet, and carry them in my arms back to the dressing room. At 16, I patted myself on the back for my hard work. At 27, I’d chide myself for my poor planning. This form of toxic positivity ruins our teams by putting too much focus on our effort rather than on our effectiveness.

Hard work is not a virtue. Hard work is a distraction. Our goal should never be to work hard, but to work well, to work smart, to work efficiently. There are probably a dozen types of work that are more important than hard work. Hard work covers up for poor planning. Hard work covers up for failing systems. Hard work covers up for bad leadership. Some people believe this means hard work is an X factor, but it’s really more of a crutch.

When we remove this from our mindset, as well as other forms of toxic positivity, we can ditch our fear of criticism and embrace growth in more authentic ways. There’s room on the team bus for the cheerleaders, but we have chosen to be coaches. We owe it to our teams to make sure we are occupying the correct seat.