Stay Curious: Lead with Positivity
Quincy Troupe has just taken on a new role; Quincy is a broadly experienced leader of operations, supply chain – a guy who knows how to get stuff done inside complex organizations. A guy who’s been on many teams and led many teams. Someone I’m proud to call a friend, as well.
Thank you, As Carlos said. I am a businessperson with an operations background. I like to think of myself as engineer-trained, but an artist’s heart. I tend to approach things with both that left and right brain, trying to figure out what the best path for that situation is.
We knew each other from Mars, but your background involves much, much more than that.
The word that I like to use to describe it is “transitions.” Physical transitions, technical transitions, interpersonal transitions. I’ve lived a life where I’ve moved around and done lots of different things across my career – my life, really. I’ve lived in ten to fifteen states, worked across what will be six companies in I don’t know how many different roles. I’ve just been someone who is really attracted to different difficult problems, working primarily with people. There was a stint in my career where I did a corporate engineering job, and I did that for about a year and half – like, “Yeah, no, this doesn’t work for me.” I don’t really like the ebb and flow of doing projects, I like the “get in the scrum and get it done” stuff. Since then, I’ve sort of pivoted and been mostly in teams.
Campbell’s, Con Edison– I worked at Con Ed. That was my first job out of college. I worked at Abbott Nutrition; that was my first food experience. From a food standpoint, I’ve made everything from infant formula to candy to pet food to main meal, and last, alcoholic beverages, for those of us that like to imbibe.
By the way, for those of you who aren’t from around the New York City area, Con Edison – Consolidated Edison – is the main power company in the New York City area.
So, Quincy, we’re both men of a certain age, we’ve been around a little while, so I hope you can tap into this rich memory of yours. When you got into business, however many decades ago that was, what was one of the first things you learned about being an effective team member?
Right away, Con Ed. Right out of college, 22 years old, immediately put into a management development program in maintenance. New York City, union shops, difficult environment. I didn’t know squat, and here I am, working with people who are twice my age, who know way more than me, and I’m supposed to be the leader. A lot of times, young people – and some of us of a certain age – think that leadership is about knowing and telling. I discovered really quickly that it really was not about that; it was about creating an environment where those who had ideas could bring those ideas out and you could find a solution that worked. And I’ll tell a quick story, if I might, to drive that point home.
So, my supervisor was a Greek immigrant. He gave me this job to get this 50-foot, flexible, iron spiraled hose about 50 feet in the air, from the sub-basement up to the mezzanine. There’s no easy way to do it. We had a team of about five or six guys to do this job.
Pardon my asking, but what was this thing for?
I can’t even remember, Carlos. But let me tell you, man – obviously this was a long time ago, but I still remember it today. It was that sort of a moment for me. You would think that lifting this hose up, maybe 50 feet in the air, shouldn’t be that hard, especially with six people who are experienced. We struggled with this for about an hour to an hour and half, and everybody was really frustrated trying to figure out how to do this. I went back to my supervisor and said, “We can’t figure this out. I don’t know what to do.” He says, “Listen. If the Egyptians could figure out how to make pyramids, you guys can figure out how to get that hose up to the next floor.”
That’s helpful advice.
Yeah, it’s like, “Okay.” So I went back to the team and, you know, sheepishly tried to figure it out. I got very directive to try and get them to figure out what to do. And that was not helping. We had one of those moments where one person got really frustrated, vented his frustration, and it required me, then, as the leader, to respond to that with the entire team. This guy’s name was Mike; he was about 6’5”, just a big burly guy. I was scared to death. I thought he was gonna, like, crush me. I walked up to him and I said, “You know, Mike, I admit, I don’t know what the answer is here. But what would be more helpful is, if you have a better idea, for you to actually suggest that and help bring the team along with us.” He turned purple. He was embarrassed that that was the path he took – to sort of vent his frustration. And we had a good dialogue about it later. But it taught me a lesson: I don’t have to have the answer. I don’t have to go to my supervisor, who didn’t give me a great solution. The answer was right there in the team. And I had not done a good job, as the leader, recognizing that they probably have ideas about what we should do about it.
So, his frustration: This is a member of the team…how much of that had to do with you, and how much had to do with the situation?
I think a little bit of both. Young whippersnapper, eager to make an impact, we were working really hard to do this… Have you ever had one of those things that you’re trying to do that looks really simple and it’s not, and you get more and more frustrated? You’ve got a little screw you’re trying to get in a hole and you can’t quite get the screw in the hole? Drives you nuts. It was that kind of a problem. What seemed simple on the surface just wasn’t. And I was not doing the best job of extracting creative thinking from the team. And that was my job.
Managing a team Day 1 of your first job
So your first job out of college, you were managing people.
Yeah, from day one.
Day one, wow. What a challenge.
I always thought, “What the hell is wrong with these people, putting someone who’s got no leadership experience in charge of people?” But in hindsight, it was an enormous gift. I learned so much about people. What moves them, what doesn’t move them, how to talk to them, how to listen. Listening is way more important than talking. Managing conflict – you know, there’s always conflict. The best lessons I’ve ever learned have come through conflict.
Over the years, you and I have talked quite a bit. I often find that you’re sharing your frustration with your colleagues. You’ve been frustrated with the way they’ve been showing up and behaving as members of a team. What about lessons you’ve learned about being a good colleague? You’re always very honest and forthcoming about your own shortcomings. What are some lessons you’ve learned about showing up for your peers?
I think the first thing is that everybody’s human. Everybody has good moments and they have bad moments. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a colleague was from Mars, in a moment like that: assume positive intent. Everybody wants to get to a good place; nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to do a terrible job or frustrate you. That was a great piece of advice. Then, the second piece he added to that: remain curious. What he meant by that was, if we’re having a disagreement, it isn’t necessarily with each other. It’s with whatever idea we’re debating. So one of the two of us, in a given moment, has to be more curious about understanding the other’s view to bridge whatever that difference is.
That’s the first thing I would say. Over the years, I’ve really tried to work harder at that. It’s really easy to lose sight of that, though. So, assume positive intent, and remain curious. It’s hard to do in the moment. You get locked in on something, a particular point. You think you’re right or you think the other person’s wrong, and they may think the same thing about you, but you can forget what you have in common, which is that we want a particular outcome. Trying to realign yourself on that outcome where you have shared interest, shared purpose, is a good path to being a good teammate.
I’m a basketball player; I’ve played basketball my whole life. I was primarily a shooting guard, but I’ve played multiple positions. So I pride myself on being a good teammate in that regard. I’m not an eagle-first sort of leader; I will do whatever my skill set allows me to do for the team. I try to skate where the opportunities are. But I’m human, and there are times when I want a certain outcome, and I get locked in on a certain outcome, and I forget that other people have other outcomes, too, that they might want. What makes teams greater is when they can blend those outcomes so that the whole becomes greater than the parts. In those moments when I’ve not done that, that’s not when I’ve been at my best. But I try to always remember: assume positive intent, remain curious.
As I listen to you, and I put myself into the position of a team member who’s in a perhaps heated debate about something –
And you’ve seen me in those.
You remind us we’re all just human, and we have our failings. One for me has always been– I’m a little bit like you, I have something of an artistic background. Part of that is my emotionality. I think the old expression is “I wear my heart on my sleeve.” I would be a great person to play poker with because I cannot hide what’s going on in my head or my heart. I get the sense that you, too, have a strong emotional makeup.
I do.
How do you manage that? You get into these situations where you want to remain curious, assume positive intent, and yet you’re bubbling inside. What do you do?
One of the things you told me a long time ago – that, in those moments when you get that way, your active listening skills tend to drop to zero. Like, immediately. You can’t hear anything, and your breathing becomes really shallow. I try to become more aware. You don’t know it when it’s happening, but you can catch it when you’re in it, if you’re really trying to focus on it. In my grizzled age of 56 now, I’m more aware of those things about myself. If I’m locked in, with Carlos or something, neither one of us wants that experience. So I then go inward for a second to say, “Why am I responding to Carlos this way? I respect him, I admire him, I like him, he’s super smart. Why am I responding to him this way, because surely there’s something good in what he’s trying to tell. Let me pause.” So, check my breathing, open up my ears, and then start asking questions.
Get curious
Get curious. “Okay, Carlos, let’s just take a breather. Walk me back through from the beginning. What’s the outcome you’re trying to solve for?” Make sure that we’re locked in on that, and then we can walk back to where the disagreement is. What I’m trying to do then is really find a place where we diverge, but where we can be okay with that divergence. Is there some nugget, at the point of divergence, where we can get to one or the other in a safe way?
Managing Conflict: What do they want?
I ask about the outcome they want. So, one of your tactics, then, in dealing with emotional conflict – you find it helpful to anchor it in an outcome. “Where are we trying to get?”
In a business setting, for sure. If we’re just having a debate over scotch, no. Then it’s just freewheeling. But in a business setting, we’re generally trying to solve something. An opportunity, an issue, something. So, for me, it’s most easy to know, do we agree on what it is that we’re trying to get to? If we don’t, well, we start there. If we don’t agree on that, let’s just talk about that. If we do agree on that, and there’s multiple paths, then we have something to work with. And honestly, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes, even when you find common ground with someone, the other person just wants what they want. At that point, when I recognize that, I think about, “Well, how important is this to me?” And if it’s really important to me, then we’ve got to have a conversation about that. You just want what you want – at least, that’s my perception. You’re not willing to entertain anything other than that path right there. What’s that about? They might say the same thing to me. I might just want what I want. Then, when confronted, I’ll say, “You’re right, I do just want what I want. Give it to me!”
That kind of honesty brings a certain level of comfort.
And even that is a form of alignment or agreement.
Managing politics and trust
You’ve played a pretty high level in some companies, where things can get political. People have agendas where they’re not really being straight with you about what they want, what they’re trying to achieve. How do you maneuver in political situations where you have to have a certain amount of circumspection.
Yes, that’s a great word for it.
Because even at low levels, politics can come into play if somebody’s working an agenda and they’re not talking about it.
I think at the root of it, for me, is a question of trust. Where I’ve gotten to on this is, “Can I trust Carlos to be who he is all the time?” Even if I don’t agree with your motive, can I trust that he is going to be moved to act in a consistent way all the time in similar situations? And if the answer is yes, then I don’t have to agree with you about your motive. I may not even like it. But what I try to get to is, okay, Carlos is who he is. He’s moved to do what he’s moved to do for the reasons that he’s moved to do it. Now Carlos and I have to figure out, how do we blend our skills, our experiences, our roles to get to those outcomes? And the politics becomes how each of us moves through the world to meet those same objectives, right?
So, let me give an example. I’m not someone who has chased roles, titles, or things like that, but I have worked very closely with people who have.
Let’s call that politics. The people chasing the title, chasing the power. That’s the essence of politics.
Yeah. There’s a part of me that does not like that. It feels very much to me like they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. That’s my worldview on it. Theirs is a different worldview. Regardless, there have been instances where someone like that and I have had to work together on a particular problem. And they may feel the same way about me and my politics: “Well, that’s very naïve, let everyone rise to their best self” and stuff like that.
Managing a positive attitude when confronted by politically motivated team members
You’re saying that person has that judgment about you, that those things are naïve?
Yeah, perhaps. Like, “The world’s not organized that way. You’re in the arena, fight! You know, pick up a sword, man, nobody’s putting it down.” We have to find a way, though, to get to shared outcomes and trust each other’s intentions behind that. That you’re not going to stab me in the back to make yourself look better, and I’m not going to undermine you – because that’s really where my head goes when I start thinking about politics and why someone is doing a certain thing. It’s about status, power, and stuff like that, as opposed to “What’s the best thing for the team in a given situation?”
Politics tends to be a zero-sum game. To get to the place I want to be, I might need to get Quincy out of my way. Politics can get personal because you might be a barrier to this person’s desire to advance or have their status enhanced. That’s when it gets ugly.
I think we have to remember that the originating idea is that we’re in teams. There can only be one captain. It’s not my job to pick the captain, it’s somebody else’s job to pick the captain. My job is to be the best teammate in that given moment, and that other person’s job is to be the best teammate. Hopefully, the person whose job it is to pick the captain picks the best person, and maybe that’s not me, because there might be interpersonal or cultural reasons why that other person might be the better choice – that are not about getting shit done, that are not about lubrication of the social environment, all the things that I do really well, I think. It might be about someone being quicker to provide clear direction and architecture. So I put that aside and say, “It’s not my job to pick the captain. That’s somebody else’s job. If they pick this other person over me, then it is what it is.”
You are very accepting.
Good and bad shit happens to good and bad people. I choose happiness. I choose optimism. I choose to want to be in a walk through life that adds to everyone else’s walk in a way that I feel is positive.
So you choose to see the best in people.
I do.
And that goes back to this idea of positive intent, and you’ve just decided that that’s gonna be how you roll.
That is how I roll. Some people make it really friggin’ hard, I will say that. [laughs] But even in that, I say, I’m sure they’re not choosing to make it really hard for me to see positive intent in what they’re doing. They’re just really shitty at it.
Even in the toughest situation, you manage to ground yourself in positivity and possibility, it sounds like.
Transitioning to COO at Zevia
I think so, Carlos. One thing about life, for me – and I talked about those transitions – adversity; it’s tough. When you change a lot – situations, locations, circumstances – it’s hard. When I look back across my life and I describe it as just continuous transitions, I’ve built up this innate ability to just get through it. To find the crest of the wave and ride it, and gain energy, strength, knowledge, experience from it. And I enjoy it. There was probably a moment when I could have shrunk from it and gone the other way, but I didn’t. And so now, when I walk into these moments of transition, like me going to Zevia now – I’m going to be the chief operating officer for Zevia; it’ll be the first time I’ve ever been a chief operating officer – I am not at all scared about it. I’m anxious, I’m nervous, in a positive way. Wow, what a great new set of experiences that I’m going to unlock. I’m going to be responsible for supply chain, part of development, innovation, and IT. I know a little bit about all those things; I’m going to have to integrate them into a real cohesive strategy for the company, with my peers with whom I’ve worked.
You’ve worked with them because you’re on the board.
Yeah, but that’s a different angle. Now I’m going to be in the trench, at a level of detail with them, and we’re going to have some disagreements about stuff. We’re going to have lots of opportunities and we’re gonna have to decide which ones to go after. On the one hand, you might look at that and say, “Wow, lots of points of failure.” But I don’t really see that. I see the points of opportunity.
That’s a beautiful thing.
Yeah, so I’m really excited.
Resilience
Some of what you’re describing strikes me as resilience. You’ve developed a kind of self-taught resilience. You’ve put yourself into situations where you’ve had to say, “Okay, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m gonna figure it out.” You’re an African-American male, growing up in American society, where that can create all kinds of problems.
Has. Definitely.
How much is that a part of this resilience you’ve developed?
I think that is a big part of it. I think in general, culturally, African-Americans are tremendously resilient. We talk about it in indirect ways. What do I mean by that? We know how to laugh. When we get together, it’s music, food, telling stories, lifting each other up.
My daughter, Mina, just graduated from the University of Michigan. I am so proud of her. Three sessions, three graduation ceremonies: one was her department, where your chair and everybody has the students walk across the stage and reads their names, it’s a super celebration, it’s great like that. Then there’s the big commencement, where everybody gets into the big house where the football team plays and they give big speeches; that’s really nice too. But the one that was most impactful: the last one. The Black alumni come together, and they throw a celebration for all these Black graduates - undergrads, Masters, PhD. It is like going to a Black church. And if you’ve never been to a Black church, you won’t know what I mean. When you go into a Black church – a Black Baptist church – it’s very musical. There’s a storytelling aspect of it. It is uplifting in its feel, rhythm, etcetera. These kids walk into the auditorium to music, and sort of a dance. It was beautiful! Everybody’s standing and clapping and shouting, and it was so moving.
That’s what our community is like, and we do that for each other. So that resilience that you’re talking about, that is part of our experience. And what makes my community different from almost every other community on the planet is that we all came from different parts of Africa. If we could trace us back to our roots, we wouldn’t all necessarily have common roots. But when we got here, we got forced to blend into a community because we looked the same. That created a need to bind community and create shared ways of language, music, literature, art, all across the board, that makes us a peculiar population within the overall population of the United States and the world. “Black,” in and of itself, is a cultural designation, not an ethnic designation. I could walk into a room in a place where I don’t know anybody, but I see a Black person there and we nod to each other, because there’s a cultural connection there that transcends any sort of national or geographic boundary. There is a resilience there. We draw from each other.
I think at the end of the day, the thing I love about the workplace and humanity is the ways we come together. To me, that’s the most rewarding part of living. That coming together is, to me, the essence of humanity.
Absolutely.
What brings us together?
And I love the way that your resilience links into the work that I’m fascinated by, which is, “What does bring us together? What helps us be with each other?” I’m a tall white guy, so I come up in a very different kind of world than you, but it is my bonds with people that I cherish just like you, so I think we have that in common anyway.
We have way more than that in common. A shared pursuit of excellence, a shared pursuit of knowledge and desire to help uplift others, a shared desire to explore the unexplored, Carlos. Our walk in the woods – we cover so much intellectual and physical ground. [laughs] It’s just awesome.
Quincy and I spent a fair amount of time walking through the woods and just talking about whatever comes up. I thought this was going to be good; I had no idea that it would be so freakin’ wonderful. Thank you, Quincy.
I have so appreciated our friendship over the years. I’m very happy to have done this. We do this sort of behind the scenes; it’s kind of cool to do an act like this now.
You can get to know more about Quincy by looking at his bio on LinkedIn. I look forward to having you all again on the next episode of Teaming With Ideas.
About Quincy Troupe
Mr. Troupe is a 25-year veteran of the consumer-packaged goods, food and beverage industry, and has served in a variety of leadership roles in manufacturing, engineering, supply chain strategy and planning, human resources, and enterprise shared services. Most recently, he served as Senior Vice President of Supply Chain at The Boston Beer Company, where he led a multi-year capacity and capability expansion program and operational improvements that enabled Boston Beer to more than double in size and become one of the fastest growing beverage companies in the world. From 2010 to 2015, he served as Vice President of Supply Chain, and subsequently, Vice President of Manufacturing and Supply Chain Strategy, for the Pepperidge Farm brand at Campbell Soup Company. Prior to Campbell Soup, Mr. Troupe served in various roles at Mars, Incorporated, including as Director of Mars Chocolate Innovation and Operating Systems. Mr. Troupe has served as a Director on the Board for Zevia PBC since June 2021. He earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.