Can you get a sense of your situational plus-minus score?
Plus-minus is a statistic used primarily in ice hockey to assess how effective players are, beyond the number of goals or assists they might personally achieve. In rough terms, a player’s score goes up 1 for every goal their team scores when they are on the ice, and down one for every goal their opponent scores. Using the plus-minus can tell observers how effective a player is in a broader way than just measuring points earned through scoring.
There’s plenty of ways to think about a life plus-minus or a choral plus-minus. You might measure how productive rehearsals are with and without an individual. I’ve known star soloists who disrupted rehearsals enough that their plus-minus would have effectively been zero – their performance onstage offset by their detrimental effect on rehearsals. Or you might measure morale. Do your fellow singers leave rehearsal uplifted because they’ve been around you, or downtrodden by your attitude or behavior?
Moreover – how do you get to that plus-minus score? Some people hustle to take a small plus (I’m not the best singer, but I work hard, am easy to get along with…) while others use their huge plus just to offset a nearly as big minus (I’m an amazing singer but a total diva to work with…). A player who scores 50 goals a season but ends with a plus-minus of 2 is a lot less help to their team than a player who scores 10 goals and has a plus-minus of 20.
Someone with a high plus-minus makes the people around them better, makes their world a better one to be in, invites collaboration and connection. We all have minuses – all of us – but if we can offset them with our pluses, then we can’t worry about them.