Anti-Hero

thoughts on heroes in the workplace

A discussion with Brent (my podcast partner) about Brent (the character from The Phoenix Project) has had me thinking about heroes, bottlenecks, and culture.

The Hero We Need

In the Phoenix Project, Brent is an overworked expert and single source of knowledge for much of the companies IT systems. He’s a bottleneck. He doesn’t want to be a bottleneck, he just ended up that way.

Modern Testing (Delivery) Principle number 7 states:

We expand abilities and know-how across the team; understanding that this may reduce (or eliminate) the need for dedicated specialists.

In following this principle, we don’t hate specialists, we just believe that the more dedicated specialists a team has, the more likely it is that there will be bottlenecks slowing down feedback loops and delaying delivery.

Spoiler Alert: In the end, the company figures out how to alleviate the Brent-Bottleneck, and he gets to go on vacation. Everybody loves a happy ending.

The Hero we Hate

It’s unfortunate that Brent got to a place where he had to be the hero all the time - to the point where he was burned out.

But I’ve experienced a much worse problem. Sometimes, people want to be the hero so badly that they purposely hoard information, sabotage the ability of others to learn their area, or otherwise gatekeep growth. I once worked with a man named Joe who knew a lot about a particular network server. Our manager asked Joe to take an hour and walk me and some of my teammates through an overview of commands, configurations, and other basic knowledge. Joe refused. Joe had a “certification” in this technology and felt that it was critical to his employment that he remain the expert in this area. Joe was a hoarder. In this case though, Joe underestimated how much his expertise was worth when he was escorted out of the building by security a few days later.

Gatekeeping happens in leadership as well. At one point, I worked as a sort of internal consultant within Microsoft. I would frequently get requests to facilitate difficult meetings, consult with development or testing teams, or to discuss a delivery strategy for a product. Then, the senior leader of our team told our org that he wanted to approve any meetings we had with teams outside of our org. We started including him on replies to teams requesting help or consultation. Half the time he didn’t reply, and half the time he told us to “pause the meeting” until he could “think about it”. If you know me, you know that I kept on doing what I had been doing (because it was the right thing), and left the org a few months later. I have no idea why Peter wanted to be in the way, and even today, I don’t think he did either.

I haven’t always worked with assholes, but I’ve had a long enough career that it’s easy to recall a few.

The Problem with Heroes

It’s worth talking about what leads to these problems. Humans love to do what they’re rewarded for. On the positive side, we can use this to promote positive behavior - Reward the Behavior You Want To See. Unfortunately, sometimes we reward the wrong behaviors.

The Monday morning mail congratulating Terry for working over the weekend to fix a critical bug, or the announcement at the company all hands thanking James for pulling a heroic move to get the blu ray driver working in time for the beta release are big adrenaline rushes for Terry and James. They are the heroes who saved the day.

But behind the scenes, we know that Terry created that bug in the first place and then ignored it for three months while working on a pet project, and that James held onto the third party blu ray driver code for six weeks and refused to share it because he said that “nobody else can understand it". Our heroes have a dark side, and it’s toxic.

It gets worse.

Everybody wants to be the hero. Other people see the hero celebration and want the adrenaline rush and high they get from solving the problem nobody else could. So - in order to do this, they ensure that they are the only ones who can solve a problem. They hoard access to tools, require that they approve or sign off on anything related to their area. They try to make themselves important, and they turn into a bottleneck. And and asshole.

No Assholes

In The No Asshole Rule, by Bob Sutton, he describes an asshole as someone who consistently demeans and de-energizes others. In their quest to be a hero, they get in the way of progress so much that they drain the energy from others. Obviously, Sutton claims that we don’t want these people in our culture. The first order of business from Sutton is to not hire these people in the first place. But I argue (again), that behavior is the product of environment, and that most “assholes” behave the way they do because the culture encourages them to be an asshole (or a shitty hero, at least) in order to be/feel successful.

Sutton, of course, then goes on to offer strategies for coping with and confronting asshole behavior, and stresses organizational culture and psychological safety as essentials for productivity.

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As an aside, I wonder if the growth of remote work - or more specifically, the lack of relationship building that can occur if one doesn’t do remote work well leads to people behaving badly. Ninety-nine percent of the time when I see people behaving badly, they are doing so with people they do not know well at all. It’s a flavor of internet anonymity that comes from a lack of strong relationships

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Do We Need Heroes?

Brent (podcast partner Brent, not bottleneck Brent) frequently says that heroes are ok if being a hero is their job - and I agree, because in Brent’s definition, the hero functions as a consultant or smoke jumper whose job is specifically to work with teams, help them solve their problems, and then get out. These heroes are accelerants, not bottlenecks. We don’t want a team full of them, but maybe having a few around is beneficial.

Given that definition, what we need are the right kind of heroes. Crisis-driven orgs, where fire drills and emergencies are the norm breed a (bad) hero culture - which in turn, encourages people to be available for the hero role for the next big rock to fall. More heroes mean more fire drills. More fire drills mean more heroes.

It sucks.

The Antidote

The cure, as expected, is culture. It’s tough for leaders because it’s the right thing to celebrate someone’s hard work. But as a leader, you can lead retrospectives on the good things that happen just as well as the bad things. If you take the time to reflect and learn on why Terry worked all night to fix a bug, you will probably discover a few things to improve in the future. And while it’s ok to celebrate the hero (even when you shouldn’t), take time to celebrate when you don’t need the hero. On the surface, it may seem uneventful for a team to ship three new highly used features in a month without any overtime, but I, for one, would celebrate the shit out of that (and then I’d lead a retrospective with the team to learn more about their secret sauce).

Celebrate the behavior you want to see (and then learn how that behavior came to be).