It’s fairly common to have a junior team of people, with one far more senior person leading them. This can be an effective way to grow skill across the org.
There is a specific flavour of this pattern, however, that is problematic and that we can fall into, if we’re not careful. I call this “hero culture”.
In hero culture, one person, the “hero” starts taking on all the challenging work. It often starts innocently as this person has more of a certain skill than others so the more difficult work comes to them.
The hero typically loves this attention at the beginning as it highlights their level of competence and drives a strong intrinsic motivation. They’re getting recognized for being high performers.
Over time, as other team members get stuck on various problems, the hero will also solve the problem for them, most often handing them the solution rather than working through it with them. This sounds somewhat counter-intuitive so let’s consider why. It takes a lot longer for me to teach someone how to do a thing than it does to just give them the answer. If I’m already overwhelmed with the demands on me, I try to optimize for my own effectiveness and that means that I stop teaching and start just providing the answers. Do this thing.
As this is happening, the other team members start to rely too much on the hero, and stop really thinking for themselves. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and we can’t blame people for allowing this to happen. As they rely more and more on the hero, their own motivation drops more and more.
Eventually one of two things will happen. Sometimes both.
- The hero will burn out.
- The other team members will be so disengaged that they’ll quit. This is no longer an enjoyable job.
Often the hero is completely oblivious to what is going on. They can clearly see that they’re taking on the majority of the work, but are often unaware of how they have contributed to this situation. In fact, it’s common for the hero to complain that “nobody else is doing anything”, completely missing that they’ve helped to encourage this behaviour.
Let me be very clear that the hero is usually a very well-intentioned expert who never would have willingly got into this situation, had they been aware of what was happening. Had they seen it coming, they would have done something to avoid it. The key is that they didn’t see it coming.
I’ve been the hero, and I can speak from personal experience.
How do we fix this?
We got to this point because the hero was doing the work, rather than teaching others how to do it. So the simple response is that the hero needs to stop doing the work for others. Their job is now to teach, not to do.
At this point you’re probably thinking that this is unrealistic. By the time we realize we have a problem with hero culture, the hero is so overloaded that we can’t imagine slowing them down so they can teach. Yet, that’s the only way out and the longer we avoid it, the worse the problem will get.
There are many different ways that the hero can share their knowledge and some are better than others. What I find most effective is for the hero to no longer work by themselves on anything. Whether this is pair work or an ensemble, they never work alone on a task.
At the beginning, there will be a tendency for the hero to want to work while someone else watches and while this can work in some situations, it’s not a generally effective solution. The person watching, will often not follow along with what the hero is doing and will then disengage, completely eliminating any value from the exercise.
The other option that teams tend to try is for the hero to review the work after the fact, and this is also generally ineffective. The feedback comes too late and is often considered to be a judgement, rather than the assistance that is intended.
What needs to happen is what we refer to as a strong pairing model. The person learning is the one on keyboard and the hero leads them through the work. For the hero’s ideas to make it into the work product, it has to go through someone else’s hand’s. If we’re working in an ensemble, this means that the hero is the only person who doesn’t get a turn on the keyboard.
Very quickly, we’ll start to see the gap in skills diminish and as that gap shrinks, the rest of the team will become more motivated and will be able to take work off the hero. At some point, the team will be able to do the work entirely without the hero, meaning that the hero can finally take a well needed vacation.
Will we get to a point where the team no longer needs to collaborate as closely, and we can have people working on their own again? You’ll certainly get to that point, although by then you will probably have discovered that this active collaboration is significantly more productive and enjoyable than working alone, and you may decide that you don’t want to go back to the old way.