Teams Don’t Need Heroes

Teams don’t need heroics, they need ownership. Heroics imply someone is not doing their job, so someone has to ‘save’ them. We will come across many people who continuously prefer heroics for selfish ends or to hide their weaknesses. Heroes love glorifying about having excessive workload, being too busy and sacrificing for others. Here are some classic examples:

- Not delegating due to fear of loss of visibility

- Keeping problems in the team unsolved so that they could ask for increase in team size

- Holding on to outdated stuff, spending excess time on support in order to avoid picking up new stuff

- Firefighting outside work hours

- Excess focus on voluntary activities at the expense of main deliverables

- Acting as a ‘gate’, retaining privileges, not sharing knowledge in order to keep others dependent on them.

- Coming up with late ‘concerns’, when everyone else is onboard

Heroes claim noble intentions, which makes them unarguable and difficult to deal with, but deep down you know it’s all drama. When challenged they become defensive. The best way to deal with them is to develop an agile culture of blameless postmortems where every team member is encouraged to recognize and prevent heroics by asking “So, what can we do better?”