The danger of hero worship at the workplace

A great incentive to a bad culture

Would you like to be a police offer in Gotham City? The place where the executive power regularly fails against supervillains that use their superpowers and their superweapons, and only a superhero like Batman can save the day? No? Who would have thought!

And yet, in real life, there are enough companies that practice this model of organizing their work. They do not even do this under the radar; they even officialize this antipattern in the form of incentives and promotions.

From a human point of view, this is understandable. It is easier to tell or follow the story of a single person turning things around when everything seemed lost than how dozens of people interacted over a period of time to work step-by-step toward a shared goal.

But this already shows the flaws of this picture being applied within a work context: How many superheroes can have a normal family life? This is unattractive for the regular folks. Whom do you want to attract and keep with this culture?

Ok, but maybe some companies do not care about that and prefer lone wolfs (a red flag for me to ever work there). Even more striking is that this breaks some other principles that companies, especially big ones, usually care about a lot. This is unsustainable. If everything breaks (or almost fails) on a regular base, this is against Business Continuity.

Plus, how often do you find heroes that are for hire? This is obviously against Scaling. Remember, the only level of competence that you can scale indefinitely is complete incompetence. And the people that like to be heroes are unlikely to share their spotlight with others. At work, heroes do like to not work with other heroes.

But the most striking contradiction is the idea behind companies themselves: Companies were founded to achieve what not even the most talented and visionary person could alone.

If this hero model is so wrong, why is it so popular then? Overwhelming bureaucracy and broken processes can thrive especially in big and traditional companies. People drowned in rules is very common. For those situations, a hero that breaks all those chains and works beyond the usual limits can sounds like the only hope. However, this creates a self-repeating pattern: "Too many rules" to keep everyone at bay on the one hand and "heroes operating outside the norm" so that anything gets done on the other. Bonus points if the terms if heroes are called people with a "can do" attitude that "walk the extra mile" (two other indicators that something is wrong).

So what's the alternative? Like I love to live in a city that does not need superheroes, I like to work in a company where ordinary people get things done. Most of the times, this means working in a team. If that is not possible, that is a clear sign that change is necessary. And this always has to start with the behavior of the leaders. They are the ones who create a work place that needs heroes in the first place.

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