software.herbrandson.com

A friend of mine recently made a comment to me, and I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit since. He was commenting on how the management at his company was suffering from the “hero syndrome” where any employee that makes some sort of noteworthy accomplishment suddenly becomes the hero of the company. Once someone is the hero, all things go through that employee. Any new ideas are brought to the hero first. Any new interesting work is assigned to the hero. Basically, the hero is viewed as the most important employee in the company. We used to have a different name for this at a company I worked at years ago. We called it “the golden boy”. It turns out this is a very common mindset. I can think of more then a few companies that I’ve worked at that have had a similar mentality. Sometimes I’ve been the golden boy. Sometimes… not so much.

My wife pointed out that this attitude runs on a much deeper level then just the workplace. We love movies about the lone hero who is able to accomplish what no one else can. We like our sports team, but love the star player.

The really interesting part to me is that the golden boy torch seems to be passed quite frequently. Today’s hero may be replaced tomorrow when another employee meets a tight deadline or creates an impressive piece of technology. The real problem with this mentality is that it limits a companies potential. Tomorrows golden boy is certainly no less intelligent or less talented today, but by not giving him/her the same opportunities a company is artificially limiting what it can achieve.

My friend’s conclusion was that the real goal should be to cultivate a sense of team, and I think he’s spot on. It’s terribly cliché, but a team will always out perform an individual. The problem with individuals is that no matter how incredible they are, at some point they will fail. Humans are just not capable of perfection. If you ever read through the Old Testament, it’s full of stories about individuals. However, almost every one of them is near fatally flawed. The Jewish people still consider King David as one of their greatest heroes, but he killed a man in order to steal his wife (resulting in all sorts of dysfunction in his family). Multiple ethnic groups consider Abraham to be their patriarch, but he actually gave his wife away to other men on two separate occasions in order to save his own neck. I think the point is that great men are still just that… men. And people are defective at best. 

Teams are not perfect either, but with more then one voice the likely hood of major oversights or completely self serving decisions is put in check. One of the hardest jobs I ever had was where I was the only developer. I agonized over every technical decision because I didn’t have anyone to bounce my thoughts off of. I was always afraid that I was missing something obvious. I think every developer has had the experience of architecting a beautiful solution to some complex problem, only to have a co-worker point out that the same thing could have been done in two lines of code. This is the same beauty in the architecture of the American governing system. Decisions about the direction of the country are made by a team. You can argue how good of a team our government is, but it seems to me that it’s still highly preferable to a monarchy.

So the question then is how do we avoid the trap of making certain individuals into heroes and instead cultivate a sense of team? This is where you come in. I’d love to hear your thoughts. However, I think the first step is to stop the golden boy mentality. It seams to be the antithesis of team.