Thursday, September 6, 2012

Banishing the hero complex

We all know how the story goes...the fair maiden has been captured by the nasty ogre and imprisoned in a high tower in the middle of a dense jungle of unforgiving thorns. Only the bravest knight in the land can rescue her. He gallops in on his trusty steed, slashes the thorns with his shining sword, defeats the ogre with a single blow, scales the high tower and rescues the fair maiden. The kingdom rejoices, he is surely the only hero they will ever need, whenever they are in peril they simply call his name and their world will be right once more.

Have you ever met this gallant knight...perhaps you see him when you look in the mirror each morning!

The IT industry abounds with such heroes...don't you love the feeling when you save the day and the subjects of the kingdom (you might know them as customers and users) worship at you feet?

Sorry to break it to you, but as nice as that feeling is, this is a BAD thing! An environment that encourages heroes is an environment where information silos abound and knowledge management is a foreign language.

Being the hero can be intoxicating and that feeling is rather addictive! It feels so good to be needed...I talked to a database administrator one day who quite openly told me that he didn't document what he did to resolve calls, because if he did then he became replaceable, as long as he held all the knowledge between his ears his job was safe...he never considered the fact that he also couldn't be promoted. Funny thing is that I saw him today, around nine years since that conversation, he is still in the same job, at the same level and wonders why people are promoted around him and he is stuck in a time warp...I might have to take him out for a coffee one day and explain it to him!

Heroes cost the business, and those costs can be high. If the only person who knows how to resolve a recurring issue is away, what do you do? Call them in from holiday (and possibly have to pay penalty rates to get him there)? Get a third party specialist to come in and work out what has gone wrong ( and you know how much they are going to charge)? Get someone else in your team to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel? None of these are satisfactory scenarios, and all are going to cost...the first option simply reinforces the hero complex - "they just can't do without me!"

So how do you banish all the heroic knights from your kingdom? Very simply, get serious about knowledge management. If everybody either knows, or can find out, how to get things working again, then there is no place for the knight in shining armour.

Again, this is one of those ABC (Attitude, Behaviour and Culture) scenarios, the business has allowed the hero culture to grow over a period of time, and it is going to be no easy matter to change that. You have to somehow replace the good feeling that your heroes get from saving the day with something equally as intoxicating...something along the lines of treating a heroin addict with methadone!

You are going to need to devise rewards for information sharing and documentation...prizes for the best knowledge-base articles, get your heroes to run workshops for other IT team members - in this way they still get that feeling of being important, and perhaps a little superior! Tread carefully, these people are often your most valuable team members, and you certainly can't afford to lose them before they transfer that information!

So have you worked out if you have a hero complex? Check yourself against the following scenario.

Your phone rings at midnight - it's the oncall techie from work, there is an outage on a service that you manage -  do you:

  1. Throw on whatever clothes are handy, grab your keys, jump into your shiny Toyota (pretty trusty as steeds go), and ride to the rescue. Tweak a few settings and - Bob's your Uncle - everything is working again, take the accolades and head back to can cry sleep deprivation a little in the morning, just so everyone knows that you had to come in!
  2. Moan and groan and talk them through what needs to be done, still in your pyjamas, tucked under your goosedown cover
  3. Not worry at all because that is never going to happen, everyone knows how to use the knowledge-base and every standard resolution and troubleshooting script is well documented
So, pretty clear that if answer one sounds like you, you need some serious help with your addiction! If you are more in the number two category, you still need some help, but you are willing to share knowledge when you have to. If you fit into category three, congratulations...when and where can I hear your conference presentation?


  1. Re #3 - Everything that can go wrong or needs to be done has already gone wrong or needed to be done? Why am I feeling just a bit skeptical?

    There are some things that cannot be documented. The ability to think through a new problem is one. The commitment to find a solution is another. "Heroes" tend to have both.

    Your hero-less scenario assumes that all problems have already happened and all possibilities have been documented. we all know that's not the case.

    It's not the hero you want to discourage: It's the hero who does not document the work, the fix, the change.

    I had a sign outside my office for years: "If it's not documented, it's a rumor."

    That's how it should be. Don't ban the heroes; ban the silence.

  2. Good post Kristie, good on you for taking the plunge and taking this topic on.

    As an IT Executive there is 2 things I learned very quickly about hero's.

    1) I love them, because they save the day and even if they are difficult to deal with, they will pull through when no one else can.

    2) I hate them, because they just can't seem to get out of that firefighting mind set. I've not met the hero who is hording knowledge because of trying to protect their job. In fact my experience has been they are constantly telling others what they did and how they did it. The problem is, it usually done in a condescending... "why didn't you guys try this, why do I need to keep jumping in here, how come you can't get your act together" tone. I love them, and I want them to grow, but as soon as I try to move them into a proactive role, they go nuts. It's like taking a real firefighter and asking them to be a boiler inspector to prevent explosions... They want the excitement.

    So here is what I learned and what worked for me.

    1) Acknowledge the hero mentality and set the rules for when it will be praised and reprimanded.
    A) You jump in at night, weekends, last minute, etc... to fix something you had provided documentation and training - Praise & lots of it.
    B) You jump in... on something you did not document or train - but don't complain about it - grateful acknowledgement and some help to get it doc'd
    C) you jump in... whine and complain on something you did not document or train - reprimand and made an example of who we are all suffering because of the lack of discipline of each team member.

    2) You openly recognize and tout the value of protecting services from outages in the first place. You make service outage avoidance a higher prize and value statement than you do service restoration. (See my blog from 2008 on Service Outage Avoidance - I'm sure this could be improved with modern End User Monitoring capabilities)

    This I believe fundamentally changed my culture to the point that Heros' worked collaboratively to look for and mitigate risks rather than storming castles and saving damsels in distress.

  3. Moulding heroes into leaders is probably the best way to go.
    Giving them responsibility and a position of "power" in a team and ensuring that they get praise for the team efforts, under their leadership are all strategies that can work. Heroes are very valuable members of your team, you need to keep their knowledge and capabilities, but modify the behaviour.

  4. Hi Kirstie,

    I heard about it and nice to see it on your blog. I think your first sentence made me understand very well regarding heroes and hope to find it the best way to go.

    Lisa@ boiler repair chelsea