What organizations promote as ‘heroism’ is rarely how I would define ‘heroism’ (see photo). In this post, I talk about a ‘hero culture’ and ‘heroism’ in terms of how I have seen organizations promote them. You can be a true hero in a team-encouraged environment, but it works differently than a hero-encouraged environment.

Consider the firefighter who saves a child trapped in a burning building, who is able to do so because of the support of his team; and the team who saves the building. Firefighters work as part of a team where each individual plays a role to keep themselves safe and save whomever or whatever it is they hope to save. The team is heralded for the work they did to save the building, and the individual heralded for rescuing the child. They all do their best work possible, support one another, and get the job done no matter what. Team cultures celebrate both the successes of the team, and of the individuals within the team. Neither is done at the expense of the other. If a ‘hero culture’ such as those I have seen in organizations were promoted in a firefighting department, you would hear about firefighters scrambling over themselves to be the one who saves the child, no matter what, so that they are heralded as the most important hero who saved a person. It is that type of ‘hero culture’ that I speak of in this post.

My Message

The notion of a hero as someone who does things because it is the right thing to do should not be done away with. It is how a ‘hero culture’ is promoted and encouraged in organizations that needs change.

The issue I have is when heroism is upheld above everything else, particularly the Team. Companies can not succeed on one or two individuals alone, at least not in the long term (in my experience and observations). The ability of a Team to pull together to prevent problems they can foresee and solve problems that do arise is important. We need different perspectives, skills, and experiences to prevent and solve problems in the best way possible at a given point in time. When all team members feel like they are contributing to the best of their ability and that management supports them as such, teams can accomplish far more than an individual hero can.

The promotion of heroism in organizations limits teams from accomplishing their potential as a team. Many people seek to achieve individual rewards, to get the top raise, to get the most recognition because the organization encourages it – even if they unknowingly hurt the team, the project, and the organization as a result.

I admit that I have been that person, and I know from experience that some colleagues will shut down and decline to contribute as a result. I have been the person who works 60-80 hour work weeks to solve problems, do the right thing, and help save a project from disaster. I have been the person who stays under the radar doing all the right things, and was recognized as a leader and someone who will save the day.

At the time, I thought that competition was a good thing, as it would help us all raise the bar and do the best work possible. I only understood later that if your bar is so high that other smart, capable people can not reach it, they just won’t bother. So then you have a ‘team’ of people who succeeds only on the efforts of an individual. Why bother having a team then?

I have learned from experience that Teams need to be recognized for the heroic efforts they do, not individuals. Teamwork results from people who trust each other, support each other, and can build relationships with each other. It is difficult for most people to build healthy working relationships that accomplish amazing things together when they feel they are in competition with each other.

So, I will continue to do all those things I’ve done when I feel it necessary, and yes, I want recognition when I do those things. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t. That said, I work hard to balance this with the promotion of a team-based culture, as the strength of a high-functioning team far outreaches my ability as an individual.

I thus promote Team-culture over Hero-culture; provided the needs of the project, company, customers, and investors, are met, and dare I say, exceeded.

Some Examples

Some specific experiences I have that highlight problems in a “hero culture”:

• A hard-nosed believes-he-is-right-about-everything programmer insists that he doesn’t have time to do things right, and tells everyone he does not test his code before releasing it to testers. He says he is too busy to bother, and it’s their job anyway.  Throughout a 5 month project his features are consistently not testable because they are so broken. This persists until a couple weeks before release when he is finally able to fix the most critical known bugs in the software. Management heralds him as a hero for solving these really difficult problems, and promotes his behaviours as what they want to see in everyone. His poor decisions earlier on are not discussed and are allowed to continue in his future work.

• A senior manager spends the majority of his time talking to people about how bad a shape the company is in, and how he would do things differently if it were his company. He spends most of his evenings and weekends in the office ‘checking up’ on people’s work and getting face time with the CEO who is often in the office. This is because his family and friends live back home many hours away, and he has nothing else to do while living in the city for this job, so he spends waking time at the office. He is quick to point out employee faults, and quick to take credit for employee successes. He is promoted as a hero by his superior’s because he spends so many hours in the office, and was crafty enough to take credit for successes that were not his (without his superior’s catching on to that).

• A team works incredibly hard to release a challenging project. Everyone works together to understand and prevent problems, solve problems as they arise, and put in equal amounts of overtime. They are a high functioning team. Each time a serious problem is averted, two individuals on the team are heralded by those outside the team as the ones who save the day. The rest of the team is demotivated by this and wonders why they bother with their contributions when the other two team members always get the credit. It was a team effort and it should be recognized as such.

While these are specific situations, I have seen many other cases where the promotion of heroism hurt the abilities of teams and organizations. In each of these specific cases, the individuals involved could have behaved differently:

• The programmer could have put his best effort into doing quality work with integrity, including testing his code before sending it for testing. It’s one thing to do your job with integrity and quality and be seen as a hero for solving a problem later on. It’s quite another thing to knowingly do crap work and then come in as the hero to fix the problems you created as a result of your crap work.

• The senior manager could have tried to help the organization improve and do better, instead of complaining to anyone who would listen. He could have informed others that the work people were crediting him with was actually someone else’s. He also could have worked from his in-city apartment (as he had a laptop and VPN access) to do whatever work he was portraying himself as doing during evenings and weekends – he instead chose to be in the office to get credit for just being there.

• The individual team members could have responded to the proclamation of their heroism that it was a team effort (because it was), and that they should be recognized as a team for those efforts.

Final Thought

These examples also highlight issues with management. Management plays a very big part in the culture of organizations, as they have ‘power’. The culture that traditional management encourages is one of individual heroism, which is detrimental to team culture. Now, I’ve often encouraged culture change from the ground up, and have been successful in some cases, but it’s a tough road, and one that many people aren’t willing to attempt.

If you prefer to work in hero-encouraged environments, be my guest. If it works for you, great. I challenge you to consider your motivation in wanting to work in that type of organization – you may have reasons that I completely agree with, or possibly not.

If you want to work in a team-encouraged environment, I implore you to listen to the YouTube clip linked to in my previous post. I summarize some things you can do to help encourage your organization to transform into one.  I challenge you to consider other ways to encourage that transformation and share them here.

Thoughts?

At Agile Coach Camp Canada in June 2010, I lead a session on How to Transform a Hero Culture. It was the first session of the day, and a spirited discussion with many new friends, old friends, and people I admire.

Organizational culture is a critical factor in whether a new process or methodology will be successful. Whether you are an Agile coach, a change agent, or a natural leader, you recognize that if an organization’s culture is not in alignment with the new direction, and is unwilling to shift, the new direction will most likely fail. This is a big challenge!

I have worked in several organizations where a hero culture was prevalent. What I mean by this is that heroic efforts to rescue a failing situation are rewarded and encouraged. In this type of culture, whether fixing a critical issue or working 60 hour weeks, you are what everyone should aspire to be.

There are many types of heroes, for example:

• Someone who wants recognition, power, and rewards, and often happens to be in the right place at the right time to solve problems.
• Someone who doesn’t take care to do a high quality job the first time around, and then swoops in to clean up their own mess.
• Someone who does high quality work, has good judgement, tries to keep a low profile, yet is a natural leader for change and problem resolution.

If you are trying to create a culture that embraces teamwork and collaboration, regardless of the type(s) of hero(es) in your organization, you will want to help evolve the culture away from one that supports and rewards heroes.

How to Transform a Hero Culture

Michael Sahota and I summarized the key findings of the session at Agile Coach Camp Canada to transform a hero culture. You can watch it in the video below.

What do you think?

Do you think a hero culture should be encouraged?

Or do you think they should be transformed into something different? If so, what are your idea’s on how to transform a hero culture?

I look forward to your comments!

- Selena

It was beneficial as I was able to help employees learn new concepts and improve skills,  in a manner that fit for them.  The added bonus for me was that I learned something new from them as well.  What powerful experiences those were!

Now, as a manager for 18 testers who are spread across several different agile teams, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to coach testing skills one-on-one.  On a weekly basis I also spend time coaching the agile teams, management-level initiatives to improve company-wide practices, and the usual management administration.  Such is life in a ‘start-up’ type of company.  As a result, my one-on-one time with each person is limited to 30-60 minutes over two weeks.  This seems a miniscule amount given they are working a minimum of 80 hours in that same time period!

I am someone who is motivated and energized in working with others to learn new skills, to understand and be able to apply new skills appropriately, and to have those ‘light bulb’ moments where things just click.  Given my work situation, I have been frustrated with how little I have been able to do this.  This left me with a problem!

How can I increase the amount of coaching and teaching time each individual is receiving?

Solutions:

• Forget about it: Nope! I’m too invested in helping others learn and grow.
• Clone myself: Not feasible, as in I don’t know how, and it is kind of icky to think about.
• Shift responsibilities to other people: The possible people to offload to are just as overloaded as me.
• Find additional ways to teach and coach skills so each individual gets more opportunities to learn and improve: There are lots of ways to do this!  I just need to invest some more time to create these opportunities.  Some possibilities:
  • Coach a smaller group, and have them coach small subsets of the larger group.
  • Direct them to other people who I trust will coach them appropriately.
  • Move our 1:1′s to their work space & turn it into a paired testing session.
  • Create workshops where they can learn and practice skills.
  • Coach other people to create workshops where they can learn and practice skills.

What I’m Doing:

Ongoing learning and growth are important to me.  Happily, I discovered that they are important to my department as well.  They requested regularly scheduled workshops/training sessions to be reinstated after being cancelled during the agile training the entire engineering organization went through over the summer.  They missed them!  They missed the learning, new perspectives, and much needed ‘down time’ at work.

So, regular department workshops / training sessions were reinstated on a biweekly basis.  We are currently shifting to make them weekly.

Our first workshop back was a brainstorming session to come up with a list of loosely prioritized workshops the team members would like to have provided.   They came up with a lot of great topics, which we are adding to on an ongoing basis, and are adapting priorities as needed.

The workshops we are doing are typically 2 hours long, and are created by myself or a team member, and contain both teaching of concepts, and time to explore, practice and apply concepts.  We customize workshop focus and content based on the people involved, what they want to learn about, and their current knowledge-base and skill sets.  A blend of ‘teaching’ time and ‘experience’ time are proving vital to help people go back to their day-to-day work and integrate new learnings – which when applied to hands-on work become new-found skills when they invest time in practicing them.

The workshops also allow me to engage with everyone both as a group and individually, and determine how I can add more value for them when we have our regular one-on-one conversations.

Final Thoughts:

I am not yet satisfied with the amount of coaching and teaching I am able to provide to each individual. However, I am happy with the progress I am making in increasing the amount of learning opportunities they are getting from me.  These workshops have allowed me to stretch the limited time I have to teach, coach, and add more value for all of my department members.   This is an improvement, and a step forward to incorporating other learning opportunities for my department.

I plan to share some of the workshop experiences in future blog entries, so keep an eye out for those!

On Teaching Software Testing:

My thoughts on this have been bouncing around in my head for a while – how can we improve on how testing skills are taught?  What is the best way to teach and coach them?

For myself, there are things I am doing now which are helpful, but there is so much more I would like to do, and I’m sure could be doing that I haven’t considered yet.  I know I am not the only person in that position.  So where do we begin?

Matthew Heusser recently blogged on this very topic.  He invited people to comment on what types of teaching and training are wanted by organizations for their employees, and what would be most effective for the employees.   I added my comments to that entry, alongside some brilliant thinkers in this field.  Thank you to Matt for starting a great conversation thread!  You can read it at http://blogs.stpcollaborative.com/matt/2009/11/18/you-say-you-want-a-revolution/.

Your turn!

What are your experiences and thoughts on how to coach and teach software testing skills?  As a coach/teacher/trainer, what have you done to do this when you have had little time to do it well?  As a tester, how do you want to be coached and taught – what would be most effective for you?

I welcome your comments, and encourage you to share them both here and on Matthew’s blog.

It has been very busy the last few months, and  though activities kept me from writing, I discovered some valuable things about myself.   Some insights are new, and some have been strongly reinforced.  While this post is off the grain for what I intended this particular blog for, I am going to open up and share them with you.  This is a big window into who I am.

I love to help people

While I have known this from a very young age, I have finally come to accept that as okay.  There was a period in my life when I allowed myself to feel guilty about this; I was told my happiness shouldn’t rest on my ability to help others.  Okay, that makes sense.  It is still a huge feel-good rush when I’ve been able to help somebody in some way.  This is part of who I am.  I am unable to not help people.  This year in particular has been big in supporting and helping others for me.  Looking back, I’m astonished at what I took on.

I am passionate about facilitating learning in others

I do not believe that the educational system as a whole is helping people learn in the best way possible.  I enjoy creating experiences that people can learn in, and extract the learning that is most valuable to them from those experiences.  The next ‘aha!’ was that I am pretty good at it.  I have set up and facilitated a number of workshops this year in the testing, software, and people-skills domains.  I also allowed myself the opportunity to learn from the best in creating experiential workshops at a workshop in June with Jerry Weinberg and Esther Derby.  Now that was a learning experience!

I am a coach and a mentor

I realized that I have been for years! I thought for a while that I was simply working my way towards being those things, but upon reflection discovered that I already am.  One of my strengths is working with people to help enable their success.  I am filled with energy in doing this.  My best days at work are those in which I spend the majority of my time facilitating learning experiences, coaching, and mentoring.

I enjoy helping people, teams, and organizations be successful

Currently this is specific to software and software testing domains, as that is the field I work in.  I would enjoy doing this in most fields I believe though.  This year I have focused a lot of time and effort into helping an organization make the transition to Agile, and through the ongoing adoption.   It has been quite a learning experience, and a lot of fun.  I also engage in improving testers skills in testing software more effectively and comprehensively, organizational processes, and software engineering practices.

I am passionate about health & wellness

I have a wealth of information in this domain.  Due to my own health problems, I have researched in many domains, and tried a lot of things.  I have been coaching others in health & wellness, and am thrilled when that has helped others find better balance and health.  This year I have slowly started building a side-business in this field, so I can better share and support others in their journeys to better health.  Part of that involved becoming a certified personal trainer, and becoming better-educated in nutrition.

It’s all about balance, and experiences!

“Work hard, play hard” has been my motto for years.  This applies to work, projects, family, personal interests, hobbies, and more.  We are here to enjoy what life has to offer… for me that means doing the things I love as much as possible.  I spend time reading a variety of topics, with family, with friends, creating new recipes, attending conferences and workshops, learning, traveling, gardening, photography, educating, coaching, mentoring, supporting, exercising, volunteering, laughing, and living.

What’s next? Keep an eye out for new blog posts to come more frequently on some of the topics above.  For other topics, you’ll have to find your way to one of my other blogs sometime.

To life’s experiences!