For Accountability to Work, We Must First Sack the Hero

We hear a lot about heroes.? Until the Avenger era, it was more mythical and generalized, but now, we idolize the ability to soar above with special gifts that no one can match, isolating our ability to be celebrated and admired as we save the day.

And what comes with heroes that makes it so much fun? Hero worship.? While we mere mortals are anchored to the ground, limited by our own feeble skills, there goes the hero, ripping off his shirt to reveal an overly large symbol of dominance, or solving problems of immense complexity out of one's own mind. Two at the most.

My daughter’s favorite is the Scarlet Witch.? Who needs to get all sweaty breaking steel with your teeth when you can serve up monster-crushing red-colored lightening snow balls!

What if Sillsets Were Superpowers

But when I see progress on real problems, this model falls apart. I only really see it attached to situations that have issues and limitations. Why, first, like all great myths, it’s a fake. No one person has all the skills or all of the answers for problems that impact value today. Every person on your team brings something to the table to make the task of solving any problem worth solving, doable.

One person might have the vision, and another to sell the vision but yet another has relationship management or technical design chops.? Still another may have the implementation discipline to pull the team through to the finish line.

This is nothing new. Team-centric tools like personality profiles, Design Thinking models and Agile ways of working have been reshaping our daily work for years now. But there’s no glory in teams.? And accountability gets messy.

How do heroes operate? You might have a dynamic duo, but every hero is usually fighting their own battle.? Are the Avengers a team? The forced scenes of one mere mortal enabling a Superhero always make me sigh just a bit. Immortals with super strength don’t need mortals who have fast reflexes and can shoot straight. Not really.

The real cringe here?? Being merely human, sucks. All of those pesky foibles and quirks of personality.

But these teams can bring forth flashes of brilliance.

As we were mostly recently reminded, it was not the most brilliant scientist that created the atomic bomb, but a well-led cohort of scientists working across disciplines that forges the most implementable solution within the given timeframe and resource constraints.

Welcome to the Dessert of the Real

Business is a social science.? It is always done with other people and is therefore, inherently messy.? Constantly churning on the weight of biases, misperceptions misuses of data and lack of information and time. And that’s when we are trying to be fully transparent and honest. Add in human engineering and gameplay, and it gets tough to see what end is up.

Instead of large muscles (deep skills in one particular domain) and jetpacks for legs (AI everywhere), wouldn’t we be much better suited to build patience, discernment, curiosity, creative thinking and determination in the face of obstacles like boredom and monotony into our work culture? ??

How much more powerful would our workplaces be if our initiatives all started with how and whom to ask for help? And we gave it without reservation?

Getting to accountability has to find a way to include empowering others and opening oneself up to be challenged, before implementation of the next new thing.

I moved away from this hero thinking much too late in my career. This approach was the cause of many limited efforts and outcomes. It drives blind spots, listless projects and solutions that fall flat or are centrally misguided.? In a word, heroes tend to waste time and effort in a world that has stark limits on both.

Some examples?

My projects tend to involve complex negotiations.? I remember one of my early assignments was to take over a project from a consultant hero who was charging ahead on doing a deal that apparently didn’t require the perspective of the business. But they wanted to own the work in the end. Hence the rejection of the hero approach. Lesson learned.

I remember in one role, I was warned off of the hero approach during the interview. I was expected to be gaining consensus as I went. Sounds great, but the culture was ultra-competitive and some hero types hoarded information for power. So the model broke down, as did progress for the business.

How Heroes Hold Us Mortals Back

Where does this kind of mentality come from? The Hero mindset is warped by perceptions of actual ability and stories of past battles won, single-handedly.

The inner monologue of the hero worker goes something like, "I work super long hours and I do all of this vast array of work all by myself and now I’m entitled. I give you updates when I feel like it. I deliver when it’s convenient for me and I give you what you need when it’s possible for me, because my world is unfair and I’m the only one solving problems in my world at my level."

This is not a world of predictable, sustainable performance. ?It may look incredible from the outside. It may even look like accountability, but it’s not.? It’s self-aggrandizement that ultimately hurts the team and limits the impact of the possible outcomes, especially when measured by those on the outside who live with those outcomes.

Let’s expand the analogy to how firms build solutions around technical or expert heroes. As we firms solutions for complex services, I see risk where reliance is on one specific person to save the day, again and again for mission-critical processes. Without the ability to immediately replace special skills over time in new resources, we create thin and fragile solutions and keep talented hero types stifled into one limiting role where value is measured within a single dimension. No better way to stagnate a career have I seen!

I flag this as risk, whenever I see it.

Practically, this limiting belief, taken to extremes, uses expertise to limit change and growth, locking people into a singular role, driving attrition and higher costs to keep resource attrition artificially low. This tends to foster a lack of innovation as the expert holds the larger function or process hostage with their limitations.

From a Contracted-Ops perspective, I like to measure and reward firms that can create the capability to replace hero talent in short order with a pipeline of capable resources over time and at a predictable cadence. That’s a sustainable solution. That's accountability.

It is messy and sometimes there is no clear path and progress is often like seeing only the next logical step, one or two at a time. That's where patience as a core skill comes in. And the end the payoff is a more stable solution.

Superheroes are fun because they are a simple, elegant and EASY answers to complex problems that would take resources and years to begin to solve and yes, we might kill our best ideas in committee.? But that's the risk of everyone being on board.

So, let’s enjoy the thought of, what if we could just call up Captain America and be done with it! I'm good with that. But let's not forget to put that model aside after the credits and bonus scenes roll, because in the end, our world will always ask us the key question, “OK, how do we scale this?”

Starting from a place of "OK, who should I be talking with first . . . " That's where I'd like to work.