Have Superhero problem? Solve it by unearthing more Superheroes!

Before we go ahead, lets establish why having a super hero is a problem?

If you have watched 2012 released The Avengers* movie, everything - yes including fate of the planet was falling apart till all the superheroes who individually were great but were given by their ego, lack of social skills, got their act together to operate as one team towards common goal of saving the planet and a real opportunity at that.

To give a sports analogy with Cricket, as great and dependable batsmen Tendulkar and Lara were carrying their teams single-handedly to memorable wins, those teams were not really world beaters like Australia of 2000s and Windies of 1980s. Why? Though the superhero player is not at the source or fault of it, as they say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts let alone a single part and what could be achieved over a period, and that definitely is a foundation for high performing, consistent teams. We CANT create a high performing, consistent team with one super hero.

In our context, as useful as super hero is in jumping-in, saving the day by solving those production issues quickly which others take more time or unaware how to resolve, and many such heroic acts, they cause much more harm, some intentional, some un-intentional resulting to others — not take responsibility, up skill, grow the team.

Typically, superhero becomes the Manager’s favorite and gets the limelight in turn demotivating others. Some of them even start wielding power and impact how team performs, Manager’s start listening to them more and the cycle keeps repeating and making things worse. With some well intention-ed superhero, their inability to say ‘no’ and manage workload makes them slog thru even if demotivated, leading to burn out, even change team or organization resulting in further knowledge drain and deeper impact for next couple of months or even year)s. Why does it start to be in this this way? Sure teams & superhero contribute to this, but generally, its due to Management style of focusing on getting things done if need be through certain individuals without focus on building team, not having team being responsible and creating a space where there may be intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to perform individually.

Does it mean having a super hero is wrong? Not necessarily, as they bring certain things onto the table which others don’t and at times its useful, but their heroic got to be more in turning a tide and for a short period if at all. Their purpose got to be to partner in enhancing team’s abilities and performance.

You may relate to this well, especially nowadays with turnaround impacting most organizations. While starting Agile Transformation for any tribe, one among the activities is to cast key roles like Scrum Master, Technical Leader, Chapter Manager and so on, one of the constraints that Tribe Managers bring out is ‘I don’t have that many people in my tribe who can take those responsibilities, don’t have many mature people, so will have one player wear multiple hats or will not have the role itself’. Considering the topic of this article, I will not delve into the relevance of those roles, rather ask you the same question I ask the Tribe Manager as well, if you already see not many take on different roles then isn’t it right time to start looking at creating more leaders? Usually this leads to interesting conversation as it opens up barriers, constraints to accomplish it, some real and some perceived and opportunity as well.

Leaders create and inspire new leaders by instilling faith in their leadership abilities and helping them develop and hone leadership skills they don’t know they possess. — John C. Maxwell

So how do we deal with Super hero situation? In this article, I will not refer to all possible ways rather share one of my experiences where I was coaching a tribe and had to deal with an hostile super hero. Here I was coaching 5 Feature teams and the tribe also had 1 dedicated platform team managing Continuous Integration and deployment (yes, existence of this team was a dysfunction that had to be addressed!), all mostly working on shared legacy code base. There was a lot skepticism with developers and even Tribe Management to embrace craft practices like TDD, BDD, Clean code and refactoring practices even where it was possible with some refactoring and design changes. So I had to take on more active stance in nudging developers to try something and see the value.

Here is where a superhero in platform team with over 10 years experience in the tribe, greatly knowledgeable functionally as well as technically, and a very capable problem solver, even influence, coerce Tech leads and developers to go by his views, was against developer’s exploring what’s possible with Craft practices and started interfering in the coaching process. How? In the training sessions he would raise questions and concerns not out of curiosity or to learn rather to discourage others from trying those practices. He started Influencing some developers to not participate in the training's and trying out writing some tests.

Not knowing why things were turning out this way, when I interacted with some developers & Tech Leads, got to know what was happening in background. Some mustered courage to share how toxic it is to work with the superhero as he enforces his views on them and paints a different picture with management and their helplessness in dealing with it. To move forward with transformation, I took on listening to this superhero on his views of this transformation, his concerns and creating with him the context he can operate from and seeking his partnership to move forward. This didn't yield any result and I saw no value in confrontation in this case, so I sought support from Tribe Manager. That person did acknowledge the problem and agreed to the risks for transformation and even to Tribe in general due to the superhero’s behavior, but acknowledged his limitation in being able to do much about it as Tribe depended a lot on this superhero for deliverable and without him it would all fall apart! Tribe Manager also expressed his lack of trust on others being able to fill in for him in his absence. So there wasn't much support for me around on this.

The way forward for me was to see how to minimize superhero’s relevance on these topics and create more superheroes. I stopped training's with all developers as a group, instead started looking for one or two enthusiastic developers, enrolling them to take on doing a POC to see if unit testing was possible on legacy code, pair with them as they do this. Thankfully this gave some success. In few weeks, more tests were written by these two, attempts at refactoring legacy code led to interesting results. With time ripe to share these with other developers and hoping they get inspired to try, even create a healthy competition, partnered with the newly named Chapter Manager who thankfully also committed to resolve the superhero problem to advance the Chapter launch from few months later to now.?

The Chapter provided a platform for developers to share & learn, come together as a group and explore what was possible. For Chapter Manager and me, focus was to unearth more super heroes, support them. In one of the Chapter meet, an enthusiastic developer did demo of the tests & refactoring done, talked about the benefits. This had few others interested. It was greatly acknowledged by the Chapter Manager, by the Tribe Manager and even Unit/BL head as in years no one had tried this in the tribe. In the next Chapter meet someone took on sharing how to use plugin in IDE for effective refactoring, he was happy to get a platform to share. Kudos to the Chapter Manager from ensuring the superhero doesn't hijack the Chapter meet and also having frequent 1–1 with all developers to hear them and minimize Superhero influence on them. I started pairing with, coaching other developers with focus on their learning and critically they seeing the value of the practices.

Slowly the cascading effect was visible, with many in the chapter starting to add backlog items on what they wanted to try out, learn and even present. After few months, highlights from the chapter activities, some of the improvements in the Craft practices & deliverable made Tribe Manager realize that few others in the tribe are capable and can rely on them. In fact a behavioral change emerged where earlier for key decisions only superhero was consulted and in turn he would hold an information cascade meet with the Tech Leads, now a virtual team was formed by the Tribe and Chapter Manager that included that super hero and Tech Leads giving them a platform offer their views and take responsibility for decisions together. More such behaviors and after 8 months since the transformation began, teams became much more responsive to continuous improvement. Many developers and Tech Leads took on being proactive, making proposals, taking up initiatives with in tribe. There is self expression of people’s abilities. New superheroes emerged. With change in environment, the earlier superhero learnt to adapt to work with new super heroes, turning out well for the good of the tribe and management acquiring the skills to create leaders.

To summarize - giving people opportunities, platform to showcase their skill, learn, being trusted to do better, providing intrinsic motivation to take on responsibilities is what gave an opportunity to unearth new super heroes among existing members.

Management needs to focus on creating Leaders, which takes much more than ‘just’ getting work done. Needs to look at future, be patient, courageous, and willing to trust & experiment by believing people are capable.

Do share your story of dealing with Superhero problem.

#superheroproblem #unearthsuperheroes #createsuperheroes #highperformingteams #consistentteams #motivatedteams #pitfallofsuperherointeam #leadership #management #superhero #intrinsicmotivation #trustpeople #upskill #platformstolearnshare

*I am big fan of Avengers and MCU!

** Superhero pic courtesy — My superhero, my daughter Lekha came to my rescue as I was struggling to draw a superhero pic, drew this pic and is now helping me learn to draw!

*** Nic Fury pic — Source: https://www.cbr.com/nick-fury-best-quotes-mcu-marvel-samuel-l-jackson/