I’ve been thinking about workplace heroics and Star Trek again. As any regular reader knows, I tend to find inspiration in Star Trek. If you’ve ever seen any episode of Star Trek or its spin-offs, you’ve seen one of the main characters doing everything on the ship. There’s a problem with the transporters and Riker leaves the bridge to solve it. The ship is in imminent danger and the bridge crew solves the problem. There’s a need to discretely observe an unfamiliar culture so one of the bridge crew has their physical appearance altered and they beam down to the planet. No one else on the ship is capable of doing anything serious.
As much as I enjoy watching the Star Trek shows, I always wondered why there were more than 1000 people on the Enterprise when only 8 did any heavy lifting. It makes for good TV, but would be lousy if it were true. Those 8 people would be exhausted and the other 992+ people would be deeply demoralized.
Is this how it is where you work? Do the members of the bridge crew (heroes) do all the important work? If the bridge crew does everything important, why employ the rest of the staff? Are the rest of the staff akin to the Star Trek red-shirts – in other words, are they expendable?
Avoid Heroics
Although it can be tempting to rely on your bridge crew, resist the temptation. Heroes don’t scale well so this is a short-term strategy at best. Get your red-shirts up to speed as quickly as possible. Get them trained. Get your processes and systems documented. Hire the right people. Give them clear direction so they work on the right things. Build a team capable of performing their jobs and there is little need for heroes.
If I still haven’t convinced you to avoid a hero culture, remember this: you don’t have heroes in the absence of crisis.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post Becki and something that needs to be said more often.
I run into this all the time as a consultant (half the time playing the role of said hero); either managers have “given up” on a portion of their staff, they themselves have become disillusioned red shirts, or more often than not they don’t see it as their responsibility or don’t know *how* to inspire all of their staff to be a part of “the bridge crew” – imagine how much downtime those 8 people would have had if they’d had 992 people to rotate off with – can you say holodeck!
Instead they use their authority to herd their employees along, encouraging them to “sheepwalk” (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/02/sheepwalking.html) in their roles.
At times I want to become an FTE just so I can be part of the solution – but after so many years I’m not sure I can make the switch.
Sounds painfully familiar.
Thanks for sharing your experiences Andrew, especially what you’ve seen in the managers that you’ve worked with. What a difference those managers could have made if they had some idea what and how to help the red shirts grow into the bridge crew.
I firmly believe leadership development can provide a huge competitive advantage and have the biggest impact on the lives of all who work at an organization.
Steve, as someone who’s lived this, do you have anything you’d like to share about your experience?
Seeing as I’ve seen it from a couple different points in the spectrum in my short career, I’d be happy to throw in my few cents worth for perspective.
First I’ll toss in my most recent red shirt experience. At the most recent job I was at, there was definitely a lack of clear direction and training during the beginning of my employ there. While it definitely afforded me opportunity to observe the environment and offer the rare suggestion where I noticed something, the lack of documentation, training, or clear goals left me adrift as to what the point of what we were doing as a business actually was. By the time I started getting a “decent” grasp as to what was actually going on, I was being pushed into mediocre day to day tasks that weren’t really benefiting anybody in the direct environment we were in. I think a little direction and training close to the beginning of a new job can go a long way in supplementing a strong team. I can’t say I was in no way not responsible for some of my inaction either, but lack of any defining goal will definitely demotivate an employee rather quickly.
As for a bridge crew experience, I’ll step back to my prior military experience. It’s more of a hiring the right people tale though. I spent the last 3 years of my active duty time in an ADP (Automated Data Processing, a bit of a cluster of a mix between help desk, NOC, and systems) shop in the middle of nowhere in northern Japan. I had arrived there shortly before they had completely restructured their internal infrastructure, so was afforded a great opportunity to actually learn what we were doing and how everything interacted. After a couple months at the command I had gotten pretty familiar with the various systems we had on site and kind of familiar with how they interacted with the outside world. The real issues began to rear their head when practically no one else in the shop was really putting forth any effort to get up to speed either, despite available documentation, training, and other people more than willing to help them. This quickly led to myself and and 1 or 2 others constantly having to play hero, coming in during our nights, weekends, and off time just so no one would get shot at by North Korea. It’s easy enough to recognize those type of people in hindsight, but in the moment it’s not always easy to spot those people that are just there to get by and get a paycheck. Even in the civilian sector, no matter how many surprise interview questions or technical interviews we subject people to, you just can’t catch them all. It also puts an interesting perspective on the IT field knowing there’s people willing to sacrifice their time and sanity just to make sure things are being kept up.
While I can’t say I have the most time in my field or the most experience or knowledge, I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up trying. Or coming up with novel solutions. Or pushing boundaries in order to make this field the most interesting field anyone has ever seen. Also, tl;dr.
Thanks for sharing your experiences; both as a red shirt and as a member of the bridge crew. You brought up several good points. One that I find particularly interesting is the importance of getting a good understanding of the mission of the organization as early as possible when being brought on board. That stirs thoughts about how important on boarding is to the success of a new hire.
The second point that I find interesting is the contrast between your two jobs. The lack of documentation and training in you most recent position was a problem, but you had documentation and training in your previous position, but some people were content to let others do the work. I would guess that there were other factors that caused those people to lack motivation.
I hope you do keep learning and pushing boundaries as you go forward with your career. I also thank you again for sharing your experiences because I believe that’s how we can learn from each other.