uber.la

Back in the day, I was part of an agressive startup company. We were working some folks too hard. While I was allowing some of them to work from home occasionally, the load was still pressing most of them into 60 hour weeks. As I was having a 1 x 1 with one of my team, I was talking about the rockstar mentality vs the hero mentality.

Here's a paraphrase: "It is my job to make rockstars not heros. I am like a strong support team. I will get you food if you have to work late. I will give you time off if you have to work weekends. I will help shift some other projects and prioritize your load so WE can succeed.

"What I am not into is creating heros. Heros are people who take the arrows for others; people who sacrifice their lifestyles to make the job work. These people end up feeling resentful, angry, and uncared for. It is my job, as a team leader, to identify the "hero" situations and try and turn them into "rockstar" situations."

Turns out, at that job I was working for a pretty supportive leader. He too was good at recognizing the difference between the two overachiever types and allowing me the flexibility to reward the rockstars and manage the heros. The problem was the fact that I was replacing an enabler. The manager who I had been hired to replace was somewhat of a mother hen. And the problem was, she was a hero. And being such she created even more heros on her team.

So when the heros were coming to me, a month into my new position, bent out of shape by how they had been treated or compensated or whatever, I was already at a disadvantage. I was NOT on IM at 10pm every night, "like they were." I did NOT work every weekend to catch up, "like they did." Or like the previous manager had.

Later in my career a manager/mentor taught me the saying, "It's not my fire."

I was just about to freak out and try hero mode on her, but she stood firm. "I'm going into this meeting. And then I have another meeting after that. If you still want to talk after lunch, I will talk with you about this, but I have other priorities at this moment."

Oh, I thought. And later I began to understand how that statement worked. I had to push back on the "fire-starter" and say, I will have to get back to you on this issue. And while the issue seemed URGENT to me and this other person, my manager had given me the power to hit the pause button.

This creates two opportunities for the fire-starter. 1. They can take a breath and regroup and wait for you to get back to them. OR 2. They can go around you.

In the case of the fire I was trying to put out, the person tried going around me while waiting for me to get back to them. And what ended up happening, was the person who was actually responsible for causing the hold up that was causing the fire, had to answer for the problem. By the time my manager and I reviewed the situation, the email flurry had died down, and the fire-starter had taken the issue back upon themselves. Where it belonged in the first place.

So I could've been a hero and spun my wheels and worked like a mad man for the entire morning to solve the problem. OR I could listen to reason, "You didn't create this problem and you alone cannot solve it." and get on with some of the things in my priority list that I could actually do something about.

Lesson learned: try to empower your team to become rockstars when necessary. If they are reporting in as heros, you might need to look at your own management style, and determine if you are enabling them to become fire-starters or hero-ic.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/rockstar_hero

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• Write a Career Plan for Yourself
• Finding and Establishing Cadence: Team Updates & Milestones – Timing Is Everything
• The Lifetime Value of a Mentor – Business is One Thing, Deep Trust Is Another Thing Entirely
• Defining a Trusted Social Network

see also the Leadership tab

Tags: empower your team, fire-starter, heros, It's not my fire, management style, not hero building, not my fire, not my problem, rockstar, rockstar building, rockstars, rockstars vs heros, supportive leader