Background

Individual heroics are behaviours aimed at personal differentiations and recognition. This can be both for self-aggrandisement or playing victim or martyr. Such behaviours are a major impediment to teamwork and can grow into a culture of individual heroics over teamwork.

Experience

Certain individuals on the team developed specialised knowledge in key areas of the system and then failed to pass on this knowledge to team members even when this was explicitly requested. This behaviour was associating with these individuals actively seeking recognition for their contribution in an area of development that no-one else could contribute to through boasting of working long hours, ad hoc personal demonstrations to the customer and emphasis of their knowledge and personal contribution during iteration reviews. This resulted in a significant backlog accumulating around these individuals who became bottlenecks to the team.

Smells

• Certain individuals emphasising their personal contribution at iteration reviews.
• Certain individuals carrying a disproportionately large amount of work.
• Repeated overtime by certain individuals.
• Tasks bottlenecking around certain individuals.

Causes

• Performance reviews that emphasise individual achievement over team achievement.
• Insecurity on the part of individuals as to their status within the team.

Consequences

• Significant slowing of the end-to-end cycle time required to get new features finished.
• Diminished collective code ownership.
• Diminished flexibility in work allocation.
• Diminished resilience in dealing with certain individuals being unavailable.

Guidance

It is common for real or perceived incentives to lead individuals towards heroic behaviour. Therefore, remove the incentives for individual heroics by coaching the customer and others to limit praise given to individuals who may be exhibiting heroics. Also ensure that performance reviews emphasise team achievement and collaboration over individual achievement. Coach heroic individuals to understand how incentives are aligned to team performance.

Individuals who engage in heroic do so at the expense of teamwork and team collaboration skills. Therefore, coach heroic individuals on knowledge sharing, teamwork and collaboration skills.

If you have had a similar experience or have a different perspective on this, please post a comment below.