Category Archives: People

We Don’t Need Heroes

Every day, we hear about people who are examples of the values we strive to live by. Good Samaritans helping their fellow humans without the need for recognition. People who are willing to work with people they don’t know and be open to new experiences and knowledge.

We live and work amongst great collaborators who have a thirst for growth and accomplishment, and who generally aren’t loners. Generally, they want to be part of something larger than themselves and have the courage to act upon their desires to help and work together. They need to be part of a team and there is no larger team, yet, than humanity itself. We have great collaborators in our every day work environments as well. Team members who reach out to each other and want to help build something together. What is the link to heroes you ask? Good teams don’t need heroes. Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls started winning championships when there were more people for him to pass to and who could take accountability to produce more points and help on defense. When Jordan was the hero, they couldn’t beat the better teams down the stretch.

In team sports, and work is definitely a team sport in most instances, a team provides synergy where the sum of everyone working together is greater than the sum of the individual parts. This is the magic behind projects that deliver without a fuss and don’t need last minute heroes to swoop in from above to save the day. They work together day in and day out to deliver high quality. If there are issues, they are worked through as a team without the need to involve anyone higher up in the hierarchy. This is the basis for Agile and Scrum frameworks. The team is accountable and takes that accountability seriously. They are professionals who’s only requirement from above is consistent support for the cause.

The downside of being professionals that deliver quietly without bringing systems down and needing intervention from above, or involving “ninjas”, “gurus” or other heroes is that the teams often don’t get the high profile recognition. See When We Recognize The Wrong Things for more on this. A team that does their job as a team will outperform those that do it as individuals. This is nothing new, but we constantly need to remind ourselves of this as we continue to live in a world of individual performance evaluations that require us to validate what we have done personally to ensure the success of the business, which is a team. The dichotomy here is untenable, but we have yet to get executive buy-in, so we continue to live with it.

If one person could do it all, we wouldn’t need enterprises with tens of thousands of people in them. But we DO need businesses with many thousands of people who each provide part of the whole to deliver great services for our customers. We need those people to work together and provide them with the tools and support that MAKE IT EASY TO WORK TOGETHER. If we can do this well, there are no limits.

A few years ago, I heard a comment from a leader that came during evaluation time. A time when high profile projects get a big piece of the conversation time and where those who came to the rescue get a lot of recognition. He said “if your project needed to bring in a hero, someone didn’t do their job”. This resonated with me, big time. Given I was working on projects that were quietly delivering and getting great results, the team working together and talking every day, backing each other up and bringing in the right people at the right time and defending the need to do things right, not just fast and cheap, I was very happy to hear it. This leader has a team that we don’t hear too much about, but they are bullish defenders of doing the right thing and making their systems stable and reliable. They get it. You can see that they get it from their low turnover and consistent delivery. They don’t do heroics. They don’t need to. We should all learn from that.

We don’t need heroes. We need great teams that work together and support each other. We are better when we work together. Corny but true. I hope your teams support one another to deliver great results together. If so, you are well on your way to having a team of non-heroes who wear their one very large cape in unison.

When we recognize the wrong things

Have you ever been thanked for working countless hours through the night, over the weekend and during your days off?  Have you ever gotten prizes, certificates or a bonus because you “did the right thing and worked tirelessly without counting the hours”?  If so, you are in good company, but maybe working for a bad one.  Rewarding people for working themselves to death is antithetical to the current push for a healthy work environment and it needs to stop.  Now.

Every day, I hear people pontificating about work life balance and how we all need to take time off to recharge.  We hear about how great it is to take time and just think.  We are given the spiel about emotional intelligence and focus being great productivity boosters.  Then, I see at least half the recognition coming to several teams saying how awesome people are because they went against those values.  There is something very wrong with this picture.

In my workplace, you will never hear an executive tell people they should be working more than the standard policy work week.  We know there will be peak periods where we will have to put in more hours, but that should be followed by commensurate time off, which is not only a legal requirement, but is the right thing to do for your staff’s physical and mental health.  But, what happens when it is all peaks and no valleys?  How many weekends and nights do we have to work before we have legitimate burn out cases?  What is “normal” workload?

In a discussion with a leader I know and respect, she accurately said that part of the problem is driven from the bottom up.  Individual workers feel and perpetuate a culture of having to work the extra hours to be successful.  Projects need to deliver on time and everything needs to run perfectly out of the gate.  If you work in software development, you know that nothing is ever perfect and the unknowns pop up pretty consistently.  We always talk about how the best laid plans go awry, but we never learn our lesson that the stuff we don’t know about is what will trip us up.  We adopt new ways of doing things, like Agile and Scrum, and then we ignore some of the fundamentals in favor of delivering every requirement without deviating from a schedule planned with inordinate amounts of uncertainty.  All of this contributing to a culture where failure is not tolerated and is feared instead of embraced.  We like to say “fail fast, fail often, fail forward”, but we ignore it all when the rubber hits the road.  Often, we are even our own worst enemies.

So, all this begs the question “what should I do about it”?

First, you should talk to your leader and their leader, and even their leader.  Repeat as necessary to get to the top if you have to.  If you are not comfortable doing this, I question how open your environment really is (This is not a judgement.  Mine has it’s issues too…).  It is worth it to talk about perception and reality.  We need to talk about expectations together and make them clear.  We need to ask the difficult questions about what to do when we think the product is not really ready.  We need to embrace the culture of failure as a good thing to learn and improve. We need to feel comfortable saying I don’t know, I don’t agree, I don’t think that is a good idea, I don’t have the time to do that and I don’t want to work that many hours.

As employees, we are trading our time and expertise for compensation.  If we work more hours than the agreed upon number without related compensation, we are diluting the economic value of our labor.  In a time where wage increases are harder and harder to come by and the lion’s share of the value WE are creating is being sucked up by runaway executive compensation and dividend increases, we, the workers, the creators of value, need to stand firm and demand what is rightfully ours.  We need to ask the questions and get the answers.  We need to help each other feel respected and valued.

Lastly, and most importantly, we need to get leaders to STOP RECOGNIZING OVERWORK.  They need to give the prizes to those work their regular hours and have a life outside of work.  Those who take the time be happy and balanced.  They need to give people the ability to get the job done in a reasonable time frame with the right support.  They need to give prizes to projects that deliver without working the team more than the standard work week.  They need to accept that there will be failures and support frameworks that reduce risk and manage time appropriately.  They need to encourage people to speak out against anyone or any project that goes against these principles.  And, we, as the teams doing the work, need to muster the courage to act as a team and support each other in leading balanced lives that make us happy.

Mom is sick, very sick.

I’ve neglected writing over the past months.  I can blame it on too much work, night class trying to start a Masters degree, being with my family or a host of other excuses that may seem legitimate, but they are still excuses.  Today, I am writing to go through some extreme emotions about my mother.  My mom is sick, very sick.

Mom has a host of issues, many that she had kept to herself or played down over the years. Mom has two artificial knees that were replaced several years ago.  She had lost a bunch of weight when she retired, over one hundred pounds, but her body had already been subjected to the weight through many years, she was a smoker for a long time, but had quit when she had the first knee replacement.  For as long as I can remember, my mom was far from active.  At retirement, she started playing bowling once a week and went to a gym where the machines do most of the work.  She never built up any real muscle mass that would help her stay stable on her feet.

In the last three years, she has spent about six months in total in the hospital.  But, those months were mostly due to falls.  The first time she fell, she had a slight break above her knee.  It took a few surgeries and three months for her to recover enough to go home.  The following year, she tripped over a small piece of carpet at a store.  She didn’t really lift her feet for fear of losing her balance.  She couldn’t use crutches since she didn’t have the arm strength and an aversion to lifting her feet, a psychological block.  If she had a railing or two to hold on to, she could climb stairs fairly well.  That caused another break higher up in the hip that would require two surgeries and another six weeks in the hospital. The last time she fell, she was coming out of the movies and using the wheel chair ramp.  There were no obstacles at all.  She simply didn’t lift her foot, it dragged and she went down.  My father-in-law was there.  He is her movie buddy.  They went to the cinema almost every Tuesday afternoon.  The falls was nobody’s fault.  It just happened and meant about another two months in the hospital.

Mom had finally gotten an apartment in a retirement residence.  We pleaded with her last year after she called us twice because she couldn’t get up from the couch or had slipped down the couch and was stuck on the floor.  That scared us quite a bit.  From then on, she always had her phone with her so she could call if something happened.  A few times, she called an ambulance because she was stuck.  She got some physiotherapy, but nothing that would build muscle to increase her stability and ability to stop herself from falling.  She was also very averse to her walker.  Being a strong, independent woman, a walker was a hindrance she didn’t want or need, at lease in her mind.

Almost a week ago, mom called and said she was feeling dizzy, but ok.  She was wondering if we could bring her some chicken noodle soup for lunch and do her laundry.  We were at her place not long after and she seemed under the weather, but could get up on her own, was dressed and could eat.  I saw her again that night to bring back her laundry and she was going to bed early.  She was tired.  The next day, I got a call at 9am.  Mom said she didn’t feel well.  I asked if she wanted to go to the hospital and she said yes.  I got her to hang up with me and call an ambulance.  Within half an hour, mom was in the hospital and being subjected to a broad range of tests to see what was wrong.  She revealed symptoms to the doctor that I wasn’t aware of.  To my surprise, there are a dizzying multitude of problems.  Later in the day, her condition got worse and the doctor starting asking if my mom had a DNR.  Mom has always been open and clear on this subject.  She very explicitly told us many times that she did not want tubes or suffering to be part of the end of her life.  My sister and I needed to make a decision, probably the most difficult decision of our lives.  We had to respect mom’s wishes.

While the emergency room doctor said things were moving fast, which they seemed to be, once the aggressive treatment was halted, things slowed down. Mom is now in palliative care.  Each day with her is a gift.  She is being kept comfortable and I haven’t seen my sister and nephew this much is many years.  While it is very painful for all of us to see mom this way, we still get to see mom.  She still loves her very cold lemon water, sweet deserts and we’ve discovered that she adores slush puppies.  During her lucid moments, we realize she is still very much aware of things going on around her and hears most of what is said in the room.  From time to time, we get a good laugh out of her and she participates in the joke.  Her strength may be low and ebbing, but her sense of humour is still very alive.  We laugh and cry within seconds of each emotion.  It is up and down many many times a day, but I feel privileged to have the time with her, not to mention the renewed connection with my sister and nephew.

In her last days, mom has done what she has always done, kept the family together and made sure we know she loves us to her dying breath.  Bravo, mom.  You are still amazing.  I don’t know what I did in a previous life to be so lucky, but I am sure glad to have had you as my mom.  I love you.