Hero Culture is Bad

Years ago, in the country where I grew up and back when I still watched TV, a pattern kept repeating: TV stars would take their shows to rival stations, only to find themselves in a worse position a few months later.

They were often offered better contracts and sometimes even managed to bring part of their original crew along. Yet they rarely held on to their audiences for more than a short while, and some were pushed out of television altogether.

Tabloids occasionally asked how this could possibly happen, but never offered real answers (not that they had much insight to give). I doubt their readers could have made sense of it either.

I couldn’t make sense of it back then, either. I’d heard the more thoughtful explanations, such as “the shows were simply better before the move” or “some stations have more money and can afford not to cut corners.” But that’s only the surface. It took changing jobs a couple of times myself to understand what success really depends on. In short:

• It isn’t about having some special talent.
• It isn’t about single-handedly pulling the company uphill.
• It’s about the entire environment that makes you succeed or fail, starting with how clean the toilets are at your workplace.

The most basic example is education: whether you get a good one depends on your family, neighborhood, city and society as a whole. You could argue that business is different, since people are selected through interviews rather than born into their position. I’d argue the same constraints apply everywhere: location, money and the human factor.

Here’s an example from one of my earlier jobs. At the time, the only way to show slides in a meeting was with a projector. It wasn’t easy: you had to get it from IT, wrestle with the setup, and only then start your actual work. Afterwards you had to reverse the whole process so someone else could use it in another room. Finance considered this the optimal approach, because fitting every meeting room with a TV or a fixed projector would have cost far more.

That money-saving strategy had two problems:

• The setup was cumbersome. Booking the projector, collecting it from IT, configuring it and returning it ate up 20 minutes or more of a meeting that lasted an hour at most. A real bottom-line win, I’d say.
• The projectors wore out. Their heating and cooling cycles were incompatible with this process, so within a few months the lenses degraded, the image lost its sharpness and the devices were no longer fit for purpose. Another bottom-line win.

Challenges like these create workplace heroes: people who seem to succeed against everything thrown at them, but who aren’t really winning. They’re survivors, the ones who appear to float above the water.

After all these years, my conclusion is that you can’t simply transplant successful people into such environments and expect them to keep succeeding. Even if they become local heroes, their real impact will be severely limited.

The workplace I mentioned had a hero culture by any definition. A few engineers worked their tails off, fighting company procedures, incompetence and, ultimately, sheer craziness. But good code alone doesn’t get you anywhere, as they found out the hard way. Such an environment simply isn’t conducive to good performance.

These heroes eventually thrived professionally once they landed in genuinely good environments, much like the TV stations I described at the start, the ones that kept drawing huge audiences whether or not particular anchors were on screen.

So what was the secret of the successful stations? They had hero-proofed their work environments.

Culture helps to a degree: successful companies today tend to have flat structures and open-door policies. That’s the visible part. The less visible part is that in such companies, nobody can succeed alone, and everybody knows it.

And yes, it really does start with clean toilets. Too few bathrooms, or mostly dirty ones, are among the most effective mood destroyers in any organization. It works like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: the basics must be in place before anything else, and the quality of your training programs only starts to matter much later. The stations that kept their audiences after “losing” certain people were simply better at covering the basics. In essence, they:

• ran a better hiring process for support staff;
• put the right tools in the right hands;
• held everyone to a high standard, with no exceptions.

By offering audiences a better product, they could charge advertisers more, spend more time perfecting details and cut fewer corners than their competitors. They kept a virtuous cycle going. Yes, it really is that simple.