The Pitfalls of Cape Worship

Celebrating workplace heroes feels right, but is it a healthy habit? Dive into the unseen costs of 'cape worship' - a story of burnout, resilience, and change.

The Pitfalls of Cape Worship
Photo by Yulia Matvienko / Unsplash

Most companies don’t think twice about it. A resource pulls off something awesome and it is all too natural to praise that superhuman effort, present it as an example for everyone, sing about how this person radiates the company values, and even promote them. But I’m here to tell you that cape worship is an addiction, like eating junk food, and it is one of the worst behaviors for continued success at both the team level and at the company level. I learned this the hard way, beginning with Sarah. 

Sarah, a super smart engineer on my team, was not so unusual. We made a point of hiring super smart people at my company. But in her case, when the company or the idiot manager (me) over-promised on delivering some functionality, Sarah was always our savior. She threw herself into the flames without hesitation. She seemed fine with it, and certainly she glowed from all the gratitude we heaped on her. 

Our customer, a Bay Area startup, had five-alarm emergencies twice a week. Their leadership was completely rabid over keeping the pressure at a screaming pitch, and I suspected they administered transfusions to swap employee blood with the company Kool Aid. As time went by, the demands for Sarah to sacrifice herself for the good of this customer’s projects never relented. 

The not-so-hidden cost of hero worship

Few things in my career do I regret as much as taking a passive stance when Sarah donned the cape for this customer. Over and over and over she rescued us. The customer heard her name repeatedly, and before long they were holding meetings with her alone. They badgered me to let them hire her away, offering her and us disgusting sums to make it happen. 

Amy, the technical lead, disapproved of the customer’s driven approach to developing their critical product set. Amy would calmly suggest that we agree on requirements together and write them down, then design the system to make sure it met those requirements. She told the customer that the majority of their escalations could be avoided by a couple of deliberate conversations early in the cycle. The customer laughed her out of the room and told me to keep her away from their project, as she was clearly not their kind of resource. I regret that too.

Sarah began to show signs of strain. Where she had been gentle and even nurturing of everyone around her, she now grew impatient, agitated, snapping at her teammates. She became obsessed with inefficiency, and fierce about not wasting her time. At last, I grew more concerned about the changes in her personally than I worried about our company’s success with this customer. 

Finally allowing myself to feel empathy for her situation, I asked her what she really wanted. “A long break,” was her response. I probed more and we had several more frank talks and reached agreement. She and her husband planned a trip to Alaska, something they’d dreamed about for years. Partway through her two-week vacation I got a call from the customer. They had to have her back. She was the only one on Earth who could resolve their product’s failures, and I, her manager, needed to convince her to help. I refused, even though they threatened to fire us. A day later Sarah called me. She told me the customer had called her that morning, offered to charter a plane to get her from Juneau to their office, pay her a five figure bonus, and then fly her back to her vacation as soon as she resolved the problems. She told them to eff-off. Then she offered me gratitude for my friendship (but not my leadership) and resigned her position. 

Learnings

selective focus photography of boy wearing black Batman cape
Photo by TK / Unsplash

Sarah’s story is an extreme one, but it changed how I viewed our industry’s universal worship of the cape, particularly in startups. With enough observation I concluded that Heroics is an addiction, and like all addictions it comes with a steep cost.

My conclusions came when I observed these pitfalls of cape worship.:

  • Alleviating only the symptom, not the problem. Relying on heroes and heroism allows your company to not have to deal with its systemic issues. That means the problems will recur and keep recurring until they are fixed, or… you can guess the alternatives.
  • Burnout. Like what happened with Sarah, it leads to burnout of key staff members. 
  • One hit just leaves you craving another. The public tribute to heroes – recognition, praise, and even rewards like promotions – encourage everyone to don the cape. The acceptance and cheerleading demonstrated by everyone else when tribute is made convinces leadership that it is perfectly fine to rely on heroics. This sets up an iterative growth of a dependency that feeds itself. 
  • All practices evolve toward “just-in-time.” A more sinister aspect is that there is less tolerance for planning, specifying, designing, and documenting anything when heroics carry your product across the finish line. Yet this has a terrible cost. With less (or sometimes none) of all those things, companies routinely fail to achieve Product Market Fit or even carve out a bare foothold in a competitive market. 
  • It leads to a critical failure. Sooner or later heroes will not be able to measure up to the demand. It’s inevitable. And the company or team can’t choose which straw breaks the camel’s back, it just breaks.
  • Heroes will hold you hostage. If heroes wear the cape often enough, they can’t help but feel that they are carrying the company. Every additional instance of heroics convinces them that they’re doing the company a favor by showing up to work. They begin to believe that the company owes them something more, like a promotion or a raise or special treatment, regardless of whether or not such things are truly earned with mature capabilities. And companies with this addiction don’t hesitate to offer up these ransoms to keep the heroes flying to the rescue. 

A Call to Action

Batman logo placed on white surface
Photo by Henry & Co. / Unsplash

Here are suggestions for leaders who see the telltale signs of cape worship addiction:

  • Encourage your company to promote individuals based on qualifications, not on their fame, visibility, or due to holding the company in their debt. Remember Amy from the story? She was extremely hard working, had nothing but the team’s and company’s success as her aim, and was prepared to face down leadership and a valuable but rabid customer to better ensure everyone succeeded. In many teams there is an Amy, sitting quietly by, delivering strong contributions over time, building up her team around her, and helping to ensure the company succeeds. Amy probably deserves the promotion more than anyone else. 
  • Even in standups, remember to celebrate the quiet ones, who organize their work so that they succeed without needing to labor all night or all weekend. 
  • Is your company struggling to get traction with their product releases? Are changes to features and functionality required at blazing speeds to help make the product even slightly more acceptable to customers? Encourage everyone to take a breath and a step back in order to devise a more reliable way to customer value. All you can do is advocate for a wiser approach.
  • When heroics occur, and they always do, have this conversation with your team – “We got lucky this time. How could we have avoided the need for luck? If it happens again, we should consider it a failure.”