Americans love a good hero.  Heroes are central to our mythology as a young nation.  There’s the American Cowboy, a lone guardian of the range who saves settlers from a wide array of dangers.  There’s the Action Movie hero, who saves the day against all odds by fighting off the villain—usually, again, on their own.  And my favorite—the mild-mannered hero who rises to the moment from obscurity, like Clark Kent becoming Superman.  We love an individual, particularly an underdog, who is able to achieve great things in the heat of the moment.

Today, I want to talk about the hero vs. the…what IS the opposite of a hero?  Not coward, since being a hero isn’t just about being brave.  Ordinary citizen, maybe?  Or foot soldier?  Maybe it’s best to give an example.  In the workplace, there is always that person that “saves the day”.  Perhaps there is a production issue and you need an engineer who can get into the plant, figure out the root cause and put a fix in place as quickly as possible.  Or maybe there is a problem with a customer and you need a salesperson or technical expert who can both solve the problem quickly and manage to keep the customer happy before the whole situation blows up.  Or maybe there is a short deadline to get a project finished and you need someone who can dig in to bring it over the goal line, working night and day to get it finished.  You need a hero.  Heroes usually bring tremendous energy and stamina to a crisis situation and are able to just keep going in the face of a myriad of obstacles to save the day.  They are celebrated when they succeed.  They are not usually blamed when they fail.

I love a good hero as much as the next person.  I was rarely the hero myself since I’m not sure I have the intestinal fortitude.  But the question that always nags me is this one:  Why did we need a hero in the first place?  If there was a production upset, for example, did it come down to a maintenance issue or was it a poorly designed process?  If there was a customer issue, was the supply chain not effectively managed or were the needs of the customer not well understood?  If a critical deadline is looming, was there not effective program management to better ensure that the deadline could be met without heroics?

The issue, of course, is that it is easy to see when a hero saves the day.  It’s not easy to see when good, solid performance avoids a potential problem.  And those people—the “ordinary citizens”, the “foot soldiers”—who simply do the right thing every day, rarely get the kudos they deserve because “lack of a problem” is not visible.  As a manager, I really tried hard to remember to give recognition to those who always got the job done—not with heroics (although these same folks would often step up when needed) but with consistent conscientious effort.  And while you always need heroes since crises do arise, a good manager will do a post mortem to understand why the crisis happened in the first place.  In many cases, it could have been avoided if something else had been done correctly.

Our public veneration of heroes can have tragic consequences.  Beware the “hero” who creates a problem so they can solve it.  Everyone knows a story of a volunteer fire fighter who sets fires so they can put them out.  Or the person who ignores simple maintenance of a situation and has to deal with a much more complicated solution.  We applaud them for their heroic actions, but should we?  The heroes in action movies always seem to leave a lot of collateral damage that, when it happens in real life, is not so invisible.  Where there are heroes, there is pain for someone else—either physical, fiscal, or emotional.

One curious aspect of our “hero complex” is that we seem to be ok with waiting for a situation to get so bad that it can only be addressed by heroics.  Take water main breaks, for example.  To proactively go into our communities and replace aging water mains would take a fair amount of money and create a fair amount of disruption.  We never seem to have an appetite to budget the funds or accept the disruption.  But what happens when one breaks?  Well, we find the money to have crews do whatever they have to do 24/7 until it’s fixed.  I can almost guarantee you it costs more and creates even MORE disruption than if the main had been replaced proactively, but people accept the situation.  They aren’t happy about it, to be sure, but they accept it because “it had to be done”. 

I contrast this situation with the efforts last summer by our local electric company to proactively replace the buried 30-year-old electrical mains in our community and upgrade the transformers for more reliable service.  Was there disruption?  Sure.  But they also did this work by using horizontal drillers to avoid messing up lawns and driveways any more than necessary.  I, personally, think they did an awesome job and made an effort to tell them so.  Those poor guys were yelled at all day every day by people who didn’t want ANY disruption.  Yet, had there been a catastrophic failure of the electric main, we would have had to deal with a power outage lasting for days instead of a couple of hours, and they would have come in with a trench digger and just destroyed everything in their seven-foot abatement in the name of speed.

Finally, there is our cultural approach to health care.  Honestly, it’s not health care.  It’s sick care.  We have THE BEST emergency care in the world, hands down.  If you are really sick or hurt and need emergency attention and medical heroics, you want to be in this country.  But if you want to live a long and healthy life with less medical intervention, you might want to live somewhere else.  With our individualistic culture, we like to do whatever we want, eat whatever we want, sit on our couches and watch as much football as we want (not that there’s anything wrong with that one), and have a surgeon heroically by-pass four blocked arteries.  Other countries have a much stronger focus on prevention and early intervention.  Not only is that better for the individual, it’s less expensive.  We spend more per capita on “health care” than any other country yet have only middling health outcomes.  If you are in need of heroics, you are very grateful for our capabilities.  But we are not asking ourselves enough, “Why do we need the heroics?”

All of this rambling is meant to raise a little awareness in you, Dear Reader.  If you are a leader in an organization, in addition to celebrating the heroes, make sure you look for and reward those foot soldiers who keep the lights on every day.  As an average citizen navigating our complex world, keep your eyes out for those folks who are doing what needs to be done to avoid the next crisis.  Thank them, even if they are causing you a minor inconvenience.  As an individual, ask yourself “what am I not taking personal responsibility for that, if I did, could avoid a crisis down the road?”  Hero worship is fun in the movies.  In real life, the true heroes are the ones who kept us from needing the heroics.