In a star team – the team gets the stars

If praise, recognition, promotions always come to a few staff members – the usual suspects – you have a hero culture. You have a hero culture – even though you might think you have a team culture. You can call it a star team all you want, if not the team gets the stars but the heroes, you are not walking the talk. Would you build a software relying on only a few persons? “He got hit by a tram” – is a true story, and it is happening again in software projects.  If you only give credit to those that pull out the big fires, you will nurture big fires. You get what you reward….

Something silly

Sure, recognize the stars – but spread the goodwill. Even heroes needs help. Make every team member feel that they contributed. Try when you lead to reach out to everybody over the course of the project/months days. Recognize them all and say thank you.

Once I was a leader at a children summer camp. Every evening we would make a mentioning of the fun stories of the day. Obviously some of the kids where more “fun” than the others, but we kept a rooster to make sure all were mentioned – perhaps just with a little thing. It meant a lot to be mentioned, even for something silly…

Keith Klain put’s it this way in The Testing Planet 10 – Leadership issue: “Leadership in Testing – What really Matters”:  I want my team to take ALL the credit because they are the ones doing all the work!  I would rephrase this to: I want to praise the teams I help succeed, but I also need to know that I am part of the team that get’s the praise ;-).  

Strip me of all my power, my titles, my roles – and hand them to those that need it to have the courage to stand up, or that needs it to grow. I know I stand on the shoulders of software testing giants (like Keith), I may not reach high compared to them – but I can still lift someone else up, so that we together reach even further. We all have to start somewhere…

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