The Cultureship Blog

We can recognise exceptional heroism but we are remarkably poor at celebrating the smaller and everyday acts of discretionary performance that can be the deciders between endemic mediocrity and sparkling excellence.

Heroism is good. It is good for those who are saved and also good for uplifting the hearts of those who hear of such sterling acts.
Pilot Captain Sullenberger managed somehow to land a plane on the Hudson River in NYC. He is hailed a hero and there are calls for him to be awarded the highest honours. I also heard several callers on the radio saying things like “Yes but he was just doing his day job. He is not a hero, just very cool and very competent.”
Yes, he was working but he also displayed amazing qualities, not least an utter selflessness in checking that everyone had left the waterlogged craft before he made his own exit.

And this growing miserliness with the garland of heroism begs the broader question of whether and how we are to recognise any exceptional performance if that type of behaviour, if not its particular magnitude, is already marked in some arid job description. From here it is only a short step towards an environment that actively discourages the exceptional in favour of homogenised mediocrity.
Part of the problem is the prevalent sense of “Hyperreality”. This is a concept developed by cultural philosopher Jean Baudrillard to express the modern day blurring of the real and the fantastic. We live in an age of new mythology, glamourised superheroes and postmodern psychological weirdness.
The boundaries of what is exceptional for ordinary folk in everyday circumstances get buried as banal beneath the hyperreal tide. Pilot Sullenberger, for some, failed to scale to Superman; he was “just doing his day job”.
Hyperreality militates against the recognition of heroism in genuinely exceptional circumstances, still more so against the recognition of the kind of “everyday heroism” that we will go on to talk more about in a little while.
However, we first need to mention a second major cultural theme which is undermining the very possibilities for heroism to happen in the first place. This is the rampant individualism that has come to pass.
We live in generally more secular times and we are less closely community bound as a result. Consumerism – the definition of our selves and our values mainly through the consumption and accumulation of material goods and services – has also pushed forward the “I” at the expense of the “we”. Widespread secularism and untrammelled consumerism are not necessarily in any way harmful of themselves; what is dangerous is the selfishness and isolation that can get sucked into the vacuum where once there was stronger community.
When we fail to recognise that the whole of societies and organisations can be much greater than the sum of their individual parts, short-term survivalism frequently becomes the order of the day within isolated minds. The beauty of altruism and the rich rewards of reciprocity become omitted from the menu of life.
Increasingly we tell our lives through narratives that speak almost exclusively of “me”, of rights and of winning. “Us”, responsibilities and co-operation are at best footnotes. A sense of “We” as community becomes corrupted to a resentment of “Them”, as in opposition.
These cultural processes all eat away at the greatest possible source of value-add within any community – the mutually involved productive reciprocity of its interacting individual members.
Heroism is a tie that binds at all levels the “I” to the “We” in creative community. Organisational leaders at all levels need to pick up much more on the multiple minor acts of everyday heroism that incrementally add up to exceptional performance.
From the front desk receptionist who is always a ray of sunshine on even the darkest morning, to the cleaner who never leaves until all is spotless, to the supplier who labours unnoticed to ensure that all is readied way beyond the threshold of just OK, to the middle manager who quietly and patiently leads and teaches amidst continual turmoil and upheaval……these are everyday heroes all.
Within The Cultureship Practice we always return to our definition of the core performance and motivation cycle which we express as Community, Contribution & Recognition.
Everything stalls unless we kick-start the cycle again as the time for Recognition comes round. Exceptional heroes like Captain Sullenberger are inspirational and rare wonders to behold. They explode into our consciousness like shooting stars and live brightly in our memories.
Everyday heroes quietly make the world go round, every single day.