Who are your heroes?

Constant heroics lead to long term damage. Who are your constant heroes and how risky is their behaviour?

Identify your heroes.

Do you have heroes on your team? Here’s how to tell. Heroes typically:

• Work more hours than they need to, often without making a big deal about it. (You might not even be aware, but someone on your team will).
• Are the person that everyone turns to for help with unusual problems: they know a lot about a lot of things in your organisation.
• Get brought in as a fixer, when things are going wrong.
• Head off and resolve issues before you even knew they were an issue.
• Don’t make a big deal about the amount or variety of work that they’re doing.

That last point is important: heroes often work in the background. They’re doing incredible work, but they’re not telling the world about it.

Assess the risk.

Heroes are usually very well motivated and the work they do is great, but they often conceal big risks. When you spot a hero, your next step is to understand all the work they’re doing and then ask yourself: what would happen if this person left the org?

That thought experiment will probably highlight a range of challenges for you to solve. Head them off by working out how to solve them now:

• Cross train other people on your team
• See if people outside your team can (or should) be taking on some of the work
• Make a business case for more resources for your team
• See if you can make a particular task go away entirely

When to take this action

This action is from 'No heroics' and should be used when a small number of people on your team are involved in everything, when you're worried about succession planning, when you're managing risks