Performance Management

No heroics

Ongoing heroics from your team will lead to burnout or disaster.

We’ve all worked with heroes: people who have put in significant extra time and energy to save a deal, bring a project in on time, or bring production back on target. Maybe you’ve been a hero yourself. We celebrate heroes, and we should. It’s important to recognise and reward people who go the extra mile to deliver a success.

But you should take note when the same people are constantly delivering over and above what you’d expect for their roles. At first things are peachy. The heroes feel like, well, heroes. And you’re happy because your team are ready and willing to go above and beyond to help the organisation be successful.

But the heroes will eventually feel jaded. They’ll resent being called upon again and again. They’ll be less inclined to step up and help. They may start to look for work elsewhere. And throughout it all they’ll be masking a big risk. Constant heroics are a sign that you have gaps - in resource, in training, in ability - in your organisation. What will you do when the heroics stop?

These are hard problems to fix, because they don’t look like problems at first. It’s hard to make the case that you need to do things differently when everything looks great. But they are problems, and they need fixing. Stop the heroics, and reveal the truth. Make things worse, to make them better.