Do you feel that every hard problem lands on you? When something is urgent, or nobody else can figure it out, it comes to you and you get it done? There’s a real pride in that. There’s also a quiet exhaustion, and underneath it a frustration you probably don’t say out loud: “why isn’t anyone else stepping up?”
I’ve heard that frustration from almost every hero I’ve worked with, and I’ve felt it myself when I was the hero. It feels like everyone else has checked out and left you holding the hard work. What’s hard to see, from inside it, is that the pattern runs the other way around. The more you take on, the less the team takes on. The less they take on, the more they need you. Without meaning to, you trained the very thing that frustrates you. I’ve written about hero culture before. Today I want to talk about the way out.
The way out is a change in your responsibility. Your job is no longer to do the hard work. Your job is to build people who can do it. This is the difference between being an individual contributor and being a leader, and it’s a bigger shift than it sounds.
A hero solves the problem; a leader makes sure the problem gets solved even when they aren’t there.
Let me tell you about two people who made that shift.
The first had the title of team lead and was, in practice, the hero. Every hard piece of work that came to the team, he took. He was frustrated that the others weren’t growing, not seeing that he’d left them nothing hard to grow on. When I pointed this out and walked him through the downsides of hero culture, he changed almost immediately. He decided that he would stop working alone. Whenever a difficult piece of work came in, he paired with someone else on it, and it didn’t take long before he was no longer needed on all the hard stuff. The people around him could handle it, because he’d finally given them the chance to.
The second story is interesting because the person didn’t wait to be told. He was a genuine hero, and he had two weeks off coming up. Not two weeks reachable by phone, two weeks completely unavailable. We often reassure ourselves that if the team gets truly stuck we can still call the person on vacation. This time they couldn’t, and everyone knew it.
So in the weeks before he left, he deliberately switched from doing the work to leading the work. He delegated as much as he could and kept himself in one role only: a sanity check. He’d look over what people were doing and confirm they were on the right track, and then he’d hand it back to them. By the time he left, the team was already running smoothly without him. They still wanted him there, and that’s a good sign, however they didn’t need him. The real test happened while he was gone and the lack of problems was the proof that it had worked. There was no panic, no problems, and when he finally did return, it was just another day.
Notice what the deadline did in that second story. It forced a change he could have chosen at any time. You don’t need a vacation to make you do it, though it’s a useful test.
None of this happens in a single step. You don’t go from doing everything to handing everything over on a Monday morning. You move people up one rung at a time. David Marquet’s ladder of leadership is the tool I’d reach for here. It gives you a concrete way to move someone from waiting to be told what to do, all the way up to acting on their own and simply keeping you informed. Start where your people are now, and move them up one step. Then another.
If you recognise yourself as the hero, here’s where to start. Pick one hard thing this week that you’d normally just take, and instead hand it to someone else with you alongside. It’ll be slower the first time. It’s slower every first time. That’s the price of building a leader instead of doing the work, and it’s the only way you’ll ever get to take your own vacation.
Heroes do the work. Leaders build more leaders. Which does your team need more?