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Hero culture will burn your best people
Why your “go-to” staff are drowning and why workflows should be the real superhero
Every business I work with has that one name.
The planner everyone calls when the board is a mess.
The engineer you send to every difficult site.
The contracts lead who can somehow find any document from 2014 in under 30 seconds.
They are the “if all else fails, ask them” person.
On the surface it looks like a strength. You have reliable people you trust to get things over the line. But if your operation quietly depends on a small group of heroes to hold everything together, you are not running a high performing system. You are running on goodwill, memory and late nights.
And sooner or later, it burns people out.
This is what I mean by hero culture and why I think it is one of the most dangerous habits in FM and field service right now and something “life after COVID” seemed to amplify!
What hero culture actually looks like
Hero culture is not a job title. It is a pattern.
You see it in moments like these:
- The scheduler who stays late every day to fix routes because no one trusts what is in the system
- The engineer who always gets the “nightmare” reactive jobs because “they know how that site works”
- The admin who manually rebuilds every invoice because the job data is never quite right
- The contract manager who keeps a private spreadsheet that only they understand, because “it is quicker than doing it properly”
None of these people are doing anything wrong. In fact, they are doing exactly what you have rewarded them for. They solve problems, they jump in, they save the day.
The issue is what sits behind it.
If your ability to deliver work depends on specific individuals rather than clear workflows and shared standards, you have built a fragile operation. It might feel fast and flexible, but it is one sickness, resignation or holiday away from being exposed.
Why it feels good in the short term
Hero culture hangs around because in the short term it works.
- Customers love the hero who always sorts it for them
- Colleagues know they can forward the problem and it will get fixed
- Leaders feel reassured because “we always find a way”
When a large site mobilisation or critical breakdown appears out of nowhere, it is the heroes who pull off the impossible. They are the ones rewriting schedules on a Sunday night or driving across the city with parts because something slipped through the cracks.
The danger is that these rescues become normal. Instead of asking “why did this go wrong in the first place” the business becomes used to plugging gaps with people.
You start to design your world around exceptions, not good practice.
How it burns your best people
Spend a day with one of your go-to people and you will see the cost up close.
The emotional load
They carry all the awkward conversations, late escalations and last-minute changes. Every “can you just” lands with them. It is flattering at first, but over time it becomes exhausting.
No off switch
Going on holiday is stressful because they know what will pile up while they are away. Sick days feel like a luxury they cannot afford. Even when they are off, they are half checking emails just in case.
Career stuck in the trench
Because they are so good at fixing problems, they rarely get freed up to work on improvements or leadership. They are too valuable doing the day job to step away from it. The business unintentionally keeps them where they are.
Growing resentment
Others start to lean back. If everyone knows the hero will always fix the board, why learn to do it yourself properly? Quietly, the hero begins to feel used rather than valued.
If you hear phrases like “I do not know what we would do without them” it is usually meant as praise. Read it another way and it is a warning sign. No one person should be that critical.
The operational risk nobody talks about
Beyond the human cost, hero culture is a serious operational risk.
Single points of failure
If one person is the only one who understands how a particular client, region or system works, you are exposed. When they leave, so does the knowledge. Handover becomes an emergency, not a process.
Inconsistent decision making
If rules live in someone’s head, not in your workflows, you will get different answers depending on who picks up the phone. That is bad for customers and impossible to audit.
Scaling becomes guesswork
You cannot scale a model that relies on individual heroics. As you add engineers, clients or regions, the cracks widen. The heroes get pulled in more directions until something gives.
Training and onboarding suffer
New starters do not learn “how we do things here”. They learn “who fixes this when it breaks”. That is not a sustainable induction plan.
I see hero culture most often in businesses that are right on the edge of their next growth phase, which i understand in part. They have attracted bigger contracts and more complex work, but the way they run the operation is still dependent on a few people doing clever things in the background.
That is not growth. That is strain.
Making workflows the real superhero
The answer is not to tell your heroes to stop helping. The answer is to turn what they do into something the whole business can stand on.
Here is a practical way to start.
1. Map the hero’s day (yes seriously!)
Sit with them. Ask them to walk you through a normal Monday.
- Which calls do they get
- What do they check that nobody else checks
- Which shortcuts do they use because the system “does not quite work for us”
- What do they fix quietly without raising it as an issue
- How do they know the answer to that, where’s the process or info
You will uncover workflows and knowledge that exist only in their head. That is gold. Get it out of their head and into a simple map.
2. Turn habits into shared workflows
Once you understand what they actually do, build it into the way the business runs.
- If they always double check engineer skills against certain job types, make that a rule in your scheduling process
- If they keep special notes for a particular site, turn that into structured site information not a personal notebook
- If they manually chase RAMS every time, create a job type that triggers the correct RAMS at the point of booking
This is where your system should earn its keep. Your workflows in Joblogic or any other good platform should reflect reality, not fight against it.
3. Share the load by role not by name
Make sure each step of the workflow is owned by a role, not “the person who knows how to do it”.
Planners, service, engineers, admin, finance and contracts should all understand their slice of the flow. Build checklists, forms and simple guidance into their view of the system so they can do the right thing without guessing.
The goal is that if your hero is off for a week, the work still moves.
4. Build visibility into the operation
One reason hero culture appears is because they are the only person who can see everything. They know where jobs are stuck, which engineers are overloaded and which clients are getting close to an SLA breach.
Dashboards, status views and sensible alerts should bring that visibility into the open so the wider team can respond, not just the same one or two people.
If you still hear “I only know what is going on if I ask them” then you have a visibility problem, not a motivation problem.
5. Free your heroes to lead not rescue
As you start to embed workflows and remove single points of failure, you create space.
Use it well.
Your best people are full of ideas for improvement. They see patterns no one else can see because they have lived the chaos close up. Give them time to:
- Improve processes instead of patching them
- Train others using the playbook you built together
- Work on larger projects, new contracts or system changes
That is how you keep them engaged and move them from constant rescuer to genuine leader. Give them head space.
From heroics to healthy high performance
None of this means you stop appreciating the people who go the extra mile. Strong teams will always have stand out individuals. You want that.
The shift is this: your operation should not collapse if those people step away.
In a healthy FM or field service business, the real hero is the way the work flows. Requests move cleanly into jobs, jobs into invoices, assets into records, engineers into the right places at the right time. People add value on top of that flow, they do not hold it together with late nights.
If your stomach drops at the thought of your “go-to” person handing in their notice, take that as your prompt. Start mapping what they do. Turn it into workflow. Share it. Train it. Build it into your system.
Protect your best people by building a business that does not rely on heroics.
Because the fastest way to lose your heroes is to keep asking them to save the day.
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