Mining the MDW Dataset 4: The Hero Problem

Every organisation has heroes. Better organisations don’t need them.

Companies with the most impressive individual performers often struggle most with performance inconsistencies. Why?

Because heroes negate the need to build systems and create organisational dependency on individual performers instead. Eventually, even heroes fail, and that’s when chaos ensues if you haven’t managed to complement your heroes with systems that capture their expertise and replicate it effectively.

The Hero Trap

Heroes are everywhere in organisations:

• The production manager that can set that tricky machine up perfectly that no one else can
• The salesperson who lands deals when the market seems impossible
• The manager who never lets anything fall through the cracks
• The operator who knows every workaround

We celebrate heroes because they solve urgent problems quickly, making managers feel secure as they demonstrate visible expertise and often have the most impressive stories.

But heroes create hidden risks, such as forming single points of failure, being bottlenecks for critical matters, hoarding critical knowledge, often intentional, creating dependency instead of growing capability. Heroes cause system fragility disguised as strength.

The Research Reality

Peter Senge, from MIT’s Centre for Organisational Learning, showed that systems thinking beats event thinking for sustained performance. Organisations that build learning systems show 3.2× better long-term performance than those relying on individual heroics.

Why? Because heroes eventually leave, burn out, get promoted, or become overwhelmed. Systems compound capability over time, especially if your systems build capability as a byproduct.

What Hero Dependency Looks Like

The Knowledge Monopoly

• The pattern: Critical knowledge exists in one person’s head
• The risk: When they’re unavailable, everything stops
• The cost: Problems that should take minutes require waiting for the expert

The Decision Bottleneck

• The pattern: Important decisions flow through one person
• The risk: Speed depends on their availability and bandwidth
• The cost: Opportunities lost while waiting for approval

The Problem-Solving Dependency

• The pattern: Difficult problems automatically escalate to the same person
• The risk: Everyone else stops developing problem-solving capability
• The cost: Simple problems become complex because basic skills atrophy

The Transformation Stories

Food Producer: From Individual Excellence to System Excellence

A 70-employee fruit processing company, faced the classic small-business hero problem: too much knowledge concentrated in too few people.

Their solution: Develop internal training modules that captured hero knowledge and made it transferable. Instead of depending on individual expertise, they created systems that preserved and shared that expertise.

Result: The organisation has become resilient to personnel changes while maintaining performance standards. Knowledge became an organisational asset, not an individual one.

Rigid Packaging Producer: From Country Heroes to Global Systems

European packaging producer faced a different hero problem: excellent performance in some plants dependent on exceptional local managers, but no way to replicate that performance elsewhere.

Their solution: Develop a comprehensive and unified system that captures best practices and makes them transferable across 13 plants in multiple countries.

The insight: “It’s not just a system – it’s how we do our job every day.” Excellence became embedded in processes, not dependent on personalities.

Result: OEE improved by over 20% and availability increased by more than 25% across the global network. Performance became predictable rather than variable.

Global Food Conglomerate: From Site Heroes to Systematic Excellence

The challenge was massive: 80 manufacturing facilities across 16 countries, each with local heroes who made things work, but no systematic way to share that heroism.

Their solution: Use Mission-Directed Work Teams as the foundation for their Integrated Management System, creating a common language of excellence that transcended individual capabilities.

The transformation: Local heroes became system builders. Instead of being the solution, they became developers of solutions.

Result: Sustainable performance improvements across diverse cultural and operational contexts, because excellence became systematic rather than individual.

Why Hero Dependency Happens, And How To Avoid It

Apart from it being the default condition in organisational evolution, hero dependence exists because of:

The Immediate Gratification Problem

Heroes solve problems now. System building takes time. Under pressure, we choose heroes every time.

The Visible Value Problem

Hero contributions are obvious and measurable. System contributions are subtle and long-term. We reward what we can see.

The Identity Problem

Many high performers derive satisfaction from being needed. Building systems that reduce dependency feels like diminishing their value.

The Control Illusion

Heroes make managers feel in control because problems get solved quickly. Systems feel risky because they require trusting average people instead of heroes.

The Four Signs You Have a Hero Problem

1. The Vacation Test

• Question: What happens when your key people take vacation?
• Healthy: Work continues normally
• Hero-dependent: Problems accumulate until they return

2. The New Employee Test

• Question: How long does it take new people to become productive?
• Healthy: Weeks with systematic onboarding
• Hero-dependent: Months of apprenticing with heroes

3. The Problem-Solving Test

• Question: Where do difficult problems go?
• Healthy: To the most appropriate person as close to the problem as possible
• Hero-dependent: Always to the same few people

4. The Knowledge Test

• Question: What happens if someone leaves unexpectedly?
• Healthy: Documented processes enable continuity
• Hero-dependent: Institutional knowledge walks out the door

The Solution: Building Systems That Create Heroes

The goal isn’t to eliminate excellent performers – it’s to create systems that develop more excellent performers through systematic incorporation of learning from top performers into the organizational fabric. Make heroic problem-solving part of everyone’s standard toolkit, not just the domain of a few exceptional individuals.

Document Hero Knowledge

• Instead of: Keeping expertise in heroes’ heads
• Do: Create systems that capture and transfer knowledge

Develop Multiple Experts

• Instead of: Relying on single points of expertise
• Do: Cross-train multiple people in critical capabilities

Create Learning Systems

• Instead of: Depending on individual problem-solving
• Do: Build organisational problem-solving capability

Measure System Health

• Instead of: Only measuring individual performance
• Do: Track how well systems function independent of specific people

What This Looks Like Monday Morning

Diagnostic questions:

• Who are the people you can’t afford to lose?
• What knowledge would walk out the door if that someone left tomorrow?
• Which problems automatically go to the same person?
• Where do new employees struggle most to get up to speed or often leave again?
• Who are the people with the highest unclaimed leave?

Immediate actions (Do one of each):

• Pick one hero and spend time understanding what they know that others don’t
• Document one critical process that currently exists only in someone’s head
• Cross-train one capability that’s currently concentrated in one person
• Create one system that reduces dependency on individual heroics

The Counter-Intuitive Truth

The best way to honour your heroes isn’t to depend on them – it’s to systematise their heroism so others can learn it.

Heroes should be developers of capability, not repositories of capability. Their value should compound through systems, not diminish through dependency.

The Long-Term Choice

You can build organisations around heroes and get spectacular short-term performance with fragile long-term prospects. Or you can build systems that create heroes and get sustainable performance that improves over time.

Hero dependency is dangerous. Heroes are wonderful.

The question isn’t whether you have great people. The question is whether your greatness depends on keeping specific great people forever.

Who’s your organisational hero? What happens when they leave? Reach out if you need help systematically reducing your dependence on heroes.