A company is alive when it stops needing heroes.
Carsten Christiani
Ask around your company who would cause the most damage by disappearing for a week. In most places people can give you a name, and quite often they give the same one. That person is usually thanked and occasionally burnt out. What they are rarely seen as is a very precise marker: they stand exactly where the company has stopped being able to carry its own weight.
I use the word alive for companies, and I know it sounds like something from a retreat brochure. I mean something you can check. In an alive company, what someone notices at the edge of the business reaches a person who can act on it while it still matters. People can say the uncomfortable thing while it is still cheap to hear, before a crisis makes it impossible to ignore. Even irritation is useful there. If someone is fed up with a handoff, that tells you where the handoff is broken, and somebody goes and looks.
A company that is losing this loses information long before it loses money. People keep noticing things and stop saying them, because saying them has never changed anything. Customers keep telling you things that don't fit any of the numbers you track. And whatever the structure can't carry, somebody starts carrying by hand.
That is where heroes come from. It's the one person who knows where everything is, because nobody ever wrote it down, or the one who catches what falls between two teams, because the handoff between them was never designed. They stay late so the launch doesn't slip, and it doesn't, and everybody concludes the process works.
Think of a river with a fallen tree across most of it. The water doesn't stop. It pushes through the one gap left by the bank, and that gap runs faster and digs deeper every year, until from upstream it looks like the river's main channel. The hero is that gap. Everything goes through them, and the longer it does, the more it looks as if that is simply how the company works.
Companies love their heroes, and they should thank them. But the hero often doesn't want to be relieved. Being the one who holds it together has become a job, and after long enough, an identity. Bad systems make good people behave badly, and then teach them that the behaviour is who they are. With heroes the behaviour happens to look admirable, which makes it much harder to question.
So asking the hero to do less doesn't work, and neither does writing their job down in a manual for someone else to follow. What works is finding what they are compensating for and taking that away, whether it's the handoff nobody designed or the decision nobody owns. Take the tree out and the river spreads back across its bed. The hero is still there and still very good, and now their attention can go to the judgment and the relationships that only a person can carry, which is probably what made them good in the first place.
The question I keep coming back to, for any process or reporting line in a company, is whether it makes it easier or harder for the people inside it to say what they notice and act on it. Heroes are what you get when the answer has been "harder" for a while and somebody decent refused to let things fall.
On Monday, ask your leadership team, one at a time, who would cause the most damage by disappearing for a week. If you get the same name more than once, go and ask that person two questions. What do you carry that nobody has written down? And what have you noticed lately that you've stopped saying? Then pick one thing from their answers and change the structure so that it no longer needs them. If it's a handoff that only works because they chase it, make the two teams own the handoff between them and agree that the hero stays out of it for a month, even when it wobbles. It will wobble.
They may not thank you for it at first. Give it the month.