The Hero Syndrome: Why You Should Fire Your Hardest Workers.

  • 2 MINS READ

There is a fatal flaw in most corporate cultures: We worship the Firefighter.

  • Scenario: The server crashes at 2 AM. “Dave” stays up all night, patches the code, and saves the client.

  • Reaction: The CEO sends a company-wide email: “Dave is a rockstar! Thank you for your dedication!”

  • Result: You just taught the entire company that Chaos + Heroism = Praise.

The Problem with Heroes

A “Hero” is a symptom of a broken system. If Dave has to stay up until 2 AM, it means:

  1. The code was bad.

  2. The testing process failed.

  3. The redundancy systems didn’t work.

By praising Dave, you are ignoring the three failures. You are incentivizing people to let fires start so they can be seen putting them out.

The Anti-Hero Protocol

In a High-Reliability Organization (like a Nuclear Power Plant), “Excitement” is bad. If a reactor operator has to be a “Hero,” someone is getting fired.

1. The “Boring” KRA

Stop measuring “Escalations Solved.” Start measuring “Escalations Prevented.”

  • Bad Metric: “Sales visits made” (Input/Effort).

  • Good Metric: “Revenue per visit” (Efficiency).

  • Bad Metric: “Bugs fixed” (Cleaning up messes).

  • Good Metric: “Uptime” (Preventing messes).

2. The Post-Incident Interrogation

When someone performs a heroic act, thank them privately, then ask publicly: “How do we ensure that you never have to do this again?” If Dave is still fixing the same server crash in 6 months, Dave is not a hero. Dave is a bottleneck.

3. The Fire-Starter Test

Watch out for the employee who constantly creates crises just to solve them. They thrive on adrenaline and validation. They are toxic to scale. Scale requires silence, not sirens.

#DhandheKaFunda: A well-run business is boring. If your office feels like an action movie, you are directing a tragedy.

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