When Hero Leadership Becomes the Problem

The programme director stays late again. Fourth consecutive night this week working past midnight to solve problems the team couldn't resolve during working hours. Steering committee praises their dedication. The executive team highlights them as exemplar of commitment. Performance review notes their exceptional crisis management capabilities. Six months later they're signed off with stress-related illness, and the organisation wonders what went wrong.

What went wrong is that the organisation designed a system that requires hero leadership to function - then acts surprised when heroes burn out. The pattern is so common it's almost ritual: reward the individual who works themselves to exhaustion fixing problems, promote them based on that capability, increase their span of control, watch them replicate the same pattern at larger scale until something breaks. Usually, them.

Hero leadership creates immediate results whilst preventing long-term capability development. When the senior leader personally resolves every escalated issue, the team never learns problem-solving capability. When the programme director makes all critical decisions, middle managers never develop decision-making judgement. When one person carries the project through force of will, the organisation never builds the systems, structures, and distributed capability required for sustainable delivery.

The Project Management Institute's research on project leaders' mental health reveals the human cost. Project environments create conditions where burnout becomes occupational hazard: high pressure, competing priorities, resource constraints, accountability without authority, unrealistic expectations from multiple stakeholders. Add hero leadership culture that rewards personal sacrifice, and you've designed a system that consumes talented people then replaces them with the next volunteer for exhaustion.

The Major Projects Association emphasises "people, people, people" as fundamental to project initiation - getting team composition and capability right from the start. But hero leadership cultures undermine this principle systematically. Why invest in building team capability when the hero leader will intervene and fix things anyway? Why develop middle management judgement when escalation to the top is faster? Why create robust processes when the exceptional individual can work around inadequate systems through personal effort?

Every crisis that the hero leader personally resolves prevents the organisation from learning how to prevent that crisis. The immediate problem gets fixed. The underlying cause persists. Next project faces the same failure mode, requires the same heroic intervention, reinforces the same dependency. The organisation congratulates itself on having resilient leadership whilst building increasing fragility into its delivery capability.

Consider the governance challenge in major capital programmes. Liverpool's Central Station redevelopment - potential £5 billion investment creating transformative infrastructure for the North West. Project of this scale and complexity requires distributed leadership across multiple workstreams, robust governance enabling decision-making at appropriate levels, systematic capability development across delivery teams. What it cannot sustain is dependency on individual heroics to hold everything together. Yet the cultural default remains: find the exceptional individual, give them enormous scope, expect them to make it work through force of personality and personal sacrifice.

Parliament's Public Accounts Committee identified related dynamics in their major projects report - accountability confusion where governance structures fail to clarify who decides what. This creates vacuum that hero leaders fill through personal initiative. They step in because someone needs to, because formal accountability is unclear, because escalation paths are convoluted. The gap in formal governance gets filled by informal leadership - which looks like strength but is actually system weakness.

The organisations most dependent on hero leadership tend to be the ones that talk most about succession planning whilst doing least to enable it. Succession planning assumes you can replace the hero with another hero. Capability building recognises you need to stop requiring heroes by creating systems where good people can achieve good outcomes without extraordinary personal cost.

This doesn't mean abandoning leadership during crisis. It means distinguishing between necessary crisis intervention and structural dependency on crisis intervention. Sometimes projects need extraordinary effort to recover from unexpected problems. The question is whether this becomes the operating model - whether crisis management is occasional response or continuous requirement.

Organisations that break hero leadership dependency make deliberate design choices. They create governance that clarifies decision rights rather than forcing escalation. They build middle management capability to handle complexity rather than centralising expertise. They design systems that enable distributed problem-solving rather than requiring central coordination. They measure whether problems recur rather than just celebrating their resolution. They reward capability development as highly as crisis management.

The transition feels risky because hero leadership provides visible reassurance. The exceptional individual making things happen creates confidence that the project is in capable hands. Distributed capability is less visible, harder to attribute, doesn't generate the same compelling narrative of personal commitment. But visible dependency on individual heroics is organisational fragility pretending to be strength.

Breaking the pattern requires confronting uncomfortable questions. What problems keep requiring heroic intervention because we're not fixing root causes? What capabilities are we not building in the team because the hero leader keeps fixing things personally? What governance gaps are we filling with personal initiative rather than structural clarity? What happens when the hero leaves, burns out, or faces multiple crises simultaneously?

The measure of effective leadership isn't how many crises you personally resolve. It's how many crises stop requiring your personal intervention because the team developed capability to handle them, or better yet, prevent them. Hero leadership might feel necessary. Building the capability that makes heroes unnecessary is actually essential.

What problems keep requiring your heroic intervention because the organisation hasn't learned to prevent them?

References

Project Management Institute Mental Health Tips Project Managers Need

LBN Daily "Chancellor Opens Door to £5bn Central Station Project"

Governance and decision-making on major projects

Major Projects Association (MPA). Project Initiation Handbook: Ten Tenets of Major Project Initiation and No More Heroes. Resources available to MPA members only.