Why being the hero is not always a good thing in your career
Reduce the burnout and negative experiences associated with performing the ‘hero’ role on projects
Projects can often veer away from their expected target along their journey. As a result, you may be asked to step in for a realignment exercise. You are often invited to step in at those challenging moments because of your ability to learn quickly, optimistically approach challenges and have leadership qualities that give you the ability to formulate a plan for what a situation needs. You are then able to execute that plan. If I had just described you, this article could help reduce the burnout and negative experiences associated with performing the ‘hero’ role on projects.
So you have been asked to assist and even perform some realignment on a project that is going differently than expected. The project may have even received an escalation. Often escalations are to senior management by senior management, and they demand some action resolution. Your involvement and the output you produce may be that resolution being committed to as part of this plan.
For a professional individual, it is often sought after to be relied upon in such a situation. After all, turning something around when it is heading for a less-than-desirable outcome is a brilliant quality. However, despite how easy this seems to come for you, there is a toll and impact of these actions that could negatively affect you and your career. Being a continuous hero is only sometimes a good thing for your career. As professionals, we need to step away from its glamourization.
Let’s look at the obvious one — managing messy situations will take their emotional toll on you. They demand a lot - they often ask you to be beyond flexible, perhaps even working late or on holidays to turn something around in a typically unrealistic timeframe. This means time away from your family and hobbies that bring you happiness.
Secondly, you are the figure whom anger and frustration is often directed to and being able to diffuse that anger is no small feat. It doesn’t just ‘get absorbed’ by you, and it could be difficult to not redirect that to your own colleagues, as their failure in part, could be partly responsible in the current situation. Taking the negative emotion and treating it with kindness, consistently and with leadership is needed in those situations, so they can see the growth moment, reducing the likelihood of the situation occurring again. This can be a heavy burden.
Regularly being put in situations of inflexibility, reduction in your own personal activities that bring you happiness, anger and emotion and the effort to redirect those to positive leadership-affirming growth moments can lead to professional burnout.
That burnout is not just a result of the actual project but often from how these situations occur. They demand that you be parachuted in, leaving your current projects or commitments to either fall by the wayside or, worse, complete them simultaneously and at the same quality. These projects could be important to you, and seeing them stagnate and even get cancelled, especially if you get called upon repeatedly, can be disheartening and begin to limit your career progression.
So how can you change this? Being in a position where your leadership can rely on you is a testament to your experience. So you could argue it is part of the responsibility of being in a senior role. Although how can you do the right thing to provide this assistance to your company as a senior leader but at the same time keep it from impacting your life and your current career?
It is essential to remember that a senior leader is looked upon for leadership in trying times, and not responsible to ‘fix’ everything.
Sometimes in these hero situations, it can seem easy to just roll your sleeves up and jump in yourself, starting to actually lead, when it is perhaps more coaching of others and personal leadership that the situation demands for. But, unfortunately, the former is much easier to do.
By providing coaching and leadership, you contribute to creating a growth mindset culture. Mistakes are accepted as part of anyone’s journey, where they can be fixed, and people grow. Having a strategy to limit those mistakes through guidelines and frameworks is necessary for the organization as a whole, but realistically understand that there will be no way to eliminate them entirely.
Failure is how people learn, and senior leaders, especially ones who are brought in to assist on failing projects, should not see sacrificing their personal hours, career aspirations and their own projects as noble, in fact, it’s not even helping the situation in the way you want. By understanding that actually not jumping in and getting involved will be even harder, you need to set boundaries and guidelines with the management asking you to support the project specifically what is acceptable and not acceptable of your time. Ask clarifying questions about under what circumstance are you being brought in to assist and look at the bigger picture of how these asks could either be starting to impact your career or put future projects at risk. These conversations can then lead to the growth of other individuals in your company, meaning it’s not always you who is parachuted in on projects but a team who can share and limit the burden it creates.
Otherwise, hero project after hero project is finite survival. Even despite that, coaching in trying times and challenging situations can take even more from us, so understand your role and make sure you don’t play the hero too much. If you continue to fix situations, the culture becomes one which is not one of growth mindset and earned trust where some slight course correction through targeted leadership is delivered, but instead a break-fix mindset that is unsustainable and drives employees away.
Want learn more about the Common Storyline Plot? Check out the 2023 Career Workbook!
This story was originally posted on my medium here