Harness collective intelligence

It took me 25 years to realize I was “the hero” at work. If you haven’t caught onto the sarcasm yet, being the hero is not a good thing. Being the hero was holding back not only myself, but everyone who has ever worked for me.

I had an answer for everything or a suggestion to make anything just a little bit better. I became such a reliable resource that people didn’t have to put in their full effort because they knew I’d “fix” it before it was too late. This practice prevented the individual growth of my team members and secured my position as a bottleneck, preventing any chance to scale the business someday.

I also suffer from perfectionism, which is probably related to being the hero, I realize now. My 80% might be a client’s 100%, but I still push to get from 96% to 97% and nobody but me values that 1% improvement. Three people producing 80% is better than one person at 100% that can’t be scaled.

If you’re a hero too and want to scale, change your role. But, give your team a heads-up first, because they might think you’ve stopped caring. It’s quite the opposite: you want to help them grow, contribute more, and get a sense of fulfillment from their job. It’s going to be painful at first. You are going to need to demonstrate patience and resilience. See if you can answer every question with a question, and no leading questions are allowed. If you want to scale, hire the right people, coach them, and reassign everything you shouldn’t be doing.