When Leadership Rewards the Wrong Thing
Recently, we've talked about the "human middleware" problem, which brings attention to when people become the logic layer between broken systems. Something else that gets overlooked, believe it or not, is that leadership creates this. Not intentionally, but you may have seen this before. We do it every time we celebrate someone for staying late, for answering messages at 9 PM, for being the person who "always saves the day." We say, "We couldn't do this without you." And we mean it as a compliment. But what if that's the problem?
Chet Naran
Mar 13, 2026
The heroics trap
Here's what I see in almost every discovery session.
Leadership spots someone who's keeping everything running. They're handling the edge cases, they're the go-to for urgent issues, and they know all the workarounds.
And leadership rewards them with public praise, bonuses, and promotions.
The message to the rest of the organization is clear: This is what success looks like.
Except heroics aren't success. They're a gap where a system should be.
When the operating system is broken, people fill the void. And the more we celebrate the people filling the void, the less likely we are to fix the foundation that created the void in the first place.
How we accidentally reinforce it
We reward firefighting instead of asking why the fire started. Someone works a 60-hour week to fix a crisis and we thank them publicly. But we should also ask what broke or how to prevent it next time.
We become the bottleneck. Leadership steps in to resolve every decision, every issue, every exception. Teams learn they can't move without us, and so they wait. And on top of that, we get frustrated that they're not taking initiative.
We keep knowledge in our heads. The processes, the edge cases, the "why we do it this way" are all unwritten. So the only way to know is to ask leadership. This makes leadership the single point of failure.
The team sees this and learns that the way to be valuable is to become indispensable.
Where the business is actually fragile
There's a question I ask leadership teams that usually creates a long pause.
"If this person took a two-week vacation tomorrow, what would stop working?"
Sometimes it's followed by, "Who are the three people who can't take time off at the same time?"
The answers tell you everything. It will show you where your human middleware is. Where people are acting as the logic layer. Where the business is fragile because it depends on someone being available 24/7.
Most leadership teams know exactly who these people are. They just haven't connected the dots that rewarding them is making the problem worse.
The urgent versus the important
When I ask leadership to name their three to five non-negotiables, the outcomes that truly drive the business, there's usually another pause.
Most teams are working on 15 priorities. But if leadership isn't clear on what actually matters, the team will treat everything as urgent. When everything is urgent, people default to heroics.
I worked with a healthcare leadership team recently. They had someone who was incredible at onboarding new locations. They were fast, thorough, and everyone loved working with this person.
But when we mapped out the process, almost nothing was clearly documented. The edge cases, the workarounds, and the "this is how we actually do it" details were all in this person's head.
And this person couldn't take a vacation. Because when they did, onboarding would stop!
That's not a person problem. That's a system problem that leadership created by not making the implicit explicit.
From hero to architect
The shift isn't about eliminating people from the process. It's about putting them in the right place.
When I work with leadership teams on this, we start documenting the unwritten rules in the form of RACI matrices, decision trees, and process maps. We also document the decisions that keep rolling uphill, and the processes that only work because someone manually fixes them.
This is when leadership has to do the hardest thing, they've got to take a step back.
Stop being the final decision-maker on everything. Let the team follow the process, even if it feels slower at first. Trust that "the system is designed to handle this" instead of "so and so will fix it."
Leadership says they want people to take ownership. But then they step in at the first sign of friction. And the team learns to not make a decision, what they learn is to just wait for leadership to tell you what to do.
What replaces heroics
When you stop rewarding the firefighting and start building the foundation, the shift is clear.
Clarity - People know what's expected without guessing.
Ownership - Decisions don't roll uphill to the same few people.
Cadence - Work has a rhythm instead of constant firefighting.
That's what a calm operating system does. It doesn't need heroes, because it has structure.
The people who used to hold everything together? They get to do their actual jobs. They can take a vacation and focus on strategic work instead of manual fixes.
The business becomes resilient instead of fragile. You're not one resignation away from a crisis, and leadership gets its time back. You stop being the bottleneck. You stop working in the business and start working on it.
The uncomfortable conversation
The hardest part of this shift isn't the technology, and it's not the process design.
It's telling your best people (the ones holding everything together) that their value shouldn't come from saving the day.
It should come from building a system that doesn't need saving.
That's a cultural shift that starts with leadership.
Stop rewarding the heroics and start building the foundation.
Your company's growth doesn't need heroes. Have you considered that what it needs are systems?
