I was recently invited to participate in a leadership panel and was asked a question about being the person who would “jump on a grenade” for the team by owning the implementation of a solution. I understand the spirit of the question. It was about accountability, ownership, and leadership under pressure. But I disagree with the metaphor. The downside of a being on a panel is that I could only give a 1 minute answer to a topic that deserves more time.

I do not want people jumping on grenades at work. Nor do I want to build teams where self-sacrifice is considered the highest form of commitment. I do not want to reward people for absorbing organizational dysfunction with their evenings, weekends, health, or family time. In other words, I will absolutely own the implementation of a solution, but I am not killing myself to do it. That distinction matters.

Hero culture is not just a cultural quirk, and it is not just about a few high-performing people who care too much. It is often a rational response to a broken incentive system. Once you see it through that lens, there is a clear game theory aspect to it.

Heroics Can Be Individually Rational and Organizationally Harmful

In many organizations, I have seen first-hand that the person who saves the day gets rewarded. This reward can look like visibility, praise, a reputation for commitment, invited to important conversations, or even get promoted.

Meanwhile, the person who quietly prevents the crisis from happening in the first place may be invisible. That is the problem.

A stable system rarely looks dramatic. Good planning is boring. Good documentation is boring. Good delegation is boring. Good architecture is boring. Clear ownership is boring. Sustainable delivery is boring. Boring, boring, boring. Boring is good when the idea is that it is a marathon and not a sprint being run.

But a late-night rescue? That is visible. So the organization accidentally teaches people a lesson:

Do not prevent fires quietly. Be seen putting them out.

That is where I notice game theory coming in. The individual incentive and the organizational incentive are misaligned. For the individual, heroics can be a winning strategy. For the organization, repeated heroics are usually a sign of systemic failure. But in the short term, everyone wins… right?

The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Burnout

Imagine a team where everyone privately agrees that the pace is unsustainable. Everyone knows the deadline is unrealistic. Everyone knows the implementation plan is thin. Everyone knows key decisions were delayed too long. Everyone knows the same few people will be expected to rescue the project at the end.

Now imagine one person says, “I am not working all weekend to compensate for poor planning.”

That person may be right, but they may also be judged as not a team player, not committed, not senior enough, or even not willing to do what it takes. So instead, people participate in the system. They work the weekend. They answer messages late at night. They save the project. In effect, they absorb the chaos.

Individually, that can be rational. Nobody wants to be the person who defects from the expected norm. But collectively, everyone loses. The team learns that unrealistic plans are survivable. Leaders learn that under-resourcing works. The organization learns that pressure can be transferred downward until someone absorbs it.

That is the prisoner’s dilemma of hero culture.

Everyone would be better off in a system where the team had sustainable planning, realistic commitments, clear ownership, and enough buffer to handle problems. But each person faces individual pressure to comply with the broken system as it exists today. The result is a bad equilibrium due to incentives.

Heroics Become a Signal

There is another game theory pattern here: signalling.

In many organizations, heroics become a signal of ownership. Someone who works late must be committed. Someone who jumps into the crisis must be a leader. Someone who rescues the project must be high impact. Sometimes that is true, but the signal is noisy.

A person performing heroics might be showing genuine ownership. They might also be compensating for poor planning. They might be masking a fragile system. They might be protecting their status as the only person who knows how something works. They might even be cleaning up a mess they helped create (something I’ve been guilty of doing in the past!).

From the outside, all of those can look the same. That is why organizations need to be careful about what they praise. If the loudest praise goes to the person who stayed up until 2 a.m. fixing the production issue, but little attention goes to the person who proposed the boring control that would have prevented it six months earlier, the organization has made its preference clear.

It may claim to value resilience but it is rewarding drama.

Hero Culture Creates Moral Hazard

Hero culture also creates moral hazard.

If leaders know someone will always jump on the grenade, there is less pressure to fix the conditions that keep producing grenades. Some of the thinking that follows on from this is:

• Why slow down and improve the process?
• Why invest in documentation?
• Why staff the work properly?
• Why reduce single points of failure?
• Why make hard prioritization decisions?
• Why say no?

After all, someone will save it. And that is the hidden cost of hero culture. It allows weak systems to survive. It lets bad planning avoid consequences. It lets leaders delay decisions because the pain can be transferred to the people closest to the work.

The hero absorbs the cost whereas the organization receives the benefit. The broken system remains intact. This is why I try to stamp out hero culture whenever I see it, not because I dislike accountability – quite the opposite – I want real accountability.

Real accountability means owning outcomes without incentivizing and normalizing self-sacrifice. It means telling the truth about constraints. It means making trade-offs visible. It means refusing to confuse commitment with martyrdom.

“Only I Can Save This” Is Not Leadership

There is also a darker version of hero culture. I have succumb to this (and, at times, continue to do so) many times. It is insidious in its very nature.

Sometimes people become valuable because the system is fragile and they are the only ones who understand it. They hold the undocumented knowledge or know the manual workaround. They might even have the private relationship and know where the bodies are buried. They are the person everyone calls when things break.

This can happen accidentally. And especially in my case, it can also become part of someone’s identity. The organization becomes dependent on the hero. The hero becomes indispensable and their status increases because the system remains hard to operate without them. But that is not resilience, it is a monopoly on fragility.

Good leadership should reduce dependency, not increase it. I have learned that my success, and that of anyone, is often seen when I can go on vacation and the system runs fine (even when things go wrong). A strong senior person should make the team more capable when they are not in the room. That means documenting, delegating, simplifying and teaching. They must design systems where success does not depend on one person repeatedly performing miracles.

If the same person is always saving the day, the right question is not, “How do we reward this hero?” The better question is, “Why does the day keep needing to be saved?”

Ownership Without Martyrdom

Where the conversation goes wrong is that the alternative to hero culture is not apathy. Nobody wants apathy but sometimes it can be viewed as not caring as much. When someone pushes back on heroics, they can be misread as rejecting ownership. But ownership and martyrdom are not the same thing.

Compare the different phrases when viewed from an ownership and a martyrdom lens:

A healthy organization should want ownership and avoid martyrdom at all costs.

Changing the Payoff Matrix

If hero culture is an incentive problem, then the solution is not a poster about work-life balance. The solution is to change how the incentives work because my belief is that, ultimately, humans are driven by incentives.

• Reward prevention.
• Reward documentation.
• Reward simplification.
• Reward realistic planning.
• Reward people who reduce operational dependency.
• Reward people who make risks visible early.
• Reward people who build systems that do not require heroics.

And when heroics do happen, treat them carefully. Praise the caring but disincentivize the heroics. Then try to understand why the system failed everyone and temporarily incentivized hero culture.

Sometimes emergencies are real and a team really does need to rally. We need to accept that extraordinary effort is necessary. But repeated heroics should not be celebrated as the sign of a strong culture. They should be investigated as evidence of a weak system.

The question should not be:

Who can we count on to jump on the next grenade?

but rather:

What made this necessary, and how do we prevent it from happening again?

The Leadership Standard

The leadership standard I believe in has simple tenets:

• Own the outcome.
• Tell the truth.
• Make trade-offs visible.
• Protect the team from avoidable chaos.
• Do not create incentives that reward people for burning themselves out.

For an individual, following these leadership tenets means I will own implementation, take responsibility, and help solve hard problems. But I am not interested in building a culture where the highest form of leadership is self-destruction.

But do not confuse management with leadership. Everyone on the team can be a leader, which means everyone on the team can be looking out for signs of a hero culture.

Because once an organization rewards people for jumping on grenades, it should not be surprised when grenades keep appearing.