Reject chronic heroism
Every team I’ve worked in has someone who saves the day. They work late. They pick up the thing nobody else noticed. They’re the reason the release went out.
The heroics hide the problem
Every late night is a process that didn’t work. You never find out the deployment is fragile, because somebody always babysits it. You never fix the handover, because somebody always catches what falls.
So things look like they’re working. The team gets a reputation for reliability it hasn’t earned, and it lasts until the person goes on holiday or leaves.
Meanwhile people are going the extra mile for a company that doesn’t really value them. It values the result, and it doesn’t notice what it cost.
Who gets noticed
Some people are good at being the squeaky wheel. They make the effort visible, so it gets seen and thanked.
Others just get on with it. They finish the work in the day and go home. Their area never has a crisis, so there’s nothing to point at, and they get nothing.
If that’s what you reward, you’ll get more of the first kind and lose the second.
Reward the eight hours
37signals talk about eight hours of work, eight of sleep and eight for everything else. I think that’s the right standard, and it’s one a team can work to.
So reward the person who does the job well in eight hours. Thank them out loud, because people are listening to what you reward far more closely than to anything in the strategy.
And when something does get rescued, thank the person and then treat the rescue as a defect. What made it necessary? Fix that. If the same rescue happens twice, the rescue has become the process.
Try this
Pick one thing that only works because of a particular person. Ask what breaks when they’re away, then send them away and find out.
Fix what you find. Then say publicly that you fixed it, and who made it possible.
The test
If your team only works because certain people go above and beyond, it doesn’t work.
It’s borrowing against them.
How I can help
I work with teams on exactly this. We find the work that only happens because of particular people, fix the process behind it with the team, and change what gets noticed and rewarded so the fix lasts.
That might mean working through one specific problem, or working alongside the team while they do it. If you’d like help, get in touch.