We all love the hero story. The star athlete who carries the team. The rainmaker partner who lands the impossible client. The visionary founder who “just sees things others don’t.” These stories dominate headlines, keynote speeches, and corporate folklore because they’re simple and satisfying: extraordinary results must come from extraordinary people.
But when it comes to sustained high performance—in teams, organisations, and yes, even elite sport—the hero narrative isn’t just incomplete. It can undermine the very performance we’re trying to create.
The moment someone becomes known as “the high performer,” that identity can begin to shape how they think, behave, and relate to others in ways that can undermine the very performance they’re trying to sustain.
Dangerous both for the individual and for the system around them.
It’s almost as though being bestowed with the moniker of “high performer” is in itself the problem. In my work with professional services principals and partners (those titles implying various degrees of high performance), here are some of the limiting patterns that can unintentionally undermine the performance these people seek:
- Fears constructive feedback. I’m working with a partner right now who was recently told he takes on too much and doesn’t stand up for his views. His first (and painful) knee-jerk reaction? To wonder why no one had said anything earlier, obsess about what everyone else was therefore thinking about him, and to imagine that the feedback was really a performance management plan in disguise. In his eyes, the feedback was really saying he wasn’t a high performer. And that message was downright intolerable.
- Resents others for not pulling their weight…but is unwilling to invest in them. This is the leader who tells me, with a sigh, that once again, she’s the one left “holding the bag” and doing all the work while others underperform around her. But has no time to slow down to ask for help, much less stop to help those around her get better. It’s as if getting help might undermine the her status as that, you guessed it, high performer.
- Simultaneously over- and underwhelmed. “I’ve got too much to do but I feel stuck and unable to grow.” No one says this out loud, but getting caught in this vise–being busy while feeling meaningless–is the biggest accelerant of burnout there is. Especially for executives who are ostensibly getting paid too well to complain about it – or even acknowledge it.
- Has “outgrown” coaching. This is the leader who used to lean into coaching; now he pushes it away. It’s the “curse of expertise”—where growth stalls because “I don’t want to know what I don’t know” gets reframed as “there’s nothing anyone else can teach me.”
And the system?
Just as individuals can become trapped by the hero label, the systems around them can become distorted by it.
When a team begins to rely too heavily on a single “high performer,” a few predictable things tend to happen.
- Stepping back rather than stepping up. When one person is seen as the go-to problem solver, decision maker, or rainmaker, others tend to defer rather than contribute. Why speak up when the hero will have the answer?
- Learning slows. If the hero is always the one closing the deal, fixing the crisis, or making the call, others don’t get the reps required to build their own judgment and skill. What looks like efficiency in the short term becomes a developmental bottleneck in the long term.
- The system weakens. Hero cultures are notoriously brittle. When the hero burns out, leaves, or simply has an off day, everyone feels it. The risk? Too much capability concentrated in one place. What felt like strength was actually a single point of failure.
- Negativity gains ground. Even when the hero is admired, their presence can create an uneven emotional landscape. Some people feel overshadowed. Others feel perpetually judged by comparison. Still others disengage entirely, deciding they can never match the standard being set.
- The team stops behaving like a team. Instead of shared ownership of outcomes, work starts to orbit around the hero. Information flows through them. Decisions bottleneck with them. And gradually the collective intelligence of the group becomes underused.
Hero stories are seductive. But sustainable high performance has very little to do with them by themselves.
It has everything to do with systems—teams that share responsibility, leaders who develop capability in others, and cultures where performance is distributed rather than concentrated.
Heroes may win moments. But systems win seasons.
It’s as true in elite sport as it is in business. Great athletes count on the support from their coaches, their team of sport science professionals, and the love of family and friends. No one goes it alone, not if they want to sustain their best performances season after season.
A couple of questions to consider:
- Where in your world are people over-relying on a “hero” to carry the load?
- And what would need to change–for the hero and/or for the team–for performance to become a shared capability instead?
