Heroes don’t actually help you get things done faster.

Heroics. Who doesn’t love a hero?

Yeah, I’m hearing that Bonnie Tyler song, “I Need a Hero,” in my head, too.

I’ve been on many teams over the past 20 years who depend on a hero. It’s that one person who pulls off a hat trick to save the day in the eleventh hour. It’s the specialist who knows the one skill that everyone needs to get their work done. It’s the manager who makes all the decisions.

Even I have found myself playing the role of the expert. It made me feel special, needed, and crucial. These feelings are addictive.

But heroics aren’t a good long-term strategy, even though they make the expert feel purposeful.

Heroes can help you win, but they also slow you down.

The expert is in high-demand and serves many people and, at times, many teams. You will often find a queue of requests piling up behind these crucial members.

We run into trouble when our heroes become the bottleneck.

Trouble for the team because flow becomes limited by the availability of the expert. Trouble for the heroes because they can’t find time to think because of all the demands on their time. Trouble for customers and stakeholders because their needs don’t get solved fast.

A hero becomes a throttle on your flow of value—the ability to create value without stoppages or waiting.

An expert impedes flow for several reasons:

• Centralized knowledge and skills.
• High-demand and low supply of expertise.
• Lack of autonomy by those who rely on the expert.

Experts seem like the key to your success, but they often limit it.

5 Steps to Reclaim Team Flow by Relieving the Demand on Your Experts.

Over the years, I’ve gathered techniques to reduce the familiar expertise bottleneck.

I am sharing the best of these with you in a 5-step guide, so you can gain from them too. In no time, you will relieve the pressure on your experts and get value flowing smooth.

Let’s dive in.

Step 1 – Make it safe for the expert to give up being the hero.

An expert has often built their reputation and career on being the hero.

Taking away this status can hurt. It could feel like losing an arm. If experts identify with being the go-to when times get tough, they may not want to give it up. I know when I have been the expert, I wanted to keep that position of utility.

Experts often like being the hero.

So, you have to make sure the expert feels safe without the hero label.

• Their job and career path are secure.
• They know how critical they are to the team and the product.
• Their incentives map to spreading their expertise, not hoarding it.

The step of making the transition safe has proven crucial for me in the past. I had an expert who fought back when faced with losing his expertise stronghold. His manager explained to him how this would benefit him, his team, and the company. When he realized the greater impact he could have and that his job was safe, he opened up to the change.

Steps 2-5 require you to make it safe for the expert to take off the hero cape.

Step 2 – Optimize the expert’s schedule.

An expert’s time is often sliced thin and in short supply, with constant interruptions.

Before you can make any changes to spread the expert’s knowledge, you must first make time for the expert to do it. This requires the expert to gain back control of her schedule.

We need to gather and contain requests made to the expert.

I’ve found the best way to do this is to set a 2-3 hour block in the afternoon, right after lunch, consisting of:

• Office Hours: 30 minutes to 1 hour of open time for anyone to contact the expert with quick 5–10 minute questions. I’ve seen this work well with an open Zoom waiting room, a Slack channel or Teams room, or a group text message.
• Meeting Time Slots: 15-30 minute blocks of time that others can schedule for longer sessions.

Outside the office hours, the expert will handle no one-off requests.

This works great to give the expert space to breathe. We have freed up the morning and late afternoon. And now we can use that space to spread the expert’s skills and knowledge to other teams.

With safety and space, let’s move into steps 3-5.

Step 3 – Focus the expert on one team and rotate.

Usually, several teams need the expert’s help.

As with any limited capacity, focus becomes your friend. Focus allows you to get things done sooner. Otherwise, context switching and split attention makes every team request take longer. It’s like spinning plates. You spin too many at the same time, and some will wobble and crash to the floor.

So, we must focus the expert on one team request at a time.

You could time-box how long the expert focuses on one team. For instance, you could focus the expert on one team for a week.

But I prefer to focus the expert until the request is complete. This has helped the experts I’ve worked finish what they start with minimal stress. It produces the least amount of context switching and completes each request fast. Imagine if you started with one team and had to stop in the middle to go help another. That slows down both requests, and it’s frustrating for everyone.

By focusing, experts can apply their knowledge in a concentrated, complete dose.

You might assume the expert is performing the work for the team during this focused time. But this would do nothing for transferring expertise. We want to spread the knowledge and skills of the expert.

So, this is why we need Step 4.

Step 4 – No work performed by the expert.

The expert can’t touch the keyboard or do any work themselves.

Drastic, yes, but incredibly effective.

The expert needs to teach the team how to fish for themselves, not fish for them. This is how knowledge escapes the stronghold of the expert and sinks into the minds of others. The expert becomes a coach instead of being a player.

This method worked wonders for one of my teams. They transferred expertise from a back-end to a front-end developer in two weeks. After this, the front-end developer could perform back-end development with minimal guidance. The transfer happened much faster than I or anyone else had imagined it would.

With any new skill development, a pattern of “I do,” “We do,” and “You do,” is effective and fast.

The expert might show the team how she does it first (“I Do”). Then, the expert does it with the team (“We Do”), letting the team, try it under expert guidance. Finally, the expert watches and only answers questions from the team (“You Do”).

Within a few cycles of this, others will gain capability normally isolated to the expert. And when this happens, you start to relieve the dependence on the hero.

The heroism is now in the coaching.

Step 5 – Decentralize decision-making to your new “mini-experts.”

With enough coaching cycles, you will have created an army of mini-experts.

You can now decentralize decision-making typically performed by the expert. This further decompresses the demand on the expert. If a team has not gained expert knowledge but needs help from an expert, the team now has many options. Any of the mini-experts can help.

Once you arrive at Step 5, the power of the model comes to life.

• Many teams are self-reliant with the expert knowledge.
• Flow has improved with teams containing mini-experts.
• The expert is no longer stressed out due to constant requests.

You have spread hero powers to the teams, resulting in a smooth, steady flow.

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Knowledge spread keeps flow, teams, and products healthy.

So, your experts have to teach what they know rather than keep it to themselves.

It’s a continuous journey to spread the knowledge of experts. You will find as you relieve your dependence on one expert, another will appear. No problem. Just repeat the 5 steps for the new hero that emerges.

1. Make it safe for the expert to stop being the expert.
2. Optimize the expert’s schedule.
3. Focus expert coaching.
4. Expert teaches to fish.
5. Decentralize to mini-experts.

We love our heroes. But instead of having one hero to save the day, let’s create a heroic team that relies on itself. Flow thrives on teamwork, not heroics.

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