Every project has a hero. The Project Manager who answers emails late at night, steps in the moment the programme starts to slip & personally rewrites the report before it goes to the client because it is quicker than explaining what good looks like. We celebrate these people, we promote them & we build careers around them. But often, these people (& I’ll put my hand up here) look like they are succeeding on the outside, whilst they are quietly succumbing to stress & pressure on the inside.
The hero concept
For years I thought rescuing the project was the job. After all, when things go wrong, which they often do, someone has to step in & who better than the Project Manager. So I caught everything, checked everything, reworked things myself & stayed late to fix problems.
It felt like I was being a better, more committed leader. Holding the team together in my brain & that the project might crumble without me. But somewhere along the way I noticed that not only did my team had stop bringing me solutions, but they started bringing me problems instead.
Have you ever rewritten a piece of work rather than giving feedback on it? Answered a question your team could easily have answered themselves? Stepped into a meeting that was not yours to run, just to be safe? None of these feel like undermining. Each one is small, well intentioned & quicker in the moment. Which is what makes the habit hard to stop.
What ‘rescuing’ actually teaches your team
Every time we swoop in, we send subliminal messages to the team. Things like; I do not trust you to handle this. Or, when things get difficult, the problem becomes mine, not yours.
The evidence backs this up. Gallup's research suggests that managers account for around 70% of the variance in team engagement; how we behave shapes how our people show up on our projects. And Google's Project Aristotle found that psychological safety, the belief that you can take risks & make mistakes without being punished for them, was the single biggest factor in team effectiveness. The problem is that a ‘hero’ Project Manager quietly erodes both. If you always catch things, why would anyone else stretch?
Why we keep doing it
We step in when we don’t need to because being needed feels wonderful. Because firefighting is visible & coaching is invisible. Because in the short term, doing it yourself genuinely can be faster.
The difficult thing to understand is that rescuing is often about our own anxiety, not the team's ability. We step in because we cannot bear to watch something wobble. Because we feel like a single point of failure for the project. And because if things go wrong, we feel like we can only blame ourselves.
But the reality is that any good project is a team effort. And no amount of heros in black capes will change that. As Project Managers, we have to get better at empowering our teams, stepping back to see the big picture & planning in thinking time that can help us keep a project on track. Because when we all get dragged into the detail, you can work extremely hard to keep a project moving. But that is only useful if you have the oversight to determine if the project is moving in the RIGHT way.
Escaping the hero concept
So what does the alternative look like?
- When someone brings you a problem, try asking "what do you think we should do?" before you offer anything
- When a piece of work is 80% right, give feedback rather than a rewrite, even though the rewrite is quicker
- Let the small, safe things wobble; a slightly awkward meeting or an imperfect first draft is not failure – we all need the opportunity to learn from when things are less than perfect
- Watch what you praise. If the person who stayed up all night fixing a crisis gets the applause & the person who quietly prevented one gets nothing, your team will learn to create drama.
Your job is not to be the strongest person on the team. It is to build a team that does not need saving.
Being a better leader
Nobody writes "rescued everything myself" on a lessons learned register, but plenty of projects are carried by exhausted PMs leading teams that were unnecessarily disempowered. The heroic version of you feels important. But the better version of you builds people who could run the project if you took a fortnight off…and then actually takes the fortnight off!
So, Project Managers, if this resonated with you, let's retire the cape. This week, catch yourself mid rescue, just once, and hand the problem back with your support attached. Your team is more capable than your anxiety is telling you.