Pit Stop - How to Avoid Relying on Heroic Efforts to Achieve Your Goals

In this Pit Stop episode of Agile Driven Impact, hosts Diane and Erich break down why heroic efforts are a symptom of a planning problem, not a sign of team strength — and share three practical ways teams can minimize them, from sustainable capacity planning and limiting work in progress, to eliminating reliance on a single team member.

A heroic effort happens when a team has to do extraordinary, unsustainable work to hit a deadline — the all-nighter, the weekend sprint, the one person who always saves the day. In the moment it feels like dedication. Over time, it's a fast track to burnout.

If your team regularly scrambles to the finish line, this episode is for you.

Evolving your work, accelerating your impact

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Agile Driven Impact. Super happy to have you here with us today for our pit stop episode, which means in, out, fast, talk about some tactical things, send you on your way. So when we think about uh our recent co-pilot episode with Bethany Planton, we were talking about team happiness and team stress. And what's a pretty natural conversation that comes right from that? Yeah, we're gonna have to talk about heroic efforts that when teams do them often decrease team happiness, increase team stress. So today's goal to get you to think about one practical thing that your team can do to stop relying on heroic efforts, right, Eric? Right. All right. So what in the world is a heroic effort though?

SPEAKER_00 0:53

I mean, I think I think a heroic effort is any time a team or individual has to do something extraordinary, right? They have to do unsustainable work to meet some type of commitment. Even if they didn't make the commitment, maybe they did. But nights, weekends, skip lunches, things like this, um, you know, it's distinct from going above and beyond on occasion, right? So, you know, needing to do something where, hey, it's coming up towards some big deadline and we've just got a little bit of a crunch for a little bit, but it's this repeated heroic heroicism that happens. Um, and uh it's you know, masking actually some type of capacity or planning problem that's going on when it happens over and over again. Um, so uh, you know, example from the type of work I do would be, you know, a deadline coming up, and uh the team works really hard to get through that deadline, but then the next deadline is also way too tight. It's like they the capacity of the team doesn't match the deadlines that were committed. So it's continuous. The new deadline, oh my gosh, we got to work really hard to get to there. Oh my gosh, another new deadline. And so I think it's when that type of stuff happens over and over and over again is where you get into that type of problem.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Yeah, and I think, you know, in the nonprofit space, you say, like, what's a sustainable heroic effort or the actions that we're taking. So you get close to like a big special event. So people might put in an extra hour or two, maybe they flex it, but like it's a one-time thing once a year around the gala. But if it's every Friday there's something that is making people skip their lunch, stay late, whatever it might be, that all of a sudden that's the unsustainable part, right? So there's a difference between every once in a while, a little above and beyond, versus the like the things that systemically decrease happiness, increase stress. Okay, so yeah, that sounds like it hurts the people, but it really is hurting the team. And when we think about how it hurts the team, here's a laundry list of the reasons how it can hurt your team. Uh, we see spike stresses for individuals and the whole team. We see an erosion of happiness in a particular work cycle and definitely over time. And we know that happiness is a leading indicator for performance, so that might mean that uh we're seeing a drop in team performance. These behaviors for uh how the teams are interacting, it's it's sort of it's it reinforces that it's okay to have these overcommitments and still like get across the finish line. Yeah. So what it's really doing is to your point, masking what's underlying behind all this, and it's creating a weird dependency at like the leadership and board level uh on what's actually happening here. So yeah, laundry list of what that can mean. But what are we gonna do about it? Like, what are practical, tactical ways that teams can counterbalance that? What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 3:36

So, yeah, you can uh commit to a more sustainable pace. So you can uh if the team is consistently needing these heroic efforts, right? You can uh use historical data to help you. So you can say, okay, how many things or how much have we completed uh last month, last week, or the last two weeks. Uh and this historical data is a better predictor than people being optimistic and and um thinking things will be quicker than they will be, right? There's this thing's called Hofstader's Law, which is basically that everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstader's law. So that means even if you say, hey, this is gonna take two weeks, you're probably even still wrong. It's probably gonna take three weeks. And so if you've given that commitment, now you're trying your best to fit it. So in for-profit work, oftentimes it's customer commitments that we've overcommitted to over and over again, and then people are working on it, they get that done, and then oh, there's another commitment we made, and that one was too aggressive, and it just keeps repeating.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

It happens all the time in the grant space. And when we think about what that looks like, it might be well, we say we're gonna be ready for the deadline, but then somebody has a dog that's sick, they themselves are sick, there's some something comes up. And I think back to Professor Al George, our mentor back in the FSAE days. Such a great memory to think about what he used to always say to us. It wasn't just you say two weeks, make it three weeks. He would always say add a zero and change the unit.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Double double it and up the unit. Oh, double it and up. Double it and up the units.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Oh, I got it a little bit wrong there.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

So if you think it's gonna take two minutes, it's gonna take four hours.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Yeah. So we've seen it in college race car days, you're seeing it in the for-profit world. I see it in the non-profit world every day. Okay, so that's one of the things that's super common.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Yeah. I think another thing is to limit your work and process. So, you know, stop starting and start finishing is a great way to think about this. So don't try to run everything in parallel. Uh, the more things you run in parallel, the least less efficient you're gonna be, and also the less likely you are to meet the deadlines for the first thing that you're trying to finish. So finishing work matters more than starting work. Uh, and then lastly, share your knowledge. Uh, usually these types of crunch times happen to one or two individuals on the team because they're the single points of failure. They're the only person who knows how to do this thing. So build uh in the safety to say, you know, that we can't take this on uh until this we have more than one person that can learn this. So allow those people to start to learn and do that thing. Yeah, so eliminating single points of failure through cross-training, documentation. Um, if only one person can do it, it's a liability, not a superpower. Um, so we want to basically build in the psychological safety also to say, you know, we can't take this in the sprint unless we have more than one person that can do this because somebody's gonna be on vacation, because we don't have enough bandwidth to handle this type of work, because we only have one person who can do it. So that cross-training to help that out is very important. Um, and in the for-profit context, uh, if you're operating with a scrum team or even just your management team or whatever, then make sure that there's someone's job is protecting the team from overcommitment, using that historical data to prevent the team from saying, yes, we can do that.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Yeah. And, you know, in in my nonprofit world, I'm not saying it doesn't happen in the for-profit world, but if if I say to somebody, wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to take your laptop on vacation? Doesn't matter what their role is, I kind of get like a weird chuckle from them. And I'm like, oh, that's an indicator that there's heroic efforts happening, probably related to this shared knowledge piece. Sure. And so they're like toting their laptop to the beach, to the mountains, wherever they are. We don't want to see that anymore. Yeah. Right?

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Okay. So let so what what can somebody do about it? Like what's our challenge to them this week from this pit stop? What are we gonna ask them to really go after?

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Right. We've given them three things to consider about like some of the common things that bring about heroic efforts. And as usual, we've got a challenge for you. So what are the things that are causing your heroic efforts? So look back over your last few work cycles, maybe it's grant deadlines, maybe it's project demos to your management team. But when you look at spots that have taken heroic efforts in order to get the work across the finish line, what were the commonalities? Was it what Eric was talking about related to capacity planning? Was it something related to like how much work was in progress? Too much was in progress not being finished. Was it that somebody's not trained? Uh, but what is the thing? That's your challenge. Find the thing that feels like a theme. Maybe you can think about what might have caused it, but find the thing so you can start to push against it. That's what we want to hear. And we want to hear about it in the comments. Make sure you tell us what you find. Right?

unknown 8:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

That's it. That's the challenge for the week.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Great.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Pretty easy. Yeah. We're in, we're out, the oil's changed. We're off.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Want to thank our uh sponsor for the season?

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yeah, thanks to Agile and Nonprofits for helping us uh put this podcast on and keep driving that impact.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Talk to you next time.