Because when everyone’s a hero, who’s left to do the cheering?

“Join our mission. Be a hero.” If you’ve read a job posting in the last decade, you’ve seen some version of this sentence. Recruitment ads promise you’ll be a hero. All-hands meetings thank you for being one. Internal comms decks put a cape on the “employee of the quarter.” Even company names have gotten in on it — Delivery Hero is just the most visible member of a small crowd that also includes a rebranded pet-care company that literally added a red cape to its logo.

This isn’t new, and it isn’t isolated to “hero.” It’s part of a broader inflation in how organizations talk about ordinary jobs that started some 20 years ago. Job-posting data tells the story in percentages: between 2006 and 2012/2013, listings using the word “ninja” rose roughly 2,505%, and “Jedi” rose 67%. “Rock star” saw a comparable jump. Somewhere in that same current, “hero” rode along, promising something even more solemn: not just skill, but sacrifice, and not just sacrifice, but a debt owed in return.

And I think that’s a bad idea, because that debt is the part nobody wants to pay. (Or can pay, for that matter.) Let’s look at why organizations keep reaching for heroism imagery despite that; what happens to the people on the receiving end of it; and why the whole framework breaks down for reasons that go deeper than overuse.

Why the imagery is so seductive

It’s worth pausing on why this rhetoric is so persistent. Yes, it’s also lazy copywriting; it’s easy to use the hero arc as a template. Stock photography, a cape emoji, “you’re the real MVP” copy — none of it requires an original idea. But there are other reasons.

It’s pretty much the oldest story we have. The hero’s journey is one of the most recognizable story templates in human culture: ordinary person, extraordinary trial, transformation, return. When we reach for it, we just reach for the shape stories are supposed to take, period.

People prefer a face to a flowchart. A hero is easier to root for than a redesigned workflow. This is especially pronounced in uncertain periods — people look for heroes to reassure them that good outcomes are still possible.

It’s free. Telling someone they’re a hero costs nothing (at least not today).

It flatters a bias people already have. Most people rate themselves as above-average in desirable traits — a well-documented quirk of self-perception. Calling someone a hero just confirms an idea they were already inclined to believe.

It turns hardship into meaning. A hard job, reframed as heroic, becomes chosen and noble rather than merely endured. This is genuinely useful psychological cover — for the employee, whose suffering now feels purposeful, and for the employer, for whom complaints about the job start to feel like a betrayal of the role rather than legitimate feedback.

None of this is unique to the corporate world — military recruitment has been studied for decades through exactly this lens. What’s less examined is what heroism-talk actually costs an organization once its own employees are on the receiving end of it.

The dilemma at the center of it

Because, you see, there’s a problem. Tell someone they’re a hero, and they’ll either believe it or they won’t. Neither of those is good.

If they don’t believe it, the label reads as manipulation. Once detected, it discounts everything else the organization says: the mission statement, the culture deck, next quarter’s town hall. You’ve spent credibility to buy nothing.

If they do believe it, you’ve inherited an obligation you probably didn’t intend to take on. Heroism, as a concept, has always implied reciprocity: extraordinary effort and endurance, exchanged for extraordinary status and reward. Corporate heroism-talk tends to accept the first half of that bargain enthusiastically and quietly drop the second. There may once have been an implicit contract where a young employee traded decades of loyalty for a stable career and a dignified retirement. I’m too young to know whether this contract really ever existed at scale. But if it did, it’s long gone. Now the arc more often runs: This year you’re a hero (rock star, ninja…), next year you’re a line item in a restructuring.

That is why belief tends to convert into disbelief over time — usually with resentment attached, because the person didn’t just fail to get what they were promised; they now feel foolish for having believed it in the first place. That’s when things start to curdle, in ways the next section maps out in more detail.

There’s an unfortunate selection effect worth naming here too: The employees most likely to see through the framing quickly (and land in disbelief early) tend to be your more discerning people — the ones with sharper judgment and lower tolerance for unfunded flattery. Which means this rhetoric erodes trust fastest in those people an organization can least afford to lose.

Did the promise ever actually pay off?

Before writing this off as a purely modern corporate failure, it’s worth asking whether the heroism bargain has ever historically been honored — because “hero,” as a category, comes from somewhere older and bloodier than a LinkedIn job ad: war.

Britain, after World War I, offers a good example of the bargain being stated very clearly: Prime Minister Lloyd George’s 1918 slogan promised returning soldiers “homes fit for heroes” — an explicit, public pledge of material reward. It never materialized at the promised scale. Disillusioned veterans, unable to reconcile the rhetoric with the reality, are a recurring background presence in the literature of the era (Agatha Christie’s novels are dotted with them) — men who did something the nation called heroic and came home to find the nation had nothing much to give them for it.

The GI Bill, 1944, is the closest thing to a genuine success story — and it’s instructive because of how it worked. It was a specific, budgeted, rule-bound entitlement: served after a certain date, discharged under acceptable conditions, a minimum number of days in uniform. Combat wasn’t even a requirement. In other words, the one heroism-adjacent program that actually delivered did so by abandoning heroism as a criterion, replacing “did something extraordinary” with “meets an administrable status.” Even this success had major exclusions — it was applied unevenly enough that large numbers of Black veterans were shut out of its benefits in practice — but the mechanism itself, sentiment traded for bureaucracy, is the part that held.

The Bonus Army, 1932, is worth including because it shows a different way the bargain can fail. The 1924 Adjusted Compensation Act had given WWI veterans a specific, calculable, rule-bound entitlement, maturing on a fixed date in 1945. When the Depression hit, veterans marched on Washington not to demand an unfulfilled promise, but to ask for early redemption of one that was perfectly on track. The government had every legal right to say no. What it did instead was send active-duty troops — commanded by MacArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower — to clear their protest encampment with tear gas and tanks; two veterans died in the aftermath. Eisenhower himself later called the scene pitiful, describing the marchers as ragged, ill-fed men who felt themselves badly abused. The lesson is that even a fair, specific, rule-bound entitlement doesn’t protect you from being treated as disposable the moment you need to renegotiate it, even reasonably. (Congress did eventually move the date up, but only after four more years of organized political pressure. Getting your hero’s reward still required a fight.)

Homeric kleos — glory — is different again. Achilles is offered a direct trade: a short, legendary life or a long, forgotten one. He chooses glory, and the reward is paid out exactly as advertised. Three thousand years later, we’re still talking about him. By the terms of his own culture, he got precisely what he paid for. The catch isn’t delivery, it’s the currency: Kleos can only be collected posthumously, and even then “collecting” just means other people talk about you — you personally experience none of it. It’s a reward structure that works flawlessly; unfortunately, it’s also fundamentally incompatible with being alive to enjoy it. (If you grew up watching early-90s pro wrestling, as I did, you may have heard a faint echo of this play out in real life: Ultimate Warrior, dead at 54. Randy Savage, dead at 58. Hulk Hogan, dead at 71. A different kind of arena, the same trade between spectacle and longevity. Hang in there, Bret Hart!)

There’s a pattern here: Assuming we don’t share Achilles’ preferences, the promise only ever paid out when heroism itself was replaced by an administrable, criterion-based status. And even then, it only really worked out when conditions were favorable. Bare gratitude, applied to bare heroism, has essentially no track record of actually cashing in. So corporations reaching for “you’re a hero” language aren’t really inventing a new kind of failure, they’re just the latest institution to borrow a rather weak currency.

What happens to scorned heroes

When the promise doesn’t pay out, the fallout tends to cluster into a few recognizable shapes — and you don’t have to go back to antiquity to see them, though it sometimes gives you the clearest diagrams.

Entitlement and flippancy. Achilles, stripped of his worldly war-prize (his slave Briseis), doesn’t just get angry — he withdraws entirely, letting his own side lose battles rather than fight for people who broke the deal. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a genuine and celebrated war hero, is expected to “beg” for the plebeians’ political approval — a request he finds so beneath him that he refuses, is banished, and defects to Rome’s enemies out of wounded pride. You don’t need Greek tragedy to recognize the corporate version: the employee who feels exempt from ordinary process or accountability — missed a deadline, but they “carried” the last launch; skipped the standard review, because they’ve “earned” the trust. It’s not a complaint about broken reciprocity so much as a belief that reciprocity shouldn’t have to be negotiated at all, because the label already settled everything.

Organized grievance. The Bonus Army shows what happens when individually wronged people compare notes: an organized, collective demand for what’s owed, rather than private resentment. The corporate equivalent is the resignation wave, the unionization drive, the public callout — the moment a workforce realizes the “hero” narrative was applied to everyone and honored for no one.

Disintegration. Christie’s shell-shocked officers and Erich Maria Remarque’s alienated soldiers represent a quieter and, in some ways, sadder failure mode: not anger, but disorientation. The story simply stops needing them, and they don’t know how to exist outside of it. This branch can go two ways in a workplace: quiet disengagement — the modern “quiet quitting,” the hardest failure mode to catch because it doesn’t announce itself — or, in its more corrosive form, a slide into cutting corners or acting out once the employee has concluded the story no longer applies to them. (There’s an entire academic paper on “Christie’s Wartime Hero: Peacetime Killer.”)

None of these three outcomes is loyalty. All three are costs an organization eventually pays.

The conceptual problem: When everyone is a hero, who’s left to do the cheering?

There is, underneath all three, a more fundamental problem that will make an organization run into some version of this almost no matter how carefully it tries to avoid it. The trouble isn’t only that promises get broken; it’s that the word “hero” itself stops working under the conditions companies use it in.

Heroism is inherently based on a special type of relation. A hero is someone who stands out against a background of the ordinary. It’s a comparative category, not an intrinsic trait. Apply it to everyone, and you haven’t created more heroes — you’ve erased the contrast the word depends on to mean anything. This isn’t just the usual dilution we see with overused superlatives like “amazing” or “incredible,” which lose intensity through repetition but keep their basic shape. “Hero,” applied universally, doesn’t just lose intensity — it loses its logical structure. It becomes a comparative word with no comparison left to make. When everyone is a hero, who’s left to do the cheering?

The case that answers it: “healthcare heroes”

COVID-era healthcare workers are a nice real-world test of that question: an inflated use of the label, followed by immediate, well-documented backlash.

The UK’s “Clap for Carers” is the most literal possible answer to “who does the cheering” — the public did, every week, on doorsteps, for months. And it’s now widely remembered as a case study in the failure this piece has been describing: Healthcare workers reported the ritual as hollow, several said publicly they’d rather see people follow public health guidance and push for better pay than applaud, and the practice was eventually discontinued and later relaunched to a lukewarm reception amid growing criticism that it had substituted for the material support workers actually needed.

Healthcare workers also explicitly rejected the “hero” framing on a core objection: Calling someone a hero implies they’re doing something extraordinary by choice, out of a kind of innate specialness — rather than doing a job that needed adequate pay, staffing, and protective equipment. Even Prince William said as much publicly, warning that turning NHS staff into heroes gave them “the burden that we gave our soldiers fighting the war” — and made it harder for them to talk openly about their own mental health. (Interestingly, France saw a similar reaction; a University of Exeter-led study of French healthcare workers found they were “near unanimous in rejecting their ‘sudden hero’ status,” calling public applause a “trick” and predicting it wouldn’t last.)

As it turns out, applause is renewable on demand, and that’s what makes it a poor substitute for the things that aren’t — pay, staffing, protective equipment. It’s also why an organization that offers applause instead of those things eventually finds the applause itself falling flat.

What to do instead

None of this is an argument against making people feel valued. It’s an argument against using heroism as a substitute for the structures that actually deliver value. And those would be:

Stable processes that don’t need heroes. If a team or a system frequently requires someone to go above and beyond just to keep functioning, that’s not a testament to the team’s character — it’s a diagnostic. Frequent heroism (also known as “hero culture”) is a symptom of broken process, not a culture win. Fix the process, and heroism becomes rare again, which is also what restores the word’s actual meaning.

Material reward that is fair, equal, and predictable. Every historical example that delivered on the heroism bargain worked by replacing sentiment with a rule-bound, budgeted, criterion-based entitlement. The corporate translation doesn’t need to be that legalistic, but the principle transfers directly: Reward should be scheduled and predictable, not narrative-dependent and delivered only when the organization feels moved to be grateful. A clear, standing, accepted system leaves less vacuum for resentment or entitlement to fill.

Recognition that different people contribute in different, non-comparative ways. This is the piece that replaces the human need heroism-talk is trying to meet — the need to be seen and to matter — without the zero-sum structure that makes “hero” self-defeating when it’s applied broadly. Heroism is necessarily scarce and comparative. Reliability, care, mentorship, and good judgment aren’t. You can have a hundred people who are all genuinely excellent, each on a different axis, without any contradiction. “Hero” can’t offer that when more than a handful of people hold the title at once.

So, to sum up, we don’t need another hero, we just need stable processes, fair pay, and recognition specific enough to mean something. I’ll admit that all of this is less gripping than a hero’s journey. But it works.