We love stories about brilliant individuals who save the day. The lone finance lead who fixes the reporting mess in one night. The controller who pulls off a miraculous month-end close. The unsung hero who remembers the one missing number right before the board meeting.
These stories feel good. But they’re a problem.
The more your team relies on individual heroics, the more fragile your operations become. Heroics are exciting - but they’re not scalable. They hide broken processes. They create bottlenecks. And they burn people out.
It’s tempting to celebrate the person who “always comes through,” but it’s more valuable to ask: Why did we need a last-minute rescue in the first place?
Most failures in finance teams aren’t caused by incompetence. They’re caused by misalignment:
None of these problems require a genius to solve. They require coordination.
The best finance teams operate with boring consistency. They have clear responsibilities, reliable processes, and tight loops of communication. They don’t wait until something breaks to figure out who owns what. They don’t leave key tasks to tribal knowledge.
In short: they make it easy to do the right thing and hard to drop the ball.
Here’s what that looks like:
When work is structured this way, small problems are caught while they're still small, and important tasks aren’t left to chance. Over time, this shifts teams away from needing rescue missions and toward a system where consistent, reliable execution is simply how work gets done.
Individual brilliance is great. But it’s only as useful as the system it operates in. Coordination, structure, and clarity are what make brilliance repeatable and shareable.
Because in the long run, the best finance teams aren’t the ones with the most heroes.
They’re the ones that don’t need any.
Over time, this shifts the culture from "Who will save us?" to "We've already got it handled."
/ Filip Ullsten @WorkTiles
