Heroic Effort Doesn’t Scale

Most organizations have one person holding them together. That person remembers every promise. They notice when something is slipping and catch it before anyone else sees it. When a deadline is in trouble, they stay late. When a decision is stuck, it lands on their desk, and they make it. Everyone is grateful, and everyone quietly assumes it will keep working.

If you lead anything, a team, a department, a church staff, a small business, there is a good chance that person is you.

I know the role well. I serve as executive director of a nonprofit, and as I recorded this episode we were days away from our big annual conference. For many years, that week left me scrambling, trying to do a hundred things at once, because I was the one at the center holding everything together.

So let me say it plainly. Heroic effort doesn’t scale, and it won’t outlast you.

Squared Away Life has always been about more than notes and a daily review. It is about stewardship: handling well what has been entrusted to you. Your knowledge, yes, but also your time, your money, your health, your work, and what you leave behind. Over the coming weeks I am taking the practice into each of those areas, and I am starting with work.

We lead the way we were led

Most of us lead the way we were led. We watched someone we respected pay close attention, remember everything, and absorb whatever fell through the cracks. So that is what we do, and it works very well, right up until the volume exceeds one person.

The trouble is that the volume usually grows without announcing itself. In Scaling People, Claire Hughes Johnson passes along a phrase from an HR partner she worked with: scaling to the call. As an organization grows, your job may not change, but its scope does. The title stays the same. The weight of it does not.

So you respond the way you always have. You pay closer attention. You remember more. You work later, and harder.

And heroic effort gets rewarded. A rescue is visible. People see you catch the ball at the last second, and they thank you. Nobody thanks you for the fire that never started because a system was quietly doing its job.

The coach never takes the ball

Liz Wiseman has a picture of this in Multipliers that stuck with me. Watching youth soccer games, she has seen frustrated coaches do everything: wave their arms, shout, lose their tempers on the sideline. But she has never once seen a coach run onto the field, take the ball from a player, drive down the field, and score.

It isn’t their role. The coach coaches. The players play.

Yet when the stakes are high, that is exactly what many of us do at work. We run onto the field and take the ball. It feels like leadership. Most of the time, it is the absence of a system, paid for by one person.

Three costs

Heroic effort has at least three costs, and they are easy to miss, because in the moment everything is getting done.

It caps the work at your capacity

When everything routes through you, the organization can move only as fast as you can. Every question waits in your inbox. Every exception waits for your judgment.

A line I saved years ago puts it well: the real killer of executive performance is not the big, high-stakes decisions. It is the endless micro-decisions that should never have reached you in the first place.

There is a second half to this cost. When the coach keeps taking the ball, the players never learn to play. The people around you do not grow, because the hard, interesting decisions never reach them.

Quality tracks how you feel

If the system is you, the work is only as good as your week. On a good week, with enough sleep and a clear calendar, everything is sharp. On a hard week, when a conference is days away, or someone at home is sick, or three things break at once, things slip.

Not because you stopped caring. Because the system had one point of failure, and it was having a bad week. Your energy and your good intentions are real. They just cannot be the foundation.

It won’t outlast you

Everything that lives only in your head leaves when you do. A vacation, a new role, a hospital stay, retirement, and eventually your death. At some point someone else will pick up this work, and if all they inherit is a set of habits nobody wrote down, they inherit a mystery.

Test yourself. Could you go on vacation for a week, or disappear for a month, and would the organization still run? It is a good stress test. I have heard of leaders who ran it on purpose, stepping away for a week to see what broke, and learned exactly what they needed to fix.

This is a stewardship question. The work you lead is not really yours to keep. It has been entrusted to you for a season, and part of handling it well is leaving it in a condition someone else can pick up.

Systems before discipline

So what is the alternative? It is not more discipline, at least not first. James Clear puts it well: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

I don’t want to overcorrect. Discipline matters. A few years ago I wrote a phrase on my bathroom mirror: Discipline makes it inevitable. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to expand it: Once you are oriented, discipline makes it inevitable.

I wrote it while trying to lose weight. If I kept a sufficient caloric deficit over the long haul, through diet and exercise, not for a day or a week but for months, then reaching a reasonable goal was inevitable. Once the plan was right, the only variable left was the discipline to keep it.

Orientation comes first. That is the system: knowing what you have committed to, who decides what, and when you will look at all of it again. Discipline is what carries that system week after week. Without the system, discipline is an excellent second floor built on a poor foundation.

Build conditions, not more discipline

The goal is to build conditions in which good work happens whether or not you are having a good week. Here are three.

Write it down

Get it out of your head and onto the page. Every open commitment goes onto one list you trust. The way things are done gets written down where other people can find it. When you make a decision that matters, you write down why.

William Zinsser said that writing is the handmaiden of leadership. He was thinking of Lincoln and Churchill and the strong declarative sentence, but it is just as true on an ordinary Tuesday. If it isn’t written, it can’t be handed to anyone. Decision records deserve a piece of their own, and they will get one.

Decide once

A lot of what reaches you is the same question wearing different clothes. Can we spend this? Who approves that? Which version goes out? Any time you answer the same question twice, you have found a standing rule waiting to be written. Write it once, and the question stops reaching you.

Some decisions should never have been yours to begin with. Push them to the person closest to the information, and give them three things: the context, the outcome you want, and a way to check the work. If you watched my episode on managing AI agents, you will recognize those three. Good delegation works the same way with people. Delegation will get its own episode too.

Review on a fixed rhythm

Not when there is a fire. On a schedule. This is the heart of it. A system nobody looks at drifts, and a weekly review is what keeps it honest.

If you already keep a daily review, this is the same practice at a wider horizon, aimed at your work. The daily review catches the day. The weekly work review catches the system.

Disappointing people at a rate they can absorb

One word of caution before we get practical. When you stop being the hero, some people will be disappointed. They are used to being rescued.

Claire Hughes Johnson quotes Marty Linsky, one of the authors of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: “Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.” So don’t hand off everything on Monday. Take one thing off your own shoulders at a time, and stay close while the new way takes hold.

The Weekly Work Review

Thirty minutes, the same time every week. Friday afternoon works for a lot of people, Monday morning for others. Pick the slot you will actually keep, and ask five questions.

1. What’s still open? Sweep your calendar, your inbox, your messages, and your meeting notes. Every commitment goes onto one list.
2. What reached me that shouldn’t have? Pick one decision that landed on your desk this week. Turn it into a standing rule, or hand it to the person closest to it.
3. Where did I run onto the field? Name one rescue. Then ask what would have made it unnecessary.
4. What lives only in my head? Write down one thing someone else would need if you were out next week, and put it where they can find it.
5. What are the three outcomes that matter next week? Outcomes, not tasks.

That is the whole review. Each week, the work depends a little less on you having a good week, and a little more on a system you built, one that can outlast you.

Download the Weekly Work Review, a one-page template with room to write.

Square it away

Put thirty minutes on your calendar for this week’s review. Before it arrives, answer question four once: write down one thing only you know, and put it somewhere someone else can find it.

Heroic effort doesn’t scale, and it won’t outlast you. A good system can do both.