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In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
10,000+ Customers With 15 People – How SweepBright scaled to over 10,000 customers with a team of just 15. A practical conversation with Raphael Bochner on leverage, focus, and designing a business that grows without growing headcount.
Hiring without Hiring – How to scale without adding payroll or burning out.
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – Stop selling to everyone. This episode focuses on defining your ICP so you can scale with better clients and less chaos.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master – You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
What Can You Learn from 22 Microteam Success Stories? (…Plus 1) – Real microteams, real results, and the repeatable patterns behind outsized growth with tiny teams… and one notable failure.
Kill the "Hero" Culture: If Someone Pulls an All-Nighter, Don't Celebrate It
Someone on your team just saved the day.
They stayed up until 3am fixing a critical bug. They worked through the weekend to finish a client deliverable that was about to miss the deadline. They personally rescued a project that was going off the rails.
Your first instinct? Thank them publicly. Praise their dedication. Maybe even call them out in Slack: "Huge shoutout to Alex for pulling an all-nighter to get this done. We couldn't have made it without you!"
And just like that, you've made a huge mistake.
To be clear, thanking and rewarding people for their effort is not a mistake. You should most definitely give people kudos and valuable rewards for going above and beyond to get things done, and done right to save the business and keep it going.
But did you read what I just wrote? Above and beyond.
What you just celebrated wasn't heroism. It was a system failure.
You just sent a signal that the way the business is working is not good enough, and you have to rise above the business and do work beyond what is expected.
That can’t be good. And now you've incentivized everyone on your team to repeat it.
The Hero Trap
Here's what happens when you celebrate heroics instead of systems:
1. You Incentivize Crisis
If people only get praised when they "save the day," they'll unconsciously let things become crises.
Why raise a concern on Monday when you can fix it heroically on Friday and get recognized?
Why build a system that prevents problems when you get more credit for solving them dramatically?
Hero culture rewards firefighting, not fire prevention.
2. You Burn Out Your Best People
The people willing to pull all-nighters are usually your most dedicated, capable team members.
They say yes because they care. They stay late because they're committed. They sacrifice sleep because they don't want to let the team down.
And you reward them by... giving them more emergencies to handle.
Eventually, they realize they're being punished for competence. And they leave.
3. You Hide Systemic Problems
When heroics become normal, you stop asking why they're necessary.
Why did this deployment break at the last minute? Why did we miss the deadline? Why was this the only person who could fix it?
Those are the questions that lead to better systems. But if you're too busy celebrating the hero, you never ask them.
4. You Create Bottlenecks
Hero culture concentrates knowledge and responsibility in a few "indispensable" people.
When only Chris can fix the critical bug, Chris becomes a single point of failure. If Chris is sick, on vacation, or quits, you're screwed.
A business that depends on heroics is a business that can't scale.
Why This Matters for Microteams
Big companies can absorb hero culture for a while. They've got redundancy. They can hire replacements when people burn out. They can afford inefficiency.
Microteams can't.
When you've got 5-10 people, losing one person is catastrophic. Burnout isn't just bad for morale—it's an existential threat.
Here's why killing hero culture is especially critical for small teams:
Every person is mission-critical. You can't afford to burn people out by making them play hero constantly.
You don't have bench depth. If your best person quits, there's no one to replace them. You're starting over.
Systems matter more than individuals. The only way to scale with a small team is to build processes that work without constant intervention.
Culture is set by you. In a microteam, what the founder celebrates becomes the culture instantly. Choose carefully.
The best microteams don't have heroes. They have systems that make heroics unnecessary.
The Anti-Hero Framework
Here's how to shift from a hero culture to a systems culture, where doing things right the first time without heroics needed is what gets celebrated.