The Coordination Gap: Transitioning from Personal Performance to Systemic Flow

This is Week 3 in a 12 Week Series on Systems-based Leadership.

In the early years of my tenure as Founder and Executive Director, I occupied a paradoxical space: I was the primary architect of a highly unusual school model, yet I was also its most over-extended laborer. Because the model was unprecedented, I found myself simultaneously serving as a classroom teacher, an instructional coach, and the executive lead managing contracts and public accountability. I stepped into the classroom not out of a desire to micromanage, but out of a perceived necessity; when staff turnover spiked due to the sheer stress of the new model, I became the “relationship holder” by default. I believed that modeling the work was the only precursor to delegating it.

However, this “heroic” posture created a structural fragility that threatened the very mission I was trying to protect. By being the primary performer of the labor, I inadvertently turned the organization into a bottleneck. Every critical decision and every nuance of the school’s culture had to pass through my physical presence to be validated. I was no longer an executive; I had become a human single-point-of-failure. I watched peers in similar founder roles burn out or lose their schools entirely, realizing that if a system’s vitality is tethered to the proximity of a single individual, it hasn’t actually been built—it is merely being performed.

The cost of this embodiment was an unsustainable workload that risked total system collapse. It became clear that “working harder” was not a leadership strategy, but a design flaw. The transition required a violent reimagining of my role: I had to move from being the person who does the work to the person who ensures the work is coordinated.

“If a system’s vitality is tethered to the proximity of a single individual, it hasn’t actually been built—it is merely being performed.”


We often mistake executive exhaustion for a badge of dedication, when in fact, a persistent bottleneck is almost always a failure of role architecture. In my own transition, I had to stop viewing my “indispensability” as a virtue and start seeing it as a symptom of a low-capacity system. When a leader is required to be in the room for a process to function, it reveals that the logic of that process lives in the leader’s head rather than in the organization’s infrastructure.

True organizational capacity is the ability of a system to produce results independent of the founder’s charismatic intervention. When we fail to build the pathways for power and information to circulate without us, we trap our staff in a state of perpetual dependency. This is not a lack of talent on their part, but a lack of design on ours. We have failed to provide the “textual systems”—the maps and manuals—that allow others to navigate the complexity of the work with the same level of authority as the executive.

When we fail to build the pathways for power and information to circulate without us, we trap our staff in a state of perpetual dependency.


The move toward maturity for any complex organization is the shift from embodied leadership to architectural leadership. For me, this meant formalizing what had previously been an “oral tradition.” I moved training out of my personal conversations and into memos, then into a 12-week training program, and eventually into a book. By codifying the “how” and the “why,” I was no longer the sole source of the model’s DNA; the DNA was now distributed across the infrastructure of the school.

This shift allows the executive to move from the “performance of labor” to the “architecture of coordination.” We replaced my personal presence with specialized operational monitors and lead teachers who functioned as systems holders. These were not just subordinates taking orders; they were “invisible giants” within the system, empowered by the specialized coaching and data supervision systems we had built. The leader’s job changed from being the loudest voice in the room to being the person who ensures all the voices are singing from the same, well-designed score.

“True organizational capacity is the ability of a system to produce results independent of the founder’s charismatic intervention.”


In a healthy system, power is not something to be hoarded at the top; it is a current that must circulate to the points of production. When an executive occupies every role—teacher, coach, and director—they act as a dam, preventing power from reaching the people who actually execute the mission. By redesigning our role architecture, we allowed power to flow. We formalized coaching cycles that didn’t require my sign-off, and operational monitors who could adjust policy in real-time based on data.

This circulation is the true measure of system health. A high-functioning organization is one where the “physics” of the design do the heavy lifting, allowing the executive to focus on system-level monitoring and long-term strategy. When power is trapped at the top, the organization becomes brittle; when it circulates through well-defined roles and textual systems, the organization becomes resilient. The goal is a system that can prosper, produce, and grow even—and especially—when the leader is not in the room.

“A high-functioning organization is one where the “physics” of the design do the heavy lifting,”

To the leader currently sitting in the bottleneck: Your exhaustion is not a sign that you aren’t doing enough; it is a sign that you are doing too much of the wrong kind of work. You may feel that your presence is the only thing keeping the walls from caving in, but that very feeling is the evidence of a design error. You are likely performing labor that should be coordinated by a system, and in doing so, you are preventing your team from building their own capacity.

The transition from founder to executive architect is a psychological and structural hurdle. It requires the humility to move from being “the one who knows” to “the one who builds the system so that everyone knows.” The question is not: “How can I work harder to save this?” The question is: “How can I design a system that produces success as an inevitable outcome of its architecture?” Your legacy will not be the work you performed, but the engine of coordination you left behind.

“To the leader currently sitting in the bottleneck: Your exhaustion is not a sign that you aren’t doing enough; it is a sign that you are doing too much of the wrong kind of work.“