When Governance Is Unclear, Leaders Become the System

Most people think of governance as something formal: boards, bylaws, committees, approvals. And yes, that’s part of it, but in practice, governance shows up much closer to the work. It lives wherever decisions are made about what happens, who decides, and how things move forward.

What governance actually is

At its core, governance is: how an organization makes decisions about its most important work. It sits at the intersection of decision-making, authority, and accountability. And it shows up everywhere:

• in how academic programs are executed (Academic Program Governance)

• in how partnerships are initiated and structured (Partnership Governance)

• in how curriculum changes are made (Curriculum Governance)

• in how resources are allocated (Resource Allocation and Financial Governance)

• in how priorities are set and reset (Strategic Prioritization)

  
  

Anytime there is a meaningful function (a core area of work, e.g. finance and academic leadership) and choices about how that function operates there is governance. For example, who gets to decide how scholarships are awarded and the required documentation? It’s important to note that it’s not always referred to explicitly as “governance” but you know it is at play when a decision affects more than one function, and it’s unclear who decides or how.

Where things start to break down

In many organizations, governance is both overly concentrated upward and poorly defined across the system. These two dynamics often show up together. Decisions escalate upward because they have to. More specifically, no one is quite sure who owns what at other levels or in other functions. What looks like centralization is often a response to ambiguity. And what looks like ambiguity often becomes dependency. When governance is unclear, leaders step in to fill the gap. Leaders

• answer questions that shouldn’t require them

• make decisions that should live elsewhere

• resolve issues that should have been prevented

• carry context that no one else has access to

  
  

Over time, leaders can become an approval process, escalation pathway, institutional memory, and dot connector across disconnected parts. And while this often looks like strong leadership and efficiency, but, it’s actually a structural problem. Things move because a capable leader is holding them together. But over time decision-making slows, consistency breaks down, dependency increases, scaling becomes impossible, and burnout becomes inevitable. And most challenging, the organization cannot function well without that individual.

What this means for organizations

When leaders become the system, it’s not a people problem. It’s a governance problem. The question isn’t: Why is this leader so involved in everything? A better question is: What decisions does the system not know how to make on its own and what needs to shift so the system can make the specific decision at hand? Strong organizations clarify governance so that decisions live where they belong, authority is distributed appropriately, expectations are visible, and ownership is clear across levels and functions. When governance is clear, leaders don’t have to hold everything together, the system does.