There is a particular kind of leader that schools tend to produce over time. They are responsive, capable, deeply committed, and almost impossibly good at getting things done. Everyone knows who they are. If there is a conflict, they mediate it. If a decision needs to be made, they make it. If something falls through the cracks, they catch it.
And that, according to Kalimah Fergus-Ayele, is exactly the problem.
In a recent episode of The Table, Kalimah — founder and CEO of Roundtrip Ticket Home, an organization that helps educators redesign school systems through design thinking — described what she calls the “heroic leadership” model and why it is so prevalent in schools. “It sometimes comes from a good place,” she said. “We’ve got so many people who are committed and dedicated and want to show up for the community.” But over time, that commitment without structure creates what she calls a “single plane of failure” — a school that functions only as long as one or a handful of people are present, energized, and holding everything together.
Most school leaders reading this know the feeling. The question is what to do about it.
What Heroic Leadership Actually Looks Like Day-to-Day
Heroic leadership is not always dramatic. It often shows up quietly: the dean who handles every conflict because it is just easier, the division director who rewrites every communication because the standards feel higher when they do it themselves, the head of school who cannot take a day off without constantly checking their phone.
Kalimah is direct about the pattern: “If you have someone who mediates every conflict, who everybody knows is the main decision maker — that’s the clue you’ve defaulted to that model.”
What makes it so sticky in schools is that it gets rewarded. Families trust the person. Faculty defer to them. The school runs smoothly — until it doesn’t. As Kalimah noted, the real damage shows up when that person burns out, transitions out of the role, or simply has a bad week. Progress that was never anchored in infrastructure disappears. The initiative that went so well? “That project was a good project,” she recalled with candor. “But when I left, it stopped.”
There is also an equity issue embedded in this model that does not get enough attention: when leadership is concentrated in a single person, it lets everyone else off the hook. Kalimah was candid about this, too. “There are always going to be a couple of people who benefited from the heroic model because it meant they were able to slack off.” And once you begin building real accountability into the system, that becomes visible — which is part of why change feels risky.
The Case for Leadership Infrastructure Systems
The alternative Kalimah proposes is what she calls a Leadership Infrastructure System, or LIS. The concept is not complicated, but it does require intentionality. At its core, it is the set of structures, rhythms, and accountabilities that allow a school to function consistently — regardless of who is in the building on any given day.
She describes it as “building the pipes.” The vision of a graduate, the school’s mission, the values on the wall — those are the water. But without pipes, the water goes nowhere predictable. “What some of the weaker areas are,” she observed, “is how that vision comes down to my individual role and responsibility.”
A functioning LIS typically includes:
- Clarity of roles: Not just job descriptions, but honest conversations about what a role actually requires versus what someone does out of habit or preference.
- Measurable goal-setting: Annual goals broken down by quarter, then by month, then by week — so that every one-on-one conversation has a direction.
- Progress dashboards: Shared documentation that makes visible what each person is working on, minimizing the “I’m so busy, but I don’t know what anyone else is doing” dynamic.
- Strategic meetings: Moving away from status-report meetings toward conversations that address real challenges and move the school forward.
“A lot of people think these structures are restrictive,” Kalimah noted, “but they’re not. They give you flexibility. You know where the guardrails are, so you have all the freedom within them.”
The TPR Framework: Audit Before You Build
One of the most practical tools Kalimah shared is what she calls the TPR framework — a way of examining any role through three lenses:
- Traditionally done: What do you do simply because it has always been done that way?
- Preferred: What do you do because you enjoy it or do it particularly well?
- Required: What actually has to be done — by you, in this role — for the institution to function?
The power of this exercise is that it separates what is essential from what is habitual, creating an opening for honest team conversations about where work should actually live. “Okay, so even though this would typically be part of my job, this is something you actually enjoy doing,” Kalimah described. “These are the ways we begin to look at building those pipes.”
This kind of role clarity is especially relevant in student life, where job descriptions tend to expand organically over time. A director of student life might find themselves carrying responsibilities that accumulated over years — some essential to the role, some personally enjoyable, and some that simply have no other obvious owner. Separating those categories creates room to redistribute, delegate, and build a position that can actually survive a transition.
Starting Small: The Friction Audit
For leaders who recognize the problem but feel overwhelmed by the idea of redesigning their entire operational model, Kalimah offers a gentler starting point: the friction audit.
The practice is simple. At the end of each day, note the moments that felt draining — where you overextended, where you stepped in when you shouldn’t have, where something in your workflow felt misaligned. She calls these “friction flags.” Once you have a week or two of data, patterns emerge.
From there, she applies the RRS process: Reflect, Reset, and Systemize. Reflect on what happened and why it depleted you. Reset by returning to your values — both personal and institutional. Then think about what small system change might reduce that friction point going forward.
“Maybe you have standing meetings in the afternoon, and it’s just the time of day,” she offered as an example. “Is it possible to change that to a walking meeting? That small tweak could make a big difference in how you feel at the end of that meeting.”
The point is not to overhaul everything at once. It is to begin noticing where your current systems are working against you, and to make one small change at a time.
The Role of Imperfect Innovation
One of the more nuanced threads in the conversation was Kalimah’s concept of Wabi Sabi — a Japanese philosophy she encountered while traveling, which she describes as “the art of imperfect innovation.” For school leaders, the relevance is clear: the pursuit of perfection before action is one of the most effective ways to avoid building anything at all.
“We were so good at identifying growth mindset in students,” she said, “but I don’t think we did a good job of seeing it in ourselves.” Leaders who require every new system to work perfectly from day one will not build sustainable systems — they will simply exhaust themselves trying to maintain an illusion of control.
The invitation is to prototype, observe, and adjust. Try a new meeting structure for six weeks and gather feedback. Introduce a progress dashboard and see where it creates clarity. None of this requires a full institutional redesign. It requires a willingness to learn in public, which, as Kalimah pointed out, is exactly what we ask of our students every day.
What Sustainable Actually Looks Like
How do you know when you have moved from heroic to sustainable? Kalimah offers what may be the most practical litmus test of the conversation: “If you can spend a day at a conference and not have to check your phone or your email every five minutes — that means things are functioning.”
A sustainable system is not one where nothing ever goes wrong. It is one where people feel empowered to make decisions, where there is clarity about who does what and why, and where the institution does not stall the moment one key person steps away. It is, as she described it, an environment with “an energy of things flowing” — not performative niceness, but genuine momentum.
Getting there requires some patience with the people who are reluctant to change. Not everyone resists out of laziness; some resist because they genuinely do not trust that a new system will work. “Give them time to actually see that it works,” Kalimah advised, “that this actually protects them from burning out, too.” Sometimes the most resistant people are not flying under the radar — they are confused about what is actually expected of them. Clarity, it turns out, is motivating for almost everyone.
Building the Gift Your School Needs
Kalimah closed the conversation with a thought that is worth sitting with: “You aren’t just solving the issues that you’re finding in this moment. You’re actually providing a gift for the school that you’re going to become.”
That framing matters. Building leadership infrastructure is not only about making this year more manageable. It is about ensuring that the progress your school makes does not walk out the door with the next leadership transition. It is about making sure that belonging initiatives, advisory programs, restorative practices — all of the things student life professionals work hard to build — actually have roots.
You do not have to do it all at once. But you do have to start. Pick one friction point. Have one honest conversation about roles. Run one meeting differently. Lay one brick.
The table is already set. Now it’s time to build the infrastructure that keeps it standing.
To learn more about Kalimah Fergus-Ayele’s work, visit Roundtrip Ticket Home. She also offers a weekly newsletter and monthly online experiences for school leaders looking to explore the LIS framework further.
