The Myth of Heroic Leadership interrogates the nonprofit sector’s reliance on “heroic” executive leadership as a structural failure disguised as virtue. It challenges the deeply embedded belief that resilience lives in individual grit, arguing instead that overreliance on executive directors concentrates power, masks institutional weakness, and reproduces inequity—particularly for women and leaders of color. Through a systems and justice lens, the column examines how boards, funders, and organizational norms reinforce this model, and why sustainability depends on redistributing authority, accountability, and care across institutions rather than extracting more from a single leader.
Every nonprofit organization has a design.
What does it take to build something different?
Resilience will not come from finding stronger people. It will come from designing stronger organizations.
This question is becoming more urgent as nonprofits are being asked to operate in environments fraught with political volatility, increasingly unstable funding, and intensifying need. Nonprofit work is becoming more complex at precisely the moment that advancing social change and addressing the needs of the communities served has become more important.
We need organizations capable of meeting this moment without requiring extraordinary people to absorb extraordinary amounts of institutional pressure.
Resilience will not come from finding stronger people. It will come from designing stronger organizations.
There Is No Such Thing as an Undesigned Organization
There are organizations designed intentionally and organizations designed through accumulated experiences.
When organizations are designed intentionally, authority has a place to live, decisions have somewhere to go, knowledge is shared, and responsibility is distributed across roles and systems that were built to anchor it.
But most organizational design happens much more quietly. It accumulates.
Roles get added when needs become unavoidable. Processes develop because someone figures out how to get something done and keeps doing it. Authority migrates toward those people who have learned to make the call. Institutional knowledge settles into the memories of the people who have been around long enough to acquire it.
Over time, those individual choices harden into an organization’s design. Together, they cumulatively determine how the organization actually works: where decisions go, where knowledge lives, who holds relationships, who owns what, and ultimately, who carries the weight of the work.
And because these choices were made in response to immediate needs rather than an intentional effort to shape the organization, as the work keeps moving, more and more of what should have been distributed across an institution is shouldered by a handful of people—especially, its (heroic) leader.
When the distribution of the effort is not designed intentionally, the weight does not disappear. It concentrates, and it usually concentrates on specific people.
If the organization has not built a clear way for its efforts to be distributed with clear systems to support the work, someone inside it will eventually absorb them.
This is the design problem underneath the heroic leadership model and how organizations produce heroic leaders.
It doesn’t happen because people ask for heroism, or because boards are consciously deciding that one person should carry the institution. Heroic leadership emerges because nonprofit work is urgent and important, and that urgency does not wait for the organization to be intentionally designed.
Decisions still have to be made. Donors still need answers. Staff still need direction. Programs still have to run. Problems still have to be solved.
The Harmful Consequence of Unintentional Design
If the organization has not built a clear way for its efforts to be distributed, with clear systems to support the work, someone inside it will eventually absorb them. And in nonprofit organizations, that someone is very often the person with the most context, the most authority, the strongest relationships, and the deepest sense of responsibility for what happens if the work stops: its executive director.
Then something more dangerous happens…
The executive director’s ability to absorb what the organization has not distributed makes the missing design less visible.
The grant money and solicited donations come in, the board keeps meeting, programs keep running, and from the outside, the organization appears to be working smoothly. That is, everyone decides that the intentional design work can wait. And because the design work waits, the organization remains dependent on the person who made waiting possible.
That is the cycle at the center of the heroic leadership model: under-design creates dependence on heroic leaders, and heroic leaders make under-design survivable enough to continue.
That is one reason organizations built on heroic leadership can appear healthy right up until they are not. The leader’s compensation both absorbs and conceals the organization’s weaknesses. Moreover, the better the leader becomes at catching those problems, the harder it becomes to detect the underlying weakness. And that is why organizational collapse often appears sudden—when, in reality, the weaknesses and warnings were there all along.
Until we treat intentional organizational design as essential institutional work, we will continue to build organizations by accumulation….while relying on extraordinary people to make up the difference.
As a sector, we have spent enormous amounts of energy trying to improve leadership inside that cycle, while paying far less attention to the conditions that produce it. We train leaders to delegate better, manage their time better, set stronger boundaries, supervise more effectively, and become more and more resilient.
All of those things may help. But none of it changes the underlying distribution of responsibility if the organization itself remains under-designed. And it comes at a cost.
When a person absorbs organizational pressure, they must spend something to do it–attention, judgment, time, energy, relationships, or emotional capacity. A leader who holds an organization together through a difficult year, enters the next year more depleted than the previous one.
A well-designed organization works differently. Decisions are distributed; knowledge is shared through preestablished systems; relationships are held across multiple people; problems can be identified before they become emergencies. Good design gives the organization more places—and more people—to hold the work.
Until we treat intentional organizational design as essential institutional work, we will continue to build organizations by accumulation. This means placing more and more responsibility on the people most willing to absorb it, while relying on extraordinary people to make up the difference.
Growth Does Not Distribute Itself
We often assume growth will create capacity. But growth and capacity are not the same thing.
An organization can have twice the money, twice the staff, and twice the programs, while still maintaining essentially the same distribution of authority, knowledge, responsibility, and decision-making it had when it was half the size. When that happens, success does not relieve heroic leadership. It intensifies it.
As a sector, we continue to treat the resulting exhaustion and burnout as an inevitable price of organizational growth. It is not. It is evidence that we are not being deliberate enough about ensuring that organizations, as they expand, redesign the distribution of the work and build systems to support that work.
Why The Heroic Leadership Myth Builds Organizations That Break—the second article in this series—argues that organizational fragility is often revealed by some sort of shock: a funding freeze, a delayed contract, a funder who changes priorities mid-cycle, or a heroic leader moving on. And while that is true, it is also incomplete.
Organizational fragility can also be revealed by growth and success. A new multi-year gift, program expansion, or exciting new board members, can each be something an organization wants—maybe even plans for—but each success also creates new decisions, relationships, obligations, and work.
Because those demands arrive dressed as achievements, we rarely ask the same question we would ask in a crisis: “Is the organization actually designed for this?” Instead, we celebrate the growth and assume the capacity will follow.
But growth does not automatically create the design it needs to hold it.
If nearly every meaningful decision finds its way back to the executive director, a larger organization just creates more decisions that will follow the same worn path. If key relationships already depend on a single person, growth gives that person more relationships to steward. If the team already suffers from ambiguity about work priorities, decision-making or authority, a larger team creates more complexity to be resolved, more people to manage.
Design Is Not an Input
Once we understand growth in this way, some of the sector’s most common answers to organizational strain—more money, people, and time—start to look different.
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- Money
More money is the sector’s first answer to nearly every organizational problem, and for understandable reasons. Organizational fragility often looks like a funding problem.
But money arrives as two things at once, hitting both sides of our capacity ledger. More money adds new capacity, but it also creates new promises to keep, more relationships to manage, systems to maintain, people to supervise, expectations to meet, and often more work to deliver.
The problem is that only one of those gets truly counted. We log the additional capacity on the plus side of the ledger, without truly accounting for the additional obligations. We treat those as administrative rather than structural needs. We ask: “What will we do with the money?”
We ask much less often: “What will our organization need to become in order to hold and sustain what this money makes possible?”
As a result, the money gets budgeted and allocated intentionally, while the organizational implications are absorbed by default. And if the organization does not change how the new responsibilities are distributed as it grows, it does not outgrow fragility.
None of this is an argument against giving organizations more funding. Exactly the opposite. Organizations need flexible, multi-year funding that creates freedom to invest in intentional design—finance capacity, management infrastructure, planning, technology, team development—and the leadership time required to build those things well.
We know this works. When the Center for Effective Philanthropy studied organizations that received MacKenzie Scott’s large unrestricted gifts, it found that after two years, they held roughly double the cash reserves when compared to other organizations—a third reported reduced burnout. Scott’s funding was transformative because it gave them long-term stability.
- People
We have similar myths about headcount. Hiring is often treated as a direct conversion: more people equals more capacity.
It is not that simple.
When roles themselves have been created, one at a time, in response to whatever need felt most urgent at the moment, adding another box to the org chart may not create the capacity the organization thinks it is buying. More people coming into poorly designed roles can simply create more confusion and more misallocated resources.
The org chart gets bigger, but the underlying distribution does not change.
And even the best new staff member does not arrive carrying their own organizational structure with them. They need clarity about what priorities govern their work, how what they do intersects with everyone else’s work, and how it connects to the organization’s strategic direction. They need to know things like what they own, what success looks like, and where their role begins and ends.
Without that design, a new hire can actually create more work for the very people they were hired to relieve. This is how you can have a robust staff and still have every meaningful decision come back to the executive director.
- Time
Underneath many of our sector’s myths about organizational sustainability sits an even deeper narrative: We can deal with the design once things settle down.
Organizations typically wait to address questions of strained design until after the year-end campaign, or after the onboarding of the new hire, or after successfully launching a new program. But “the right time” never arrives.
It helps to be precise about what we are waiting for. More than half of nonprofits are operating with three months or less of cash on hand, and nearly one in five with less than a month. More than a third ended last year in deficit—the highest share in a decade of tracking.
The problem is not simply that things never settle down. It is that we are waiting for stability before doing the work to help create that stability in the first place.
Design Is an Ongoing Endeavor, Not a Project
Organizations do not stay still. Strategies change, programs evolve, staff join and leave, and new funding creates new obligations. So, what do we do about this?
Organizational design cannot be treated like a project with a beginning, a deliverable, and an end.
It must be an ongoing organizational endeavor—a continual asking and answering of the question: Is the organization we have designed capable of supporting the organization we are becoming?
Three parties shape the answer:
- Leaders author the design.
This is core executive work. An organization’s leadership does not need to personally invent every system, map every role, or facilitate every process. But responsibility for the shape of the organization cannot be outsourced. Someone must decide what the organization needs to become in order to deliver its strategy.
Someone must create the conditions for discussions and decisions about where authority should live and who should be accountable for what. Someone needs to be thinking about things like: Is our organization knowledge too concentrated? Are there relationships that can belong more fully to the institution? What capacity do we need to exist before the next stage of growth?
These are not operational questions sitting beneath the leader’s “real” leadership work. They are leadership work. And a leader who spends too much time operating within the organization has very little space to architect the organization.
- The board keeps the questions that shape the design alive.
The board’s role is different. It is not the board’s job to design the org chart or decide how programs should be evaluated. Taking that work away from the executive simply creates a different governance problem.
But boards do have a responsibility to remain curious about the organization underneath the performance. Boards should be asking questions about whether growth is creating capacity or simply more activity, and whether the executive director’s relationships should belong more fully to the institution.
The most concrete version of operationalizing these questions is succession planning. Not because every board should be running a replacement search, but because succession planning is where a board, separate from the nonprofit’s leader, can see concretely what the institution has actually built. If a board cannot describe how the organization will function 90 days after its executive director leaves the post, that knowledge gap demonstrates a design gap.
- Funders make design affordable.
Design requires new roles, stronger financial systems, technology, planning, facilitation, documentation, professional development, and months of leadership attention whose payoff may not appear in the next grant report.
Flexible, multi-year general operating support is especially valuable because it gives leaders room to make investments whose exact form may not have been obvious when a grant proposal was written. Dedicated funding for capacity-building can give organizations genuine room to build rather than prescribing the solution in advance.
The difficulty is that institutional strength is genuinely hard to measure—six years into a multibillion-dollar general operating initiative, the Ford Foundation’s own BUILD evaluators could not attribute results directly to the grants it invested in the program.
But that is a measurement problem, and it has a solution. The Weingart Foundation has used unrestricted operating support as its primary grantmaking vehicle since 2009. Rather than abandoning measurement, it built an assessment framework evaluating grantees across nine functional areas of organizational health, replacing program-level measurement with organizational-level measurement. As then-president and CEO Fred Ali put it, “If you give a reasonably managed, well-governed, strategically focused nonprofit flexible, unrestricted dollars, outcomes will follow.”
Because the strongest organization is not the one with a leader capable of keeping everything moving. It is the one that is designed well enough so everything does not have to move through one heroic leader.
Organizational Design Is a Matter of Justice and Equity
Organizational design is fundamentally about distribution: How are authority and accountability distributed? Where does knowledge live? Who holds the relationships? Where does risk land? When something new enters the organization—money, people, opportunity, crisis—who or what absorbs what comes with it? These are not merely internal management questions. They shape whether an institution can keep faith with the people who depend on it.
When a legal services organization disappears or a food program closes, the cost does not stay inside the nonprofit. The community absorbs it. And those consequences are not distributed evenly either.
That makes intentional organizational design a question of justice and equity.
Breaking that cycle requires making the tending to the design of the organization somebody’s actual work and protecting that work from the tyranny of the urgent.
This work is less sexy than launching a new program and harder to celebrate than winning a grant. But it is foundational to true resilience, which requires more than adding resources to organizations and hoping capacity follows. It requires deciding, deliberately, how the work of the institution will be distributed.
Because the strongest organization is not the one with a leader capable of keeping everything moving. It is the one that is designed well enough so that everything does not have to move through one heroic leader.
