Good Leaders, Broken Systems

 It's not only the manager. It's also the system around them.

My last post on leadership in conservation got far more responses than I expected. Many of you described the same thing: someone brilliant at their technical work gets promoted, suddenly has a team to lead, and is quietly expected to figure the rest out. Several people from development organizations wrote to say, "This is us too."

I still believe we need to invest far more in leadership development. But since then I've been sitting with an uncomfortable thought: what if training is only half the answer?

We can teach someone to give feedback, delegate, and handle conflict. Then we send them back into an organization where decisions are unclear, workloads are unrealistic, poor behavior goes unchallenged, and they have little authority over the things they're responsible for. And we're surprised when leadership still feels so hard.

Good managers can struggle inside bad systems

Picture a manager told to empower her team when every meaningful decision needs sign-off from three levels above her. Or someone asked to develop their staff while the team is permanently understaffed. Or a supervisor expected to build psychological safety while senior leaders punish disagreement. Or a country director expected to retain talented national staff when the salary structure offers them nowhere to grow.

At some point these stop being leadership problems and become organizational design problems. That distinction matters, because otherwise we ask managers to compensate for systems they didn't create and can't change.

Why our sectors feel this so sharply

Our organizations aren't hard to manage because people don't care. It's the opposite. People care enormously about biodiversity, climate, poverty, rights, and communities, and that purpose is powerful. But it can also hide structural problems.

People stay late because the proposal has to go in. They take on another country, another donor, another reporting framework. Everyone knows resources are tight, so everyone compensates. For a while that looks like commitment. Over time it becomes the operating model: an organization that only works because people keep doing more than their roles were designed to carry.

Our funding models make it worse. Three-year project cycles and restricted grants mean teams are built around projects rather than people. When the grant ends, so can the role and the career path. It's hard to invest in someone's growth when you don't know if their position exists next year.

Then there's the distance between headquarters and the field. Country and field managers often carry the heaviest load, navigating communities, government partners, and local realities while meeting reporting demands designed far away. And we rarely talk openly about the gaps in pay, voice, and opportunity between international and national staff, which shape who gets to lead.

Managers sit right in the middle of all this, responsible for results without controlling the budget, staffing, priorities, or timeline.

Many people problems are structural

One of the most useful lessons I've learned is that problems which look interpersonal are often structural underneath. A conflict between two colleagues may come from unclear roles, overlapping responsibilities, or two people being held accountable for outcomes that pull in opposite directions. Conflict-resolution skills help, but they don't remove the cause.

So when things go wrong, I've started asking: is this really about the person, or is the system producing the behavior we're seeing?

Culture is shaped above the manager too

Most organizations invest very little in training at any level. And when they do, it usually goes to junior and mid-level managers, while senior leaders are assumed to already know how to lead. The result is that managers come back from training with new ideas, only to find the organization works differently.

A manager learns that teams need transparency, then watches major decisions made without explanation. They learn that disagreement should be welcomed, then see colleagues sidelined for speaking up. They learn that burnout matters, then hear overwork praised as dedication.

People learn culture from what leaders tolerate and reward, not from what's in a training manual. If senior leaders aren't learning and changing too, training ends up teaching people how the organization wishes it behaved, rather than how it actually does.

Managing people is real work

In many of our organizations, a manager is also a technical expert, fundraiser, donor liaison, report writer, and budget holder. People management gets whatever time is left.

But one-to-ones, feedback, mentoring, and building trust all take time. We can't call people our greatest asset and then design jobs were managing them well is practically impossible.

Making good leadership possible

So alongside How do we create better leaders?, I think we should ask How do we build organizations where good leadership can succeed?

That might mean clearer decision-making authority, well-defined roles, realistic workloads, and career paths that include national staff and people on project contracts. It means holding leaders accountable at every level, recognizing people who develop others, and addressing destructive behavior even when the person responsible is brilliant or brings in major funding.

None of this is as easy as organizing a workshop. But it would likely have far more impact.

This isn't an argument against leadership training. We need more of it, and earlier in people's careers. But we shouldn't send someone on a three day course and expect them to fix problems the organization has carried for ten years.

Our next capacity gap

Our sectors have built strong capacity in technical work, project management, safeguarding, and monitoring. Maybe organizational leadership is the next gap to take seriously: not just leadership courses, but leadership systems.

Because conservation and development aren't delivered by strategies or logframes. They're delivered by people, working inside organizations. If we want our impact to last, we need to care as much about the health of those organizations as we do about the quality of our projects.

So I'd love to hear from you: when leadership struggles in your organization, how much is the manager, and how much is the system around them?