If we can systematize swimming, isn’t leadership as important?

One of the author’s little nuggets, demonstrating the glow of a system that works.

I was at my eight-year-old’s swim lesson when it struck me.

That place is a well-oiled machine. The experience is SO consistent. Even with a broad variety of instructors teaching a broad variety of kids.

The kids have different personalities, different needs and different levels of experience. The instructors’ personalities and teaching styles are different, too. But in the water, all of those differences disappear.

Every instructor is teaching from the same system; a shared language, shared expectations and a clear progression for developing the skills to help kids intentionally progress from Level 1 through Level 10.

What makes it work isn’t just that the pieces are connected. The system is designed around the experience the swim center wants to create. Kids should feel safe and confident in the water. Parents should understand their child’s progress. Instructors should know what good looks like and how to deliver it, without having to invent their own approach or guess at it. 

That creates guardrails without requiring every instructor to be the same. And it means the experience doesn’t depend on one great teacher, one great manager or one great location. As the organization grows, the system gives every employee, in or out of the pool, a way to deliver on the same promise. 

Think about how rarely we do this for our leaders in the workplace.

We hire smart, capable people. We promote strong performers. We tell them what results we need and give them the freedom to lead in a way that feels authentic to them.

But too often, we never define how we expect leadership to happen here. So the experience an employee has becomes highly dependent on which leader they happen to get.

I know because I’ve helped scale companies without a leadership system. For a long time, it actually worked really well.

My mind goes to the terrific leaders I worked with and the talented people around me. We had clarity on where we were going and how we were moving in the same direction. Communication, culture, and trust were strong – and the business grew.

It worked until it didn’t.

In one instance, we reached a stage where growth required new capabilities and perspectives. We brought in experienced leaders to help us get to the next level. This wasn’t the wrong decision, but what I see more clearly now is that we underestimated how intentional we needed to be about defining how leadership itself would work in the business.

It got messy.

We were all distracted. Conversations had to happen (a lot of them), and keeping our eye on the goal got harder. It was like we were stuck in place, left with uncertainty on how to navigate.

We missed our goal that quarter by a long shot. It took some time to catch back up. And when you’re scaling, that time matters.

Leadership shouldn’t be left to chance.

I see, time and time again, that leaders fill in those blanks for themselves.

Again, it works until it doesn’t.

What is a leadership system?

When I talk about a leadership system, I don’t mean a playbook, a training manual, or a step-by-step guide that gets applied the same way in every organization.

A system has connected parts, but what makes those parts work is that they’re built around the organization itself: where it’s going, what it values, and what it needs from its leaders to get there.

I once worked with a founder who really valued and talked a lot about authenticity.

It was important to her that leaders could acknowledge when they weren’t at 100%, say when something wasn’t working, or pull their heads up during a difficult time and say what they were really seeing.

When she first called me out on it, it shook me a bit. I’d never worked in an environment like that.

But over time, it gave me a guardrail. It influenced how I solved problems with my team, how I made decisions, and when I knew to step forward or step aside and connect with the person in front of me.

The point isn’t that authenticity needs to be part of every company’s definition of good leadership. The point is that she had made it part of ours.

A leadership system creates shared language and clarity around what good leadership looks like here — then gives leaders a way to learn, practice, and reinforce it.

The goal isn’t to make every leader the same. It’s to make good leadership less dependent on which leader you happen to get.

But defining it at the top isn’t enough.

There are real business reasons to embrace a good system.

When we find something that works and we want to be able to repeat it as we grow, we build a system around it. We do it with sales. We do it with operations, finance, customer experience, onboarding. Apparently, we do it with eight-year-old swim lessons.

When we find something that works and we want to be able to repeat it as we grow, we build a system around it.

Looking back at the companies I’ve helped grow, I know it’s possible to scale without that kind of intentionality. Smart people compensate for a lot. Strong relationships compensate for a lot. Founders who are close enough to the work compensate for a lot.

Until they can’t.

We build systems around nearly everything we expect to work consistently as a business grows.

Leadership is no less important.

So why would we leave it to chance?

Related Reading

Leadership development shouldn’t just focus on leaders
Why leadership development falls short when we focus on people without addressing the systems around them.

Do your systems support the behaviors and actions you need to happen?
How clear, consistent systems make desired behaviors easier to practice and sustain.

Leaders are only as effective as the systems that support them
A real-world look at how systems turn culture from an aspiration into something leaders practice every day.