When You Are The Bottleneck
He Had More Support Staff Than Ever. He Was Still the Bottleneck.
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Year Three Is Supposed to Be Different
He’s a third-year principal at a massive comprehensive high school. Over 200 employees. The kind of campus where you can spend an entire day reacting and never once touch the work that matters.
Everyone in his orbit keeps telling him the same thing: year three is the year. Systems are in place. Relationships are built. Now you execute.
He believes it. He’s ready. And clarity and focus have been his fight since the day he took the job.
The People Were Never the Problem
Here’s what makes his situation interesting.
Earlier in his career, at a smaller school, his line was give me the people and I’ll do the job. Now he has the people. More than he’s ever had. Two English coaches. Two math coaches. Program specialists for budgeting, testing, pathways, interventions. More than ten fully released teachers on assignment.
And the work still routes through him.
He ran an exercise with his admin team to find out where the hours actually go. Everyone tracked what they actually do in a day (not the job description, the reality).
The answer: reacting.
Referrals. IEPs. Supervision duty. Parents.
Next thing you know, it’s time to go home, and what did you really do that day?
So the problem was never headcount. Something else was jamming the handoff.
He’d Already Done the Hard Part
This wasn’t a leader who hadn’t done the work.
He’d just locked his admin team in an office for three days hammering out strategy. They’d fought their way past a feel-good goal and landed on one thematic priority for the year: instruction. Everything in service of quality bell-to-bell teaching.
He could even name his own lane. Instruction. Relationships. Strategy.
That’s the job.
Everything else, in his words, gets delegated or ignored.
But “gets delegated” is where it stalled.
Delegated to whom? With how much rope? Checked how often? He had the destination and a parking lot full of capable people. He was stuck at the handoff.
Delegation Isn’t a Switch
The first move was naming what delegation actually is. Not a switch you flip. A dial with five levels:
