A playbook for when the founding team is still running the organisation it used to be.

Newcastle's Gosforth Civic Theatre was founded by a group of young people with learning disabilities, with support from Liberdade Community Development Trust. By 2019, it was hosting more than 900 events a year and welcoming more than 50,000 people through its doors.

And in 2022, the organisation secured a £1.5 million Youth Investment Fund grant to renovate the building.

But like many capital projects, it overran, and less than two years later, CEO Rob Huggins had taken leave to recover from burnout, with the rest of the leadership team covering for him. On his return, the leadership agreed to bring in extra support in an HR professional from the corporate world. Her observation on arrival, new to the charity sector, was that she had never worked somewhere so reactive: a theatre-goer would walk in saying there was no loo roll, and the leadership team would drop everything to go and get it.

However, in a founder-led organisation, that responsiveness ensures the organisation's survival. It's frequently seen in startups and community-run services everywhere. And the reason is that it works until the organisation grows past the point where it still can.

Fair Collective's 2025 research found that 85% of small charity leaders in England had experienced poor mental health as a direct result of their role. That figure is not surprising to anyone who has watched a founding team carry an organisation through rapid growth. The pressure to respond doesn't come from poor leadership. Rather, it comes from leadership that has not built the infrastructure to distribute the work required because they never needed to.

I have been in that leadership team. Earlier in my career, in a startup, I was the one who did the things required before the budget and demand could hire the right person to do it. I was absolutely going to be visible to clients, and of course I got results - why wouldn't I when I had thrown myself at being the solution to every challenge that presented itself to us.

When we grew and hired the right people, I kept being the solution. I don't think I realised it at the time, but looking back now, it was partly habit and partly because I thought showing how much I cared would help the team internalise it.

But I didn't account for the fact that clients kept coming to me because I had always delivered, and the new hires - the right people we had busted our budget to get - had learned to expect it, too.

Redirecting clients felt like letting them down.

Stepping back felt like abandoning what had made all of our growth work.

Reactivity like this isn't just a habit. It's more profound because it's wrapped up in identity. And the people around a founding leader, such as staff, long-standing clients, and beneficiaries, have inadvertently been trained to expect it.

When the team at the top hold the mission so tightly, at what point does their leadership morph into a bottleneck?

And this is what played out at the Gosforth Civic Theatre. In their case, the first real sign of a problem was the CEO's burnout, but it doesn't always become evident like that. Sometimes a project stalls because the one person who can make decisions is already overloaded, and the only person who might notice is the ops leader.

To move towards a leadership team focused on the right work, Gosforth Civic Theatre wrote down what each leadership role had to include to make the flow of responsibility and accountability obvious to themselves and to everyone else. They had to resist the blur of role boundaries, which is often the result of a well-gelled leadership team that has been working together for years. For an ops leader, this role mapping is a first practical step that allows the issue to be raised without it coming across as a criticism of individuals.

The team at Gosforth Civic Theatre then conducted a series of listening and culture building sessions to define what the organisation had become and how that should shape the way everyone worked day to day, with the aim of showing how each role contributed to the organisation’s overall mission.

Finally, they built communication structures, such as team talks, monthly newsletters, and regular touchpoints, that didn't require the leadership to be the conduit, so that staff stayed informed without a senior person carrying every message personally.

These practical steps reconfigured the perception of what the leadership team was there to do. No more being in the weeds. 

Identity, though - the crux of the issue for a founding team - is a different beast, and it takes an ops leader to spot it before the founding team is ready to hear it.