Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Dr. Karla Johnson — CEO of Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School — as a model for how executives must redefine what leadership means before they can actually scale. Johnson’s core principle: leadership is not how much you can do, but how much you can get done through your entire team. That shift, which took Johnson 30 years and a deliberate sequence of progressively harder roles, is the difference between a manager who executes and a CEO who scales.
Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School (PALCS) serves thousands of students across Pennsylvania as one of the largest online charter schools in the country. When pandemic enrollment surged more than 60% in a single year — pushing student count past 5,000 — Johnson’s organization stress-tested every assumption about readiness, hiring, and infrastructure. What she learned from that crisis, and from her own career arc from physics teacher to chief executive, produces a replicable framework for any CEO scaling an organization through rapid, destabilizing growth.
This episode is for CEOs who know they need to delegate more but haven’t yet built the leadership layer beneath them that makes delegation safe.
Key Takeaways
- Dr. Karla Johnson of PALCS holds that CEOs who define their job as “doing” hit a ceiling that cannot be broken by working harder — the transition to “enabling” requires surrounding yourself with people who are better than you at the functions they own.
- When PALCS enrollment surged over 60% in one year during the pandemic, the organization hired large numbers of staff simultaneously — a decision Johnson identifies as a scaling mistake, because infrastructure and sequential hiring matter more than speed.
- Dr. Johnson built her CEO readiness not through a linear climb but through deliberately accumulating breadth: teacher liaison, union representative, curriculum director, operations director, academic officer — each role adding a capability the next level required.
- PALCS’s approach to AI treats it as a preparation imperative, not a threat: because students will use AI regardless of school policy, the only responsible move is to teach appropriate use before graduation.
- Johnson holds that leaders who want to be followed must understand the people they are trying to lead — without that understanding, you will find yourself on a long journey by yourself.
How CEOs Shift from Doing to Enabling — and Why It Takes Decades to Complete
Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO of Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, opens with a contrast that most executives recognize too late. Early in her leadership career, Johnson operated from a belief that being the forerunner — the person who did all the things, made sure everything happened — was what leadership required. Thirty years later, she holds a different definition entirely.
“Leadership is not how much I can do, but it is how much I can get done — with the use of my entire team.”
That reframe is not cosmetic. It restructures what a CEO’s job actually is. Johnson describes the operating model it produces: a collaborative mindset, trust in the leaders around her to oversee their domains, and a deliberate decision to distribute ownership rather than concentrate it.
Glenn Gow reinforces the same principle with his CEOs: surround yourself with people who are better than you at the function they own. Delegation works when the talent is there. Leadership works when the talent is there. The constraint is never the model — it is whether the right people sit beneath it.
For Johnson, building that layer of trust was the most impactful process in her leadership development. It required two things most executives underinvest in: recruiting people capable of genuine ownership, and then actually giving it to them.
How CEOs Survive 60% Enrollment Surges Without Breaking Their Organizations
When the pandemic arrived in 2020, Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School faced the kind of growth event most CEOs say they want and then discover they are not ready for. Enrollment jumped from approximately 3,000 students to over 5,000 in a single year — more than 60% growth — while the organization simultaneously needed to nearly double its staff.
Johnson is direct about what went wrong. PALCS was not prepared for what was coming. The organization worked through the first phase of the pandemic with the staff it already had, then began hiring — and hired too many people at once.
“We also hired a lot of people at one time, which I would not recommend doing.”
Two failure modes compounded each other. First, the decision to wait — reasonable given genuine uncertainty about whether pandemic enrollment would hold — meant the organization absorbed the surge with insufficient staff. Second, the correction came in bulk rather than in sequence, which creates onboarding strain, culture dilution, and management bandwidth problems that a phased approach would avoid.
Johnson frames the lesson as an infrastructure question, not a headcount question. The organization needed infrastructure capable of absorbing additional students and additional staff simultaneously — and that infrastructure must exist before the growth event, not in response to it. Waiting for confirmation that growth is real before building the systems to support it guarantees the organization will be behind the demand curve.
For CEOs in high-growth environments, the PALCS pandemic experience produces a specific principle: when growth arrives faster than hiring can respond, the capacity gap cannot be closed by working harder — it requires pre-built systems that scale independently of headcount.
How CEOs Build Readiness for the Top Role Before They Know They Need It
Dr. Johnson’s path from physics teacher to CEO did not follow a standard sequence. It followed a deliberate pattern of accumulating breadth — and it started three weeks into her first teaching assignment, before she had taught a single class.
The school district of Philadelphia assigned Johnson to a school that already had a physics teacher. While administrators figured out where to place her, she assisted the assistant principal. That accidental exposure became a mentor relationship, and that mentor relationship changed her career direction entirely.
“I don’t want to be a classroom teacher. I really enjoy the administrative part of it.”
From that point, Johnson treated every teaching role as a platform for building leadership muscle. She volunteered as the teacher liaison to senior administrators. She became a teacher coach. She served as a union representative. None of these were paid leadership roles — they were deliberate self-assignments to build capability before it was required.
When she moved into formal leadership positions, she chose roles that forced breadth over depth. As director of operations for a charter school, she managed facilities failures, worked with accountants, and handled logistics that had nothing to do with curriculum. Johnson identifies the operations-director role specifically as the one that closed the finance and facilities blind spots she otherwise would have carried into the CEO seat.
The sequence Johnson followed — teacher, teacher-liaison, coach, curriculum director, operations director, principal, chief academic officer, CEO — is less a ladder than a capability map. Each role contributed something the next role needed. CEOs who reach the top seat with depth in one function but gaps in operations, finance, or people management discover those gaps when the organization most needs them not to have any.
Why CEOs Who Ban AI Lose the Preparation Window They Need Most
Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School’s approach to AI starts from an observation about student behavior, not a position on technology policy. When AI tools became widely available around 2021 and 2022, most school districts banned them. PALCS did not — because Johnson had already drawn the accurate conclusion about what students would do in response.
“The moment that you tell students not to do something, they are going to learn how to do the exact thing that you don’t want them to do.”
The ban approach produces students who know how to use AI covertly and do not know how to use it well. Johnson’s counter-argument is a workforce readiness argument: AI integration into the workplace was already happening before most people recognized it as AI. Recommendation algorithms, personalization engines, decision-support tools — these were AI applications running in the environments her students would graduate into. Shunning the tools in school means graduating students who are behind on day one.
PALCS’s response was structural. The school built a research and development department specifically to study AI and emerging technology — not to assess whether to allow it, but to stay ahead of what comes next and ensure students and staff learn appropriate use before those tools become unavoidable.
For CEOs managing AI adoption inside their own organizations, the PALCS model offers a direct parallel. Banning or delaying AI experimentation does not prevent employees from using AI — it prevents the organization from developing norms, guardrails, and skills around how to use it well. The preparation window is the period before AI becomes load-bearing in your operations. Once it is, the learning curve costs more.
The PALCS Leadership Framework: From Classroom to C-Suite
| Principle | What It Means in Practice | Named Evidence |
| Leadership is what you get done, not what you do | CEOs must shift from personal execution to enabling others — the ceiling for individual doing is lower than the ceiling for team-enabled getting-done | When PALCS enrollment surged past 5,000 students, Johnson’s distributed ownership model allowed department leaders to absorb hiring, onboarding, and service delivery in parallel — a workload the prior model, which concentrated execution in Johnson, could not have sustained across functions simultaneously |
| Hire for infrastructure, not just for headcount | When growth arrives faster than staffing can respond, bulk hiring creates new problems — sequential hiring matched to onboarding capacity produces more durable results | PALCS hired large numbers simultaneously during the 2020 pandemic surge; Johnson identifies this as a scaling mistake she would not repeat |
| Build breadth before you need it | Every role that seems tangential to the CEO track — operations, curriculum, union representation — contributes capabilities the top seat requires; the gaps show up late when they are hardest to fix | Johnson identifies the operations-director role as the one that closed the finance and facilities blind spots she otherwise would have carried into the CEO seat |
| Prepare for AI rather than prohibit it | CEOs who ban emerging tools lose the window to build organizational competence before the tools become load-bearing | PALCS established an R&D department to study AI rather than restrict it — framing adoption as a student and staff readiness issue, not a compliance one |
Quotes from This Episode
- “I don’t want to be a classroom teacher. I really enjoy the administrative part of it.” — Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO, Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School
- “We also hired a lot of people at one time, which I would not recommend doing.” — Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO, Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School
- “If you don’t understand the organization and you don’t understand the people, they’re never going to follow you — and so you’re gonna find yourself on a long journey by yourself.” — Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO, Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School
- “You don’t think, why do I need these things? But all of those things played a part in where I am today.” — Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO, Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School
Frequently Asked Questions
How should a CEO transition from doing the work to leading others who do the work?
Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO of Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, holds that the transition requires two moves, not one: adopting a collaborative mindset that treats leadership as enabling rather than executing, and then placing the right talent in each function. Without the right people in place, delegation fails — not because the CEO won’t let go, but because there is nothing safe to let go to. Johnson built this capability over 30 years by deliberately distributing ownership to trusted leaders across PALCS, giving each one the autonomy to be creative and accountable within their domain.
What should a CEO do differently when their organization faces sudden, massive growth?
Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO of Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, identified two compounding mistakes when enrollment surged more than 60% in a single year during the pandemic: delaying hiring until growth was confirmed, which left current staff absorbing the surge alone, and then hiring large numbers of people simultaneously once the decision was made. Johnson’s post-mortem recommendation is to build infrastructure capable of supporting both additional students and additional staff before growth arrives — because organizations that wait for confirmation before building capacity will always be behind the demand curve.
How should a CEO approach AI adoption inside their organization before it becomes disruptive?
Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO of Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, argues that CEOs who restrict AI adoption lose the preparation window they need most. When PALCS students encountered AI tools, Johnson’s operating assumption was that prohibition would not prevent use — it would only prevent the organization from teaching appropriate use. Dr. Johnson responded by building a dedicated research and development function to study AI and emerging technology, framing adoption as a workforce readiness imperative: students who graduate without AI competence enter workplaces where those tools are already embedded.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Organizations by Scaling Their Leadership First
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches CEOs to build the leadership layers and organizational infrastructure that make scaling possible. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
