Why Senior Leaders Should Never Own Coordination

Every hour a VP spends chasing status updates costs the company far more than their hourly rate. That sounds like an accounting observation. It is actually a diagnosis of one of the most common and expensive resource misallocations in mid-sized companies — and it rarely appears on any cost report because nobody has named it yet.

Senior leaders end up owning coordination quietly, incrementally, and almost always without a conscious decision to do so. A project slips. A stakeholder goes quiet. A deadline is missed because nobody chased it. The senior person closest to the work fills the gap — because they care, because they can, and because there is nobody else set up to do it. Then it becomes habit. Then it becomes their job.

The cost is not the time spent. The cost is the time not spent on everything else.

Why do senior leaders end up owning coordination?

The honest answer is that coordination is invisible until it breaks. When projects run on time and stakeholders are informed, nobody thinks about the mechanism that made it happen. When things slip, the person with the most visibility — usually someone senior — steps in to fix it.

There is also a capability trap. Senior leaders are, by definition, competent. They can write a clear status email. They can run a check-in meeting. They can chase a vendor. The work is within their ability, so they do it. What they rarely stop to ask is whether their ability to do something is a good reason to do it.

Coordination also carries the illusion of productivity. A COO who has spent the morning consolidating project updates, chasing delayed deliverables, and preparing a board summary feels like they have worked. They have. But they have done the work of a coordinator, not the work of a COO.

The trigger that creates this pattern is almost always an organisational gap — no dedicated coordination function, no one with clear ownership of process management, no system that surfaces risk before it becomes a crisis. Senior people fill that gap because they are the ones who notice it. The gap should be filled differently.

What is the real opportunity cost of senior coordination?

Start with a rough number. A VP with a total compensation package of £200,000 per year costs roughly £100 per hour in employment terms alone — before factoring in management overhead, equity, or the impact of their decisions on the wider business. A COO at £350,000 is closer to £170 per hour.

Now estimate time. In most companies running complex projects without a dedicated coordination function, senior leaders spend somewhere between eight and fifteen hours per week on activities that are fundamentally coordination: compiling status reports, running update meetings, chasing deliverables, reconciling conflicting timelines, and preparing stakeholder communications. Call it ten hours. At £100 per hour, that is £1,000 per week per VP. For a leadership team of five, that is £250,000 per year in coordination labour — priced at VP rates.

The cost is not the ten hours spent on coordination. The cost is the ten hours not spent on strategy, commercial decisions, hiring, product direction, and the problems that only a senior person can resolve.

Coordination done badly compounds the cost further. When no one owns the tracking system, risk surfaces late. When stakeholders are not proactively updated, they generate noise — emails, ad hoc meetings, escalations — that pull in more senior time. When project timelines slip undetected, senior leaders absorb the emergency work at the worst possible moment.

There is a useful exercise here. Pull the last four weeks of calendar entries for your most senior operational leader. Categorise each meeting and task: strategy, decisions, external relationships, people management, coordination. If coordination — status chasing, update meetings, timeline management — accounts for more than 15% of their time, you have a structural problem with a calculable cost.

Most leaders who run this exercise are surprised. Not because the hours are shocking, but because they have never thought of those hours as a cost at all.

What does dedicated coordination look like as a function?

The instinctive response to “our senior leaders spend too much time on coordination” is to hire a junior coordinator. This usually fails, and it fails predictably.

A single junior hire gets absorbed. They do not have the authority to chase senior stakeholders. They do not have the process discipline to run consistent cadences. They do not have the tools to give leadership real-time visibility. Within six months, the senior leader is back doing coordination — now with additional overhead of managing the coordinator.

The alternative is to treat coordination as a function, not a role. This distinction matters.

A coordination function has three components that a lone hire does not: cadence, tooling, and accountability structures. Cadence means predictable rhythms — weekly status collection, milestone reviews at defined intervals, automated escalation when thresholds are breached. Tooling means a system that tracks project status, surfaces deviations, and generates reporting without human effort at every step. Accountability structures mean clear ownership of each stage, with explicit escalation paths when something falls through.

When those three components are in place, AI can handle a significant portion of the operational load. Status collection from project owners can be automated. Milestone tracking runs against predefined rules. Reporting templates populate from live data. Deviation alerts trigger before a project lead even realises they are behind. None of this requires senior judgement. It requires a well-designed process and the right tools running consistently.

What remains for human coordinators is the work that genuinely requires judgement: stakeholder communication when a project is at risk, escalation calls where context matters, nuanced update interpretation when the data is ambiguous, and the relationship management that determines whether a late project stays recoverable. Experienced coordinators do this well. Senior leaders do it expensively.

Coordination is not a senior responsibility. It is an operational discipline. The companies that treat it as infrastructure — with the same rigour they apply to finance or IT — run projects differently from the ones where it falls to whoever cares most.

There is a practical question of where this function lives. Some companies build it in-house as a PMO. Others embed coordination capacity into a managed operation that handles it end-to-end. The structure matters less than the principle: coordination needs dedicated ownership, defined process, and tools that remove humans from the mechanical work.

What it cannot be is a senior leader’s side responsibility. Not because senior leaders are incapable of doing it — they clearly are — but because the opportunity cost is real, calculable, and entirely avoidable.

The argument in short

Coordination is operational infrastructure. It requires discipline and process, not seniority. When senior leaders own it by default, the company pays VP rates for coordinator work — and pays again in the strategy, decisions, and commercial thinking that never got done.

The fix is not a hire. It is a function: cadence, tooling, and accountability designed to run with AI doing the mechanical work and coordinators doing the judgement work. Fund coordination the way you fund finance or IT — as infrastructure, not an afterthought — and your senior leaders get their time back for the work that only they can do.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much time do senior leaders typically spend on project coordination?

In companies without a dedicated coordination function, senior leaders commonly spend between eight and fifteen hours per week on coordination activities — status chasing, update meetings, timeline management, and stakeholder reporting. This is rarely tracked explicitly, which is why it rarely gets addressed. Running a simple calendar audit across a four-week period is usually enough to quantify the number for your own leadership team.

Is a junior coordinator hire enough to solve this problem?

Usually not, and it fails for a predictable reason: a single junior hire without authority, process, or tooling gets absorbed into the existing dysfunction rather than changing it. Effective coordination requires a function — defined cadence, tracking tools, and accountability structures — not just an additional person. Without those foundations, the senior leader typically ends up back in the coordination role within months, now also managing the coordinator.

Where does AI fit into a coordination function?

AI handles the mechanical, high-frequency work well: automated status collection, milestone tracking against defined rules, deviation alerts, and reporting that populates from live data. This removes the need for senior or even coordinator time on routine tracking. Human coordinators focus on what requires judgement — stakeholder communication when a project is at risk, escalation calls, and nuanced interpretation of ambiguous updates. The combination produces a coordination function that runs consistently without pulling senior leaders into the operational detail.