Weekly Intelligence
for Campus Leaders

You believe in your people. Your org chart doesn't. That's not a leadership philosophy problem. It's an architecture problem. And it's sitting in five questions.

Your last strategic planning retreat cost somewhere between $8,000 and $40,000 — when you add up the time, the facilitation, the venue, and the two days your cabinet wasn’t doing anything else.

Most haven’t. They just stopped asking the question that would prove it. One superintendent’s CFO sat on a $2.3 million insight for eleven months. Not because he was withholding it. Because the room was never structured for him to offer it.

“When your cabinet disagrees with you — what does that actually look like? Not in theory. In your last three meetings.” Sit with that for a second. Most leaders pause too long. Some describe what sounds like managed dissent. A few are honest: they can’t remember the last time someone pushed back on something that mattered.

There is a specific look I’ve learned to recognize. It’s not burnout — burnout has an edge to it, an exhaustion that at least announces itself. This is quieter. It’s the superintendent who has navigated everything thrown at her for nineteen years, who is admired by everyone in the room, who gives a precise and thoughtful answer to every question — and who, if you ask her privately when the last time she felt like she was actually making something was, has to think about it for a long time.

Special Edition: Peer-2-Peer Leadership Roundtable Recap. The Builder posture toward disruption — straight from the leaders living it. The loneliest job in American education is an absolute privilege... Said very few superintendents, college presidents, VPs, or provosts.

Special Edition: Peer-2-Peer Leadership Roundtable Recap. The Builder posture toward disruption — straight from the leaders living it. The loneliest job in American education is an absolute privilege...

Conviction builds loyalty. Consensus builds mediocrity.

Conviction builds loyalty. Consensus builds mediocrity. When is the last time someone became an unpaid evangelist for what you're building? Research across 987 leadership teams answers this.

A short dispatch from Tucson — and the most honest picture of burnout I've ever seen. The kind of evening you actually protect on your calendar.