Are Your People Line Items Or Someone's Precious Child? Do this math: 500 staff × 2,080 hours/year = 1,040,000 hours of someone's precious child's life you're stewarding annually. Not "FTEs." Not "human capital." Someone's daughter. Someone's son. 73% of superintendents and presidents in our 987-team study can't name ONE person whose actual life—marriage, parenting, mental health—improved because they work there. That silence? That's the question costing you everything that matters. Fair warning: This newsletter will take 8 minutes to read. That's 8 minutes you could spend on: Prepping for tomorrow's board presentation about declining enrollment Responding to the parent/trustee who emailed your personal cell (again) Explaining to your spouse why you missed another dinner Doom-scrolling LinkedIn wondering if other educational leaders feel this lonely But if you're a superintendent or campus president whose talented cabinet produces mediocre results while everyone's exhausted... If you've ever gone home wondering whether you're breaking people to hit state accountability metrics or enrollment targets... If you've ever felt the loneliness of being the only person who sees the pattern while your board asks, "Why can't we just do what that other district/institution does?"... This might be the most important 8 minutes of your week. Your call. [Still here? Let's go.] ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🧮 THE STEWARDSHIP CALCULATOR Calculate your responsibility right now: _____ (your staff count) × 2,080 hours/year = ________ hours That's how many hours you're responsible for someone's precious child each year. That's not a budget line. That's someone's daughter going through a divorce while trying to manage 45 teachers or 85 faculty members. That's someone's son missing his kid's baseball game—again—because you scheduled another "urgent alignment meeting." Screenshot this calculation, fill in your numbers, and post it with your biggest realization. Tag DR. JOE HILL so I can see what you're discovering. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS LIKE ADULTS WHO KNOW THE INDUSTRIAL MODEL BROKE PEOPLE BY DESIGN Here's the pattern nobody discusses at AASA or NASPA conferences (because dismantling 150 years of industrial-era thinking doesn't fit on a PowerPoint): Monday, 6:45 AM: You're in your car in the parking lot, finishing the "quick alignment call" with your Director of Curriculum or Dean of Liberal Arts before the day starts. You need their proposal ready for Thursday's board meeting because the trustees are asking questions about reading scores or retention rates. Again. You communicate urgency—not with hostility, just with that edge that says, "I need this yesterday because the board won't accept 'we're working on it.'" Monday, 5:45 PM: They walk through their door. Their spouse sees "the person I chose to build a life with." Their middle schooler or college-age kid needs help with homework or life advice. But the stress you created at 6:45 AM? It's sitting at their dinner table at 5:45 PM. Monday, 7:15 PM: Their kid asks for help. But your curriculum director is mentally still in that car, calculating how to defend her timeline while managing 8 principals who all interpret "district curriculum" differently. Your dean is mentally still in that parking lot, calculating how to explain to 85 faculty why their departments matter when majors are declining. They snap at their kid. Not because they're bad parents. Because you never realized that superintendent and presidential urgency doesn't stay in the parking lot—it goes home with everyone in your cabinet. Quick gut-check: Think about the last time you sent an urgent text to a direct report after 7 PM. What time did THEIR family eat dinner that night? And what version of that person showed up at the table? Comment with the honest time you sent your last after-hours "urgent" message. Let's examine this pattern honestly. (This is actually why I built The GROUP —a free community where we dismantle industrial-era leadership and rebuild around purpose and connection. Where these provocations become Leader CORE Lessons you can actually deploy Monday morning without the translation tax. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) Here's what the data screams: 74% of chronic illnesses are stress-related. The most significant cause of stress? Work. The biggest cause of work stress? Leaders who still think humans are interchangeable parts in a machine. You're not just failing to close achievement gaps or stabilize enrollment. You're literally—and I mean literally—affecting whether your principal's or dean's marriage survives. Whether their kids feel loved. Whether they can sleep at night. And that principal or dean? They're doing the same thing to 45 teachers or 85 faculty members. Who go home to their families carrying that stress. Who bring it into classrooms where 600 students or 1,200 undergraduates feel it. The industrial model didn't just break organizational charts. It broke families. And we're still running the same system, wondering why everyone's burned out. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎯 THE FRAMEWORK: Three Ways To See People (And Only One That Actually Works) Call this the Stewardship Equation. Or don't. It'll still explain why your talented cabinet produces mediocre results while everyone's working themselves to death. Most leaders think: Competence + Hard Work = Results But the actual equation is: How You Make People Feel × Their Competence × Their Effort = Results Miss that first variable? Everything multiplies by zero. Math doesn't care about your strategic plan. THE THREE LEADERSHIP APPROACHES (A 150-YEAR EVOLUTION) APPROACH 1: PEOPLE AS EXPENSES (Industrial Era - 1870s-1970s) This is where Frederick Taylor broke American work culture. People are interchangeable parts. Costs to be managed. When you don't need them, you eliminate them. When budgets tighten, you "right-size." The language is designed to dehumanize so you don't have to feel what you're actually doing. K-12 Observable Reality: A superintendent once told me he was proud of his district's innovative STEM initiative. I asked how many people worked there. "450," he said. "So you'll champion programs, but what are you investing in the 450 people who have to implement those programs? Do they feel they matter, or do they feel like mechanisms for your strategic plan?" Long pause. "I never thought about it that way." Higher Ed Observable Reality: A president contributed significantly to her institution's capital campaign—buildings, scholarships, endowed chairs. When I asked about her 800 employees, she said the same thing: "I never thought about them that way." That's not unusual. That's normal. We inherited a system that celebrates initiatives while ignoring the humans who make them possible. The multiplication effect: When you treat people as expenses, they give you expense-level performance. They show up. They comply. They collect paychecks. But their gifts? Their creativity? Their discretionary effort? You'll never see it. Because why would someone give their best to someone who sees them as a cost center? Your principals manage crises but don't lead transformation. Your deans meet targets but don't build cultures of excellence. Your teachers and faculty comply but don't innovate. Real talk: Think about your last major initiative. How much time did you spend planning the program vs. ensuring your people wouldn't take implementation stress home to their families? Comment "PROGRAM" or "PEOPLE" with your honest answer. APPROACH 2: PEOPLE AS HUMAN RESOURCES (Enlightened Management - 1980s-2010s) You've read the books. You know EQ matters. You talk about "culture" and "psychological safety." You took your cabinet on a retreat with trust falls and personality assessments. Progress! But you're still fundamentally transactional. You're nice to people because research says nice bosses get better performance. You care about retention because turnover is expensive. You invest in development because it improves outcomes. You're treating people better, but you're still treating them as mechanisms for your success. K-12 Observable Reality: A superintendent implemented comprehensive wellness programs—yoga classes, mental health days, stress management workshops. Great stuff. Then budget cuts came. Guess what got eliminated first? Higher Ed Observable Reality: A president launched an ambitious faculty wellbeing initiative—sabbatical support, mental health resources, work-life balance programs. The board loved it. Then enrollment dipped. Guess what got cut to "preserve core mission"? The wellness programs. Because they were never about caring for people as precious children. They were about managing turnover and reducing sick days. When programs became expensive, they revealed themselves as tools for managing human capital, not expressions of genuine care. The multiplication effect: This gets you to adequate. People perform. They might even be engaged. But you're leaving exponential potential on the table because people can sense when they're being managed versus when they're being cared for. Your principals implement initiatives but don't own them. Your deans hit targets but don't build transformative programs. Your teachers and faculty follow curriculum but don't adapt it brilliantly. You get compliance, not adequacy. Adequacy, not excellence. APPROACH 3: PEOPLE AS SOMEONE'S PRECIOUS CHILD (Purpose-Driven Connection - The Future We're Building) This is where everything changes. Every person in your organization was raised by someone who loves them desperately. Who hopes they're safe. Who wants them to flourish. Who's trusting you—whether they know it or not—to care for their child. This isn't soft. This is recognizing the profound weight of what you've been given: the privilege of stewarding someone's life for 40+ hours per week. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📊 THE CASE STUDY: When Someone You'd Write Off Becomes The Leader You Desperately Need "But Joe, I'm not running a manufacturing plant. I'm running a school district with union contracts and state mandates, or a university with faculty governance and accreditation pressures. My board thinks empathy is code for 'not holding people accountable.'" Fair. Let me tell you about someone we'll call "Dean Margaret"—not because one toxic academic department equals your entire institution, but because the industrial-era thinking that broke her is the SAME thinking breaking your other deans and department chairs right now. Let me tell you about someone we'll call "Dean Margaret" (not her real name, but if you know her, you absolutely know this is her). Margaret started as an associate professor in the College of Liberal Arts 28 years ago. Brilliant scholar. Published extensively. Students feared her. Colleagues avoided her. Self-identified as "the department skeptic." Angry. Isolated. Built literal barriers—she scheduled all her office hours back-to-back so no one could "drop by" for "pointless conversations." Her department chair told her, "You're brilliant, but you're impossible to work with. You don't have anything else." A junior faculty member said, "I saw her name on the meeting invite and immediately had to reschedule." When new university leadership took over 8 years ago, Margaret was not interested in their "collaborative governance" nonsense. She'd heard it all before. Administrative speak that meant nothing but more committee work. But two people—a provost from Wisconsin and an associate dean named Dr. Sarah Chen—started stopping by her office every single week. "Good morning, Margaret. How's your research going?" "Saw your article in that journal. Really impressive work." Week after week. Month after month. Margaret ignored them. Kept her door mostly closed. Made it clear through her body language: I have work to do; leave me alone. One day, Dr. Chen literally knocked on Margaret's door during her "do not disturb" office hours, walked right in with two coffees, sat down, and said: "Margaret, I know you hate this kind of thing, but I need to understand something. What happened that made you stop believing universities could be places where people actually care about each other?" Think about that image for a second. A leader literally interrupting "do not disturb" time to reach someone who'd built schedule barriers to keep everyone out. That's not "faculty engagement." That's not "psychological safety." That's not some HR best practice from a consultant's deck. That's one human refusing to give up on another human. And it took 8 years. Eight years of "good morning, Margaret." Eight years of acknowledging her scholarship before asking anything of her. Eight years of seeing someone's precious child even when she couldn't see it herself. Most university leaders won't do 8 days of that, much less 8 years. Which is exactly why most leaders never see transformation. If you're still reading this 2,000+ word newsletter at 11 PM because you can't stop thinking about whether you're breaking people, comment "11 PM" below. Let's see how many of us are in the loneliness together. That was the start. The university offered voluntary workshops in "collegial leadership." Margaret signed up in 2007. Not because she believed in it. Because she wanted an answer: Should I stay in academia or leave? In that workshop, Margaret wasn't taught communication skills. She was taught self-reflection. She learned that the isolation, the anger, the barriers—those weren't personality traits. Those were survival mechanisms from a lifetime of academic environments where she wasn't seen as someone's precious child, but as a "productive research unit." Who Margaret was before: A "decent colleague" to the handful of senior faculty she respected. To everyone else? "Brilliant but toxic." Junior faculty avoided working with her. Graduate students requested different advisors. At home? Not a bad partner, but not emotionally available. She was the academic. Her family accommodated her schedule. That was the relationship. Her chair's assessment was accurate: brilliance and anger were all she had. Who Margaret is now: "Completely different person," according to colleagues. She mentors junior faculty. She's the first person graduate students seek out when they're struggling. She travels with her spouse again—not just to conferences. Her adult children? "We actually have conversations now. Real ones. It wasn't like that before." At work? She's now Dean of Liberal Arts. One of the most sought-after mentors for new faculty, teaching others about sustainable academic careers and healthy departmental cultures. Here's the part that breaks my brain: Margaret didn't get therapy. She didn't have a dramatic life event that forced change. She just started working for leaders who saw her as someone's precious child instead of a research productivity metric. And that lens change—that fundamental shift in how she was seen and treated—changed who she became. The kicker? When I asked about stress, she said, "I didn't think I had stress. I just thought I was appropriately cynical about higher education." Then, after the transformation, "I realized I'd been carrying enormous stress for decades. I only had one emotion about my work—contempt disguised as intellectual superiority. I was never excited about teaching. I didn't love mentoring. I just published and resented everything else." ACADEMIC CULTURE DID THAT TO HER. THE "PUBLISH OR PERISH" INDUSTRIAL-ERA SYSTEM MADE HER THAT PERSON. AND A DIFFERENT CULTURE—LEADERSHIP BY PEOPLE WHO SAW HER AS SOMEONE'S PRECIOUS CHILD—UNMADE IT. Now translate this to YOUR context: That 22-year department chair who's "technically brilliant but departmentally divisive"? That's your Dean Margaret. Built walls because the last three deans treated them as an FTE generator and course coverage mechanism, not as someone's precious child. That associate dean who "doesn't collaborate well across colleges"? That's your isolated academic. Defensive because collaborative leadership has always been code for "do what the provost wants but make it look like shared governance." The question isn't whether you have a Margaret. You absolutely do. The question is: Are you willing to spend 8 years knocking on their office door? Or will you write them off in 8 days? Tag your cabinet member who needs to see this (do it cowardly—don't explain why. They'll know.) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 SCREENSHOT THIS: "Academic culture made her Darth Vader. Different leadership unmade it. Your leadership doesn't just affect org charts—it affects whether someone's family recognizes them." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ PAUSE: If you're still reading, you're in the top 15% of leaders willing to confront uncomfortable truths. Most superintendents and presidents will scroll past this because it challenges everything the industrial era taught them about "managing people." But you're still here. Which means you already know something's broken. The question is whether you're willing to do something about it. Let me show you exactly how... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE UNPOPULAR TRUTH THAT'LL GET ME UNINVITED FROM AASA AND NASPA Most superintendent and presidential leadership development is actively making this worse. They teach you data-driven decision making. Change management. Strategic communications. How to survive your board. How to pass levies or navigate trustee politics. Nobody teaches you how to see your curriculum director or dean as someone's precious child instead of a deliverables machine. Nobody teaches you that your principal's or department chair's marriage matters more than their building's test scores or department's enrollment numbers. Nobody teaches you that when you text your cabinet at 9 PM about tomorrow's agenda, you're stealing time from someone's family—and calling it leadership. The courses exist to make you a better superintendent or president within the industrial-era system. I'm trying to help you dismantle the system. There's a difference. And that difference is whether your cabinet members go home feeling they matter or feeling they're mechanisms in someone else's ambition. Comment "MECHANISMS" if you've sat through leadership training that felt more like systems engineering than human stewardship. (If we get 20+ comments, I'll write next week's newsletter about why ed leadership graduate programs are accidentally training superintendents and presidents to break people. Fair warning: It won't be diplomatic. Your graduate professors will hate it. You might finally understand why leadership feels impossible.) Now, if you're thinking, "This story is great, but how do I actually shift my cabinet from Approach 2 to Approach 3 on Tuesday?"—I get it. That's the gap between insight and implementation that's been keeping you up at 2 AM rewriting meeting agendas. This is what The GROUP is for. Each week, I turn frameworks like this into Leader CORE Lessons and Guides: facilitation notes, discussion prompts, the "Precious Child Lens Shift" diagnostic, conversation frameworks—everything you need to lead your team through this content without spending Sunday night translating conference insights into Monday morning reality. It's free (because charging for the solution to an industrial-era problem I'm trying to help you escape would be peak irony), built for busy leaders in K-12 and higher ed, and designed for Monday morning meetings when you're already exhausted from last week's fires. Grab this week's "Stewarding Someone's Precious Child" implementation guide: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group But whether you join The GROUP or not, here's what you can implement immediately... Before we get to what you can do Monday morning, do something right now: Screenshot the Margaret story above and text it to one person on your leadership team with this message: "What if we led like this?" Just that. Nothing else. See what they say. (I'll wait while you do it. This newsletter isn't going anywhere.) Done? Good. Now here's your Monday morning playbook... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⚡ THE APPLICATION: What To Do Monday Morning STEP 1: The Precious Child Lens Shift (10 Minutes, Alone) Before your next cabinet meeting, pull out photos of your team. Your cabinet members. Your principals or deans. Your directors or department chairs. For each person, write: "This is __________'s precious child. Their parent hopes I will care for them. How am I doing?" Be brutally honest. K-12 Version: Is your Director of Special Education someone you see as a compliance officer, or as someone's precious child navigating impossible state mandates while trying to serve students with dignity? Is your high school principal someone you see as a test score producer, or as someone's precious child managing 150 staff and 1,200 teenagers while parents email them at midnight? Higher Ed Version: Is your Dean of Liberal Arts someone you see as an enrollment generator, or as someone's precious child trying to explain to 85 faculty why their departments matter when majors are declining? Is your VP of Student Affairs someone you see as a crisis manager, or as someone's precious child responding to Title IX cases, mental health emergencies, and parents who threaten to call trustees? If you're treating them as functions, mechanisms, or means to achieve your strategic priorities, you're failing to fulfill that parent's hope. If you can't immediately name one way their life (not career, but life) has improved because they work for you, you're failing that parent's hope. The uncomfortable truth: Most leaders realize in this exercise that they don't actually know their people as humans. They know them as roles. VP of This. Director of That. Dean of Something. But do you know what keeps them up at night? What they're worried about at home? Whether they're thriving or surviving? YOU CAN'T CARE FOR SOMEONE'S PRECIOUS CHILD IF YOU DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW THEM. STEP 2: The Dinner Table Audit (15 Minutes) Think about your last cabinet meeting. Your last interaction with a direct report. Your last decision about staffing, budget, or strategy. Now imagine that person going home that evening. Sitting at dinner with their spouse and kids. Ask yourself: Did the way I led today make them a better spouse? A better parent? A better human? Or did I send stress home with them? Be honest. Not "did I intend to create stress?" but "did my actions—my tone, my urgency, my expectations—actually create stress that went home with them?" Prediction: You're about to think "But my board won't understand this." I know because I'm about to address it. Comment "MIND READER" if I'm right. K-12 Specific Questions: When you texted your principal at 9 PM about the parent complaint, did that help them be present with their family, or did it ruin their evening? When you questioned your curriculum director's timeline in front of the whole cabinet, did that make them go home feeling valued, or did they spend dinner mentally rehearsing their defense? Higher Ed Specific Questions: When you sent your dean that "following up on enrollment numbers" email at 10 PM, did that help them sleep well, or did they lie awake calculating how to explain demographic realities? When you questioned your provost's recommendation in front of the president's cabinet, did that make them go home feeling trusted, or did they spend the evening wondering if their judgment is valued? Here's what most leaders don't realize: You can't compartmentalize humanity. When you treat someone as a function at work, they don't magically become a whole human when they clock out. The stress goes home with them. Their spouse feels it. Their kids see it. Their health carries it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 THE HUMAN QUESTION: "Did the way I led today make them a better spouse, parent, and human—or did I just send stress home with them?" ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Real talk: If you just skipped Steps 1 and 2 to get to Step 3, go back. I built those in sequence for a reason. Trust the process. Also comment "CAUGHT ME" if I just called you out. STEP 3: The One Conversation That Changes Everything (30 Minutes This Week) Pick one person on your team. Schedule 30 minutes. No agenda except this: "I want to know you as a human being, not just as [their role]. Tell me: What do you love outside of work? What are you worried about? What would make your life better?" Then—and this is critical—shut up and listen. Don't problem-solve. Don't jump to solutions. Don't make it about work. Just listen to understand who this person is as someone's precious child. Not: "How are your buildings doing?" or "How's your college performing?" But: "How are you doing?" Not: "What's your plan for improving reading scores?" or "What's your enrollment strategy?" But: "What's making your life hard right now, inside or outside of work?" Not: "I need you to get buy-in on this initiative." But: "What do you need from me to feel supported as a human being, not just as a principal or dean?" This will feel awkward. It might feel inappropriate. You might think, "This isn't my role as a leader." That discomfort is diagnostic. If you can't have this conversation, you're treating people as functions, not as humans. Which means you're getting function-level performance instead of human-level devotion. The data backs this up: In one organization that taught empathetic listening classes, 95% of the feedback wasn't about improved work performance. It was about improved marriages. Better relationships with kids. Healthier family dynamics. Because when you teach people to see each other as precious children—to listen without judgment, just to validate worth—those skills go home. Your principals and deans take those skills back to their buildings and colleges. They listen to teachers and faculty differently. Who listen to students differently. Who go home and interact with their families differently. One conversation with you creates a cascade of better humanity through your entire system. Done the Precious Child Lens exercise? Comment "DONE" below so others see how many of us are actually doing the work, not just reading about it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ OBJECTION HANDLING (Because I Know What You're Thinking) "This sounds soft. We have real problems—achievement gaps, enrollment declines, budget cuts. I don't have time for feelings." Fair. Let me give you the hard reality: 74% of chronic illnesses are stress-related. The biggest cause of stress is work. The biggest cause of work stress is bad leadership. One study estimates we're killing 120,000 people annually from work-related stress. Your "hard" approach to leadership? It's literally killing people. Slowly. Through elevated cortisol. Weakened immune systems. Heart disease. Depression. Anxiety. And it's costing you educationally. That principal or dean you stressed out? They're making worse decisions about discipline, hiring, and instruction because chronic stress impairs executive function. They're calling in sick more. They're leaving the profession (costing you 150% of their salary to replace). And their stress cascades to teachers and faculty, who cascade it to students, who underperform—creating the very achievement gaps and retention problems you're trying to solve. You think you don't have time for "feelings"? You don't have time NOT to care for people properly. Because the alternative is educational waste wrapped in human suffering. "My board won't understand this. They want results, not philosophy." Then show them the results. I know a K-12 superintendent who shifted to this approach. Three years later: Teacher retention: 78% → 94% Student achievement: 3rd quartile → 1st quartile in state Staff recommending district to their own children as a workplace: 34% → 89% Parental satisfaction: 68% → 91% I know a university president who did the same. Four years later: Faculty satisfaction: 62% → 87% First-year retention: 72% → 84% Enrollment: Stabilized despite demographic headwinds Employees recommending institution to their own children: 41% → 91% Your board doesn't care about your leadership philosophy. They care that it works. And this approach produces results because people who feel they matter will move mountains. Which objection did you just think? "This is too soft" or "My board won't get it"? Comment 1 or 2. Let's see which industrial-era myth is most persistent. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "My job is to hit board metrics. My cabinet exists to execute the strategic plan." Mature leaders think: "My job is to steward precious children entrusted to my care. Board metrics improve when I do that well." Immature leaders measure success by: State rankings or US News rankings. Levy passage rates or fundraising totals. How many principals or deans stay until you tell them to leave. Mature leaders measure success by: Whether cabinet members go home less stressed. Whether principals and deans can be present with their own kids. Whether your curriculum director's or department chair's marriage is surviving. Immature leaders optimize for: Compliance. Execution. Performance dashboards that make board meetings easier. Mature leaders optimize for: Humanity. Whether the talented people they inherited are becoming better humans. Whether someone's mom would be proud of how you're treating her child. The shift isn't about being less rigorous. It's recognizing that how you close achievement gaps or stabilize enrollment matters as much as whether you accomplish those goals. Because if you're hitting state metrics or enrollment targets while destroying cabinet members' marriages, you're failing that parent's hope. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 SCREENSHOT THIS: "Immature leaders optimize calendars. Mature leaders optimize whether someone's kid gets a better parent because of how you led that day." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ YOUR TURN: The Question That Reveals Everything Think about your team right now. Your cabinet. Your principals or deans. Your directors or department chairs. Can you name one person whose life—not career, but actual life—is genuinely better because they work for you? Not because of salary. Not because of title. Not because of professional development opportunities. Because of how you see them. How you care for them. How you steward the precious child their parents entrusted to your care. K-12 Version: Can you name a principal whose marriage is stronger because of how you lead them? Can you name an assistant superintendent whose kids get a more present parent because you see them as someone's precious child? Can you name a curriculum director who sleeps better at night because they trust that you genuinely care about their wellbeing, not just their deliverables? Higher Ed Version: Can you name a dean whose family recognizes them again because of how you lead them? Can you name a department chair whose aging parents get more attention because you've reduced their stress load? Can you name a faculty member who's thriving—not just surviving—because you've created a culture where they matter? If you can't immediately name someone, you have work to do. And that work? It's the most important work you'll ever do as a leader. Because leadership isn't about strategic plans and achievement data and five-year facilities master plans. Leadership is about whether someone's kid gets a better parent because of how you led that day. Leadership is about whether someone's spouse gets a more present partner because you saw them as human, not function. Leadership is about whether someone goes to bed feeling they matter. That's the stewardship you signed up for, whether you realized it or not. The only question left is: Are you willing to lead like it? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE FORK IN THE ROAD You just invested 8 minutes discovering why treating cabinet members as line items is destroying both your outcomes and their humanity. Now you have two choices: OPTION 1: Return to the industrial era Keep optimizing for compliance. Keep measuring success by whether people execute your vision. Keep wondering why talented cabinets produce mediocre results. Your board will be satisfied (until they're not). Your metrics will be adequate (until they're not). Your people will stay (until they don't). And in 10 years, you'll retire with decent pension, impressive resume, and the quiet knowledge that you broke more people than you built. OPTION 2: Build the future Join The GROUP —a free community where superintendents and presidents learn to steward precious children while actually improving every metric that matters. What you get: Implementation guides that turn this newsletter into Tuesday's cabinet agenda Facilitation notes for the "Precious Child Lens" conversation Peer community of educational leaders dismantling industrial-era thinking together Monthly live problem-solving with other lonely leaders who get it The "Empathetic Listening" curriculum that transformed Randall This week's guide includes the complete "Stewarding Someone's Precious Child" framework—ready to deploy Monday morning. JOIN THE GROUP: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group Or just subscribe to weekly insights: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/blog Pick one. Pick both. Just don't pick neither. Because your alternative is spending the next decade wondering why leadership feels like breaking people you were supposed to build. (Spoiler: It's because you're still using Frederick Taylor's playbook in 2025.) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ YOUR MOVE Found this challenging? Good. Challenge is where transformation starts. → Repost this and tag one leader who needs to see people differently → Comment with your honest answer: Can you name someone whose life improved because they work for you? → Screenshot the "Precious Child Lens" section and text it to your cabinet The more superintendents and presidents who shift from managing employees to stewarding precious children, the healthier our teachers and faculty become. The stronger our schools and institutions become. The better our communities become. This isn't idealism. This is the most practical leadership strategy you'll ever implement. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly leadership insights that honor humanity while driving performance. #EducationalLeadership #SuperintendentLife #K12Leadership #HigherEdLeadership #SchoolLeadership ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ P.S. A final thought about that wedding: The father who walked his daughter down the aisle last week was one of my good friends. He wasn't thinking about her performance metrics. He wasn't measuring her productivity. He wasn't calculating her ROI. He was thinking: "Please see her the way I see her. Please treat her the way she deserves. Please don't break what I spent 27 years building." Every parent whose child works for you is thinking the exact same thing. They're just not in the room to say it. So I'll say it for them: Please don't break what they spent 27 years building. That's not your job description. But it's your responsibility. And at the end of your career, nobody will remember your strategic plan. But the precious children you stewarded well? They'll remember how you made them feel. That's legacy. Everything else is just résumé content. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ NEXT ISSUE: "Your Cabinet Has Succession Energy (But Nobody Knows Who's Kendall)" We'll explore why your leadership team performs collaboration theater in meetings but would never call each other when the world falls apart at 11 PM—and how that's not dysfunction, it's the DESIGN of command-and-control systems. Your principals and deans are Logan Roy's kids—brilliant, ambitious, competing for your approval, secretly destroying each other while performing teamwork. You're Logan—wondering why nobody's ready to lead after you leave. Spoiler: You've been optimizing for control instead of connection. And that worked great in 1987. In 2025? It's why your succession plan is "hope nobody retires."  (Also: Yes, I'm comparing your cabinet to a show about toxic family dysfunction. If that makes you defensive, you should DEFINITELY read it.)

(And You're the Dealer They Keep Calling) Do this math: 6 times per week × 47 weeks × 15 min × $125/hr = $17,625 annually being "the optimistic one." That's a slightly used 2023 Honda Civic you're burning while calling it leadership. 73% of leaders in our 987-team study are the only "hopeful one" on their team. You're not helping them. You're creating dependency. Here's the pattern nobody's naming: Every time you loan your hope, you confirm they don't have their own. Every time you're "the optimistic one," you teach them optimism isn't their job. Every time you solve their hopelessness problem, you rob them of the exact agency that builds real hope. That question you love asking—"Who on my team needs to borrow my hope?"—isn't supportive leadership. It's enabling learned helplessness with inspirational language. And while you're performing hope for your cabinet, your board is wondering why decisions take forever, your teachers/faculty are experiencing inconsistent leadership, and you're Googling "leadership burnout symptoms" at 11 PM on a Tuesday. Your turn: Count this week. How many times were you "the hopeful one"? Drop the number in the comments—I'm curious. THE DIAGNOSIS: Why Smart Leaders Build Dependent Teams Let's talk about this like adults who've survived multiple enrollment crises and at least one strategic planning retreat that somehow cost $40K and produced a vision statement that could apply to literally any organization with a mission. Here's what your last two weeks actually looked like: Monday, 9:00 AM: Cabinet Meeting Your VP of Enrollment presents fall numbers. They're... not great. (In K-12, substitute "your Director of Student Services presents discipline data." In higher ed, it's enrollment. The pattern's the same—someone brings math that hurts.) The room catalogs obstacles: Demographics working against us Competition has better facilities Budget constraints everywhere That new program bleeding money Board asking uncomfortable questions Someone mentions "headwinds" because apparently we're all sailing ships now Energy drops like your retention rate during that semester we don't discuss. And you—because this is leadership, right?—step in. "Here's what I'm seeing as possible..." You reframe. You remind them of the community college that turned around enrollment with adult learners. You point to opportunities buried in the obstacles. You tell that story about the institution that was struggling five years ago and is now thriving. You provide the hope injection. The room shifts. People nod. Someone says, "Good perspective." Meeting ends on an upward trajectory. You feel like you just performed emotional CPR. They feel slightly less defeated. Nobody notices you're the only one who performed life-saving measures. Tuesday's Meeting: Different Topic, Identical Dynamic Budget discussion. Your CFO presents constraints. Your deans/principals express concern. The conversation spirals toward "what we can't do." You redirect: "Let me share what I'm thinking about differently..." They listen. They nod. They leave feeling better. And you leave feeling like you just ran an emotional marathon while everyone else walked. By Thursday You're in three different "quick conversations": Your CFO in the parking lot: "Can you help me reframe this for the board?" Your Provost via Slack: "I need your perspective on something" Your Dean in your doorway: "Just need 5 minutes" (takes 23) Translation: They need to borrow your optimism because they've temporarily run out of their own. You provide it. Because that's leadership. Right? Wrong. It feels like supportive leadership. It's actually enabling learned helplessness with inspirational language. Quick check: How many times THIS WEEK have you been the emotional CPR for your cabinet? And while you're performing hope for your cabinet, your teachers/faculty are wondering why leadership can't seem to make decisions, your board is asking why implementation is slow, and you're Googling "leadership burnout symptoms" at 11 PM on a Tuesday. I know the loneliness of being the only person who sees the possibility of feeling like you're carrying the emotional infrastructure of an entire institution. Would your team collapse into nihilism if you took a vacation? You're not crazy. Your team isn't incompetent. You've just accidentally created a system where hope has a monopoly holder, and the monopoly holder is exhausted. Comment "THURSDAY" if this was literally your week. (Bonus points if you can calculate how many times you were "the optimistic one" since Monday.) HERE'S WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING Your team has high individual competence but catastrophically low collective agency. They're brilliant people who've never learned to generate their own hope under pressure. So they compensate with dependency. On you. It's not malicious. It's mathematical. When you own Goals, Pathways, AND Agency for your team, you're not multiplying their capacity. You're multiplying by zero while working really, really hard. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 "Hope isn't something people borrow. It's something teams build. Every time you loan yours out, you prevent them from constructing their own." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ (This is actually why I created The GROUP —a free community where insights like this become Leader CORE Lessons you can deploy Monday morning. We teach your team to build hope infrastructure, not rent yours. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) Here's the uncomfortable truth: You accepted the assignment of being "the hopeful one." And every time you perform that role, you confirm the role distribution. Your team isn't failing to generate hope. They're successfully outsourcing it to you. And you—because you care about them, because you want to support them, because this is what you thought leadership looked like—keep accepting the outsourcing contract. THE FRAMEWORK: Stop Being the Hope Source. Start Building Hope Infrastructure. Call this the Agency Architecture Framework. Or don't. It'll still explain why your last "inspirational message" changed nothing about your team's actual capacity. THE RESEARCH EVERYONE MISUNDERSTOOD Psychologist C.R. Snyder spent decades studying hope. He identified three components: Goals - Clear objectives Pathways - Routes to achieve goals Agency - Belief in our capacity to act Here's the part that matters: Agency is "our belief in our own capacity to act." Read that again. Our own capacity. Not borrowed capacity. Not your capacity that they rent for 90 minutes. Their own. Every time you loan your hope, you confirm they don't have their own. Every time you're "the optimistic one," you reinforce that optimism isn't their job. Every time you solve their hopelessness problem, you rob them of the exact agency that builds real hope. Data from 987 leadership teams confirms: Teams with one "hope source" report 40% lower collective efficacy than teams with distributed agency. When only you own Goals, Pathways, and Agency, you're not multiplying team capacity. You're multiplying by zero while working really, really hard. Comment "BORROWED" if you've ever asked, "Who on my team needs to borrow my hope right now?" Let's see how many of us have been accidentally enabling dependency. THE THREE SHIFTS: Stop Being the Dealer They Keep Calling ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎯 SHIFT 1: GOALS Stop Deciding For Them. Start Deciding With Them. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ What you're doing now: You set goals. Cast vision. Define success. Your cabinet nods, agrees, maybe even feels inspired momentarily. Then returns to their divisions and operates according to entirely different goals because they never actually owned yours. What happens: In K-12: You announce district priorities. Principals nod. Teachers experience three different interpretations of the same priority because it never belonged to anyone except you. In higher ed: You define institutional objectives. Deans agree. Faculty wonder why priorities keep changing because the goals were never co-created, just announced. What to do instead: "Before I share what I'm thinking, what does success look like from your seat? What would make next year feel like progress for Student Affairs? For Academic Affairs? For Finance?"  Then facilitate the messy work of finding the intersection between eight different definitions of success. ⚠️ The Uncomfortable Truth: This is slower than just deciding. It also produces goals your team will actually pursue when you're not in the room. Choose wisely. The difference between clarity provided and clarity created is the difference between compliance and ownership. One requires you to constantly reinforce. One sustains itself. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🛤️ SHIFT 2: PATHWAYS Stop Bringing Back Conference Insights. Start Building Collective Capacity. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ What you're doing now: You went to the conference. Learned the framework. Came back energized. Built the implementation plan. Ready to deploy. Two months later, you're experiencing "implementation friction"—consultant-speak for "nobody's actually doing this and everyone's pretending they don't notice." Why? Because you brought back your pathway , not theirs. What happens: You keep wondering why your brilliant strategy isn't being executed. They keep wondering why you don't understand their reality. Everyone's frustrated. Nothing changes. What to do instead: "We agree we need to improve retention. Before we pick a strategy, let's identify: What's actually in our control? What resources do we have? What's worked before? Then let's build options together." You're not withholding your expertise. You're teaching them to build pathways instead of walk yours. ⚠️ The Uncomfortable Truth: This feels inefficient at first. But it's the difference between leading a team that executes your plans (requires your constant presence) and leading a team that generates plans (functions when you're on vacation). ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💪 SHIFT 3: AGENCY (The Big One) Stop Loaning Belief. Start Building Their Capacity to Generate It. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ This is where the Hope Tax lives. What you're doing now: Cabinet discussion surfaces challenges. You reframe anxiety into optimism. They feel better. You feel exhausted. Nothing changes about their actual capacity to see possibility independently. Next meeting: Same pattern. They bring problems. You bring hope. They express doubt. You provide belief. You've accidentally trained them that hope is your job, not theirs. What happens: Your calendar fills with "quick conversations" where people need hope injections. You become the emotional infrastructure of your organization. They become dependent on you for basic optimism. Everyone calls this "supportive leadership" while you quietly burn out. What to do instead: "I notice we're cataloging obstacles. That's important—we need to see reality clearly. And I also notice nobody's named what's possible yet. Before I jump in, who wants to try? What's one pathway that could actually work?"  Awkward silence? Probably. Will last approximately 47 seconds (yes, I've timed this across hundreds of leadership teams). Will someone eventually speak? Yes. Will it be messier than when you do it? Yes. Will it be theirs? Yes. And is that the entire point? Also yes. ⚠️ The Uncomfortable Truth: The silence is diagnostic. If nobody can articulate possibility without you, you've created dependency, not capability. And dependency—no matter how inspirational it looks—is the opposite of leadership development. Honest question: What would happen if you stayed silent for 47 seconds? Would your team collapse or discover they don't need you to think for them? THE CASE STUDY: When Alicia Stopped Being the Hope Dealer Let me tell you about a president I'll call Alicia (Alicia, you absolutely know this is you, and your former CFO is probably reading this right now and texting you). Alicia led a regional comprehensive university. 12,000 students. Declining enrollment. Aging facilities. Board asking increasingly uncomfortable questions about "institutional viability" (academic-speak for "are we going to survive this?"). Her cabinet: Eight people with an average of 19 years in higher education each. Combined credentials that could staff a small academic conference. Combined ability to see possibility without Sarah? Roughly equivalent to their combined ability to agree on where to order lunch (which is to say: zero). Every cabinet meeting followed the same script: Someone surfaces enrollment/budget/operational challenge Team catalogs obstacles with the thoroughness of people who've definitely done this before Energy drops Alicia reframes, provides hope injection, tells inspiring story Meeting ends on upward trajectory Nothing actually changes about the team's capacity Alicia was even featured in a Chronicle article about "leading with optimism during challenging times." Privately? Alicia was exhausted. And confused. Because her team was brilliant individually but seemingly incapable of seeing possibility collectively. And she couldn't figure out why eight smart people couldn't generate optimism without her. Before you read what Alicia did—predict: What's YOUR Hope Tax number? Comment your guess. Then Alicia did something uncomfortable. At her next cabinet meeting, when the Provost started cataloging enrollment challenges (demographics, competition, the existential crisis of regional comprehensives, probably something about "headwinds"), Alicia did something she'd never done: She stayed quiet. The silence was excruciating. Her CFO later told her it felt like 10 minutes. Alicia timed it. 47 seconds. Finally, her VP of Student Affairs said: "Okay, what if we looked at this differently? Declining traditional enrollment is actually forcing us to finally fix our adult learner infrastructure. We've been talking about that for six years but never had the pressure to actually do it. Maybe this crisis is the forcing function we needed." Alicia told me later, "I almost interrupted him three times. I had to physically put my hands under my thighs to stop myself from jumping in. It was the hardest 47 seconds of my presidency. And the most important." The conversation that followed wasn't as polished as when Alicia facilitated. Messier. Less linear. More awkward pauses. But it was theirs. Alicia did this systematically over six months: Stopped immediately reframing every challenge Started asking "Who else sees a pathway forward here?" Practiced counting to 10 before providing hope Named the pattern: "I think I've trained us that my job is to see possibility and your job is to see obstacles" Her team stopped borrowing her hope and started building their own. Cabinet meetings stopped being "Alicia inspires everyone for 90 minutes" and started being "eight people solve problems together." The transformation wasn't dramatic. It was incremental. And it was permanent. The numbers: Hope Tax: $28,000/year → $4,200/year (85% reduction) "Quick conversations" needing Sarah's optimism: 18/week → 3/week Cabinet decisions made WITHOUT Sarah facilitating: 2/year → 12/year Alicia's Sunday night work sessions: 4 hours → 45 minutes Same budget. Same enrollment challenges. Same board pressure. Different hope infrastructure. Within six months: Cabinet meetings were 35% shorter Implementation increased 60% Alicia's workload decreased significantly Team made a major strategic pivot unanimously—without Alicia facilitating The strategic plan didn't change. The hope infrastructure underneath it changed. Turns out, that's what actually matters. Now, if you're thinking "this framework makes sense, but how do I actually facilitate the awkward 47-second silence without it turning into a staring contest or accidentally making my VP cry?"—I get it. That's the gap between insight and implementation. This is what The GROUP is for. Each week, I turn the newsletter topic into a Leader CORE Lesson and Guide: Facilitation scripts for navigating the silence when you stop being the hope source Discussion protocols that build agency without feeling like therapy Team exercises that develop hope infrastructure, not hope dependency The actual language to use when someone says "but isn't hope your job as leader?" Diagnostic tools to assess where your team is on the agency spectrum It's free (because charging you to solve a problem called the Hope Tax would be peak irony), built for busy leaders who need practical resources—not more theory—and designed for Monday morning meetings when you're already exhausted from last week's hope performance. Grab this week's Hope Infrastructure guide: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group But whether you join The GROUP or not, here's what you can implement immediately... THE APPLICATION: What to Do Monday Morning (Assuming you survived last week's hope marathon and aren't currently hiding in your car eating lunch alone to avoid more "quick conversations" where someone needs you to help them "see this differently") STEP 1: THE HOPE MONOPOLY AUDIT (15 minutes) In your next cabinet meeting, when someone surfaces a challenge, don't immediately reframe it. Count to 10. Out loud in your head. Feel the discomfort of the silence. Then ask: "Before I share what I'm thinking, who else sees a pathway forward here?" Watch what happens: If nobody speaks, you've just discovered you have a hope monopoly If someone speaks but then looks at you for validation, they're still borrowing agency If someone speaks and others build on it without checking with you, congratulations—you have distributed agency somewhere The silence is diagnostic data. Don't fill it. Let your team experience the gap between their current dependence and their potential capacity. If this feels cruel, remember: You're not withholding help. You're creating space for them to discover they don't need to borrow what they can build. (Objection handling: "But what if nobody speaks and the meeting just dies?" Then you've diagnosed a more serious problem than you thought. And you still can't fix it by continuing to be the hope dealer. The silence itself is the intervention.) STEP 2: CALCULATE YOUR ACTUAL HOPE TAX (10 minutes) Track this for one week. Every time you play "the optimistic one," make a tally mark. Count honestly: Cabinet meetings where you reframe challenges One-on-ones where you "help them see differently" Emails where you provide encouraging perspective Hallway conversations where someone needs hope injection Then do the math: [Number of instances] × 15 minutes each × $125/hour × 47 weeks = Your Annual Hope Tax For the president who hit 23 instances in five days? That's $32,662.50 annually. That's not a rounding error. That's a full-time staff position you're filling with your emotional labor while wondering why you don't have time for strategic thinking. Write the number down. Show it to someone. Maybe your spouse, who's been asking why you're exhausted on weekends. Your Hope Tax isn't a leadership development expense. It's a leadership design flaw that's been costing you actual money and time you'll never get back. STEP 3: THE AGENCY REDISTRIBUTION CONVERSATION (20 minutes at next cabinet meeting) This is the uncomfortable one. This is where you name the pattern that everyone's been experiencing but nobody's been saying. Add this to your next cabinet agenda: "Team development conversation: Hope infrastructure" Then say this (or your version of this): "I've noticed a pattern in our meetings, and I want to name it and see if you're noticing it too." I think I've accidentally trained us that my job is to see possibility and your job is to see obstacles. That wasn't intentional, but I think it's happening. And I think it's making us less effective as a team. Not because you can't see possibility—you absolutely can. But because I keep doing it for you before you have to. So you've stopped practicing that muscle. What if we practiced seeing possibility together? What would that look like?" Pause. Let that land. Count to 10 again. Then: "I'm not going to stop being optimistic. But I am going to stop being the only person who's optimistic. Starting today." Uncomfortable? Extremely. Necessary? Absolutely. Will someone say "but isn't providing vision and hope literally your job as leader?" Probably your CFO. Your response: "My job is to build a team that can lead even when I'm not in the room. Right now, I'm accidentally preventing that by providing something you need to learn to generate yourselves." This won't feel natural. It will feel like you're withholding something they need. You're not. You're teaching them to build what you've been loaning. There's a difference. ⚡ Pause here. Comment "47 SECONDS" if you're willing to try the awkward silence experiment at your next meeting. I want to see how many leaders are brave enough to stop talking. OBJECTION HANDLING "But we don't have time for this philosophical conversation about hope. We have actual crises." You're currently spending 15+ hours per month being the hope dealer. That's 180 hours per year. That's 4.5 weeks of full-time work. You don't have time NOT to fix this. Also, this isn't philosophical. This is operational. Your team can't function independently because you've accidentally made yourself indispensable for basic optimism. That's not crisis management. That's crisis creation with inspirational language. "What if I stop providing hope and they just spiral into negativity?" Then you've discovered the actual state of your team's agency, and you can finally address the real problem instead of decorating around it with motivational speeches. But here's what actually happens: When you stop filling every silence with optimism, someone else will. Maybe not immediately. Maybe not eloquently. But they will. Because people don't lack the capacity for hope. They lack practice generating it when someone else has been doing it for them. "This feels like I'm abandoning my team when they need me most." You're not abandoning them. You're graduating them from dependence to capability. There's a difference between supporting people and becoming their emotional life support system. One builds strength. One creates atrophy. And right now, your team's hope muscles have atrophied because you keep doing the emotional heavy lifting while they watch. THE MATURITY SHIFT: From Hope Performance to Hope Infrastructure ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ IMMATURE LEADERS ASK: "Who needs to borrow my hope?" MATURE LEADERS ASK: "How do I build a team that generates its own?" ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Immature leaders model optimism, yet wonder why their team remains pessimistic. Mature leaders build systems where agency is distributed and wonder why they didn't do this five years ago. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Immature leaders measure their effectiveness by how inspired people feel after meetings. Mature leaders measure effectiveness by how independently their team solves problems when they're not in the room. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Immature leaders treat "being the hopeful one" as a leadership strength. Mature leaders recognize it as a team development failure masquerading as inspirational leadership. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Immature leaders = Indispensable + Exhausted Mature leaders = Team Capable + Vacation Restful ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 "The Hope Tax isn't an operational expense you have to accept. It's a leadership design flaw you can fix." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The difference is the difference between performing hope and building the infrastructure that makes hope renewable. One makes you indispensable and exhausted. One makes your team capable and your vacation actually restful. And unlike your actual budget constraints, your enrollment challenges, and the existential questions your board keeps asking—this one is 100% in your control. YOUR TURN Count this week. How many times were you "the optimistic one"? Calculate your Hope Tax: [instances per week] × 15 minutes × $125/hour × 47 weeks = ? Drop your Hope Tax calculation in the comments. (Bonus points if it's so high it makes you reconsider every leadership podcast you've ever loved. Double bonus if you can calculate what you could have bought with that money—spoiler: it's probably a Honda Civic.) What would it look like to stop loaning hope and start building the infrastructure for your team to generate their own? Tag the cabinet member who borrows your hope most frequently. (Do it cowardly—don't explain what you're actually tagging them for.) P.S. IF YOU'RE THINKING "I DON'T HAVE TIME TO TURN THIS INTO A MONDAY MORNING TEAM CONVERSATION" I already did it for you. The GROUP is a free community where every newsletter becomes a ready-to-deploy Leader CORE Lesson and Guide: Facilitation scripts for navigating the 47-second silence without panicking Discussion protocols that build agency without feeling like group therapy Team exercises that develop hope infrastructure systematically The actual language to use when your CFO says , "I sn't hope literally your job?" Diagnostic tools to assess where your team is on the agency spectrum Recovery protocols for when you accidentally slip back into hope-dealer mode Join The GROUP here (it's free): https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group Plus you get access to hundreds of campus leaders who are also trying to stop being the lone source of institutional optimism. The implementation guides save you hours. The peer conversations? Those might save you from becoming that leader who's inspirational on LinkedIn and exhausted in real life. HELP OTHER LEADERS DISCOVER THIS If this resonated (or made you uncomfortable, which is basically the same thing): → Repost this with your Hope Tax calculation and biggest takeaway → Tag a leader who's definitely paying the Hope Tax right now (you know exactly who they are—the one who's always "the optimistic one" and always exhausted) → Comment with your experience—Have you noticed this pattern? What's it costing you? Your story helps others feel less alone The more leaders who shift from providing hope to building hope infrastructure, the better our educational systems become. And the fewer leaders burn out trying to be the emotional architecture of their entire organization. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights. NEXT ISSUE: "Your Cabinet Has Commitment Issues (And Your Strategic Plan Is the Emotional Affair)" Why your team enthusiastically agrees to priorities in September and acts like amnesia victims by October. We'll explore the 15-minute exercise that reveals whether you have genuine ownership or performative compliance—plus the uncomfortable reason strategic plans built through consensus create exactly zero commitment.  Spoiler: Your team isn't failing to follow through. They're successfully executing a plan they never actually owned. And you're about to discover you've been confusing agreement with commitment for your entire leadership career.

THE MATH THAT DESCRIBES WHY LEADERSHIP TEAMS FAIL UNDER PRESSURE ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Do this math: 8 cabinet members × 12 meetings × 90 minutes = 144 hours annually with people you call "your team" but wouldn't call if your world fell apart. That's not a leadership gap. That's a relationship infrastructure crisis. 73% of superintendents in our 987-team study report "plenty of colleagues but no one who really gets it." (Most won't admit this until drink two at the conference hotel bar.) Here's the pattern: We've professionalized educational leadership so thoroughly that we've accidentally made it functionally impossible to build the one thing that determines whether your cabinet actually works—relationships that transcend the role. I was recently in conversation with a leader who has navigated both established legacy organizations and complete startups—completely different contexts that require entirely different leadership skills. And he said something that stopped me cold: "I only have 2-5 people max who remain my friends through all the seasons of life. And that's all that really matters." Two to five people. Not 2000 LinkedIn connections. Not your entire cabinet. Not even your full executive team. Two. To. Five. And suddenly, everything about why some leadership teams click and others just... meet made perfect sense. Let's discuss what most leadership development programs overlook entirely. LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS LIKE ADULTS WHO'VE SURVIVED MULTIPLE ACCREDITATION CYCLES Here's what nobody tells you at leadership conferences (because they're too busy selling next year's tickets): The reason your cabinet doesn't function like a team has nothing to do with strategic planning tools or communication protocols. It has everything to do with whether you've built trust deep enough to survive seasons. SPECIFIC RECOGNITION: You know this moment: It's 11 PM on a Sunday, and the board email just hit your inbox—the one that makes your stomach drop. You scroll through your contacts looking for someone to call. You pass right over your Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum. Your CFO. Your VP of HR. Not because they're incompetent. Because you need someone who knows you independent of your title. (And the person you actually call? Probably doesn't work in education.) Or this one: You're in a cabinet meeting debating a controversial policy change. Everyone's nodding. Taking notes. Agreeing professionally. Then you adjourn, and three separate people text their actual thoughts to someone NOT in the room. You've built a team that performs trust but doesn't practice it. Or my personal favorite: Your Chair gets promoted to Dean—brilliant strategic mind. Everyone's excited. Six months in, she's technically proficient, but the cabinet dynamics feel off—because she's performing her new role while psychologically remaining in her old identity. And nobody can talk about it because you've never established the kind of trust where identity evolution is safe. ROOT CAUSE DIAGNOSIS: Here's why this keeps happening, and I'm going to be direct because I've spent 25 years in the loneliness of the leadership seat: We've confused competency with capacity. We hire for IQ. We develop EQ. We measure performance indicators. But we completely ignore the foundation that determines whether any of it actually works: Building Trust. Not trust as a soft skill. Trust as the oxygen of TEAM INTELLIGENCE. Research from our work with 987 leadership teams reveals something most leadership development completely misses: Leaders cannot skip competency levels without creating fragility in their leadership foundation. You cannot authentically empower others until you've established trust. You cannot facilitate genuine collaboration without both trust and empowerment. You cannot lead change successfully without trust, empowerment, collaboration, and influence working synergistically. Yet what do we do? We promote people into complex leadership roles and immediately expect them to manage change, resolve conflicts, and develop others—Level 5 work—when they're operating at Level 1-2 on Building Trust. That's not a competency gap. That's a developmental logic violation. And it's why 67% of change initiatives consistently fail. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 "You cannot empower others until you've established trust. You cannot collaborate without empowerment. You cannot lead change without all prior competencies working synergistically." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ (This is actually why we created the TEAM INTELLIGENCE framework and built it into our TEAM INSTITUTE sessions—to help leadership teams develop sequentially instead of randomly. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) TQ FRAMEWORK INTRODUCTION: This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you to "create psychological safety" or "build better relationships." But you already knew that. The real problem? Most leaders are attempting advanced leadership competencies without mastering the foundational one. Here's the developmental sequence that actually works, drawn from our Leader Competency Assessment: Level 1: Building Trust — Foundation for all others Level 2: Empowerment — Builds on trust foundation Level 3: Collaboration — Requires trust and empowerment Level 4: Broadening Influence — Leverages collaborative networks Level 5: Managing Change — Requires all prior competencies Level 6: Managing Conflict — Transforms collaborative tension into breakthrough Level 7: Developing Others — Apex competency synthesizing all others Your cabinet isn't dysfunctional because people lack skills. It's dysfunctional because you're trying to run Level 5 plays (change management) with a team operating at Level 1-2 trust. And trust—real trust, the kind that survives leadership transitions and organizational turbulence—isn't built in strategic planning sessions. It's built when relationships transcend the org chart. 🎯 BUILDING TRUST: THE COMPETENCY THAT DETERMINES EVERYTHING ELSE WHY THIS ALWAYS COMES FIRST (EVEN WHEN WE WISH IT DIDN'T) Organizations led by leaders who create a psychological safety culture are significantly more likely to foster innovative cultures, with substantially better talent retention and higher stakeholder satisfaction. (That's not motivation-poster wisdom. That's data from institutions that actually work.) But here's what most leadership development gets catastrophically wrong: They treat trust as a soft skill you sprinkle on top of competence, rather than the foundation that determines whether competence ever becomes performance. Trust is the oxygen of team intelligence. Without it, every other competency suffocates. Let me break down the five levels of Building Trust—and show you exactly where your cabinet is probably stuck: LEVEL 1: DEMONSTRATES INCONSISTENT RELIABILITY • Communication lacks transparency • Actions and words frequently misalign • Tends to blame others for setbacks Observable reality: This is the superintendent who announces, "My door is always open," but team members never walk through it. Or the cabinet member who commits to the meeting but ghosts on execution. Your team isn't underperforming because they're incompetent—they're hedging because reliability is inconsistent. Quick gut check: How many times this month has someone on your cabinet surprised you by not following through? LEVEL 2: SHOWS BASIC RELIABILITY BUT STRUGGLES WITH VULNERABILITY • Generally follows through on commitments • Shares limited information • Hesitates to admit mistakes Observable reality: This is where most educational leadership teams actually operate. Professional. Polite. Performing collaboration. But when something goes sideways, nobody's texting each other. They're calling someone outside the organization who they actually trust. You've built a reporting structure, not a team. Be honest: When was the last time someone on your cabinet admitted a mistake before you discovered it? LEVEL 3: CONSISTENTLY DEMONSTRATES INTEGRITY AND TRANSPARENCY • Demonstrates vulnerability as a leader • Advocates for team members even when costly • Addresses trust violations directly and fairly Observable reality: This is where the shift happens—from "colleagues who work together" to "people who have each other's backs." Cabinet members start processing real thinking with each other instead of around each other. When one person's worried about something, the team knows about it before it becomes a crisis. LEVEL 4: CREATES AN ENVIRONMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY • Establishes systems that promote transparency • Creates mechanisms for addressing breaches of trust • Models reconciliation and repair after conflicts Observable reality: This is the cabinet that can debate controversial decisions and still go to lunch together afterward. Why? Because they've built systems—not just goodwill—that make trust renewable even when it's damaged. They've moved from hoping trust happens to architecting it into how they operate. LEVEL 5: BUILDS INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES OF TRUST • Establishes formal and informal influence channels • Develops systems for cross-campus knowledge sharing • Connects the institution to external opportunities Observable reality: This is rare. This is when your cabinet's trust infrastructure becomes the model for the entire district. When principals start running their teams the way you run yours—not because you mandated it, but because they've watched it work. THE BRUTAL REALITY CHECK: We spent this fall running TEAM INSTITUTE sessions with campus leadership teams, and we started every single one with the Building Trust assessment. Want to know the most common result? Leaders rated themselves at Level 3-4. Their teams rated them at Level 1-2. That gap? That's your entire performance problem right there. THE THREE TRUST QUESTIONS THAT REVEAL EVERYTHING: I learned these from a leader who built multiple teams across completely different organizational contexts. He said the distinguishing factor wasn't competence or chemistry—it was answering three questions honestly: Question 1: "Who on this team would I call at 11 PM if my world were falling apart?" If the answer is zero or one, you don't have a team. You have coworkers who attend meetings. Question 2: "Who on this team has embraced the leader I'm becoming, not just the role I'm performing?" Leadership transitions require identity evolution. If your cabinet can't hold space for that, people perform their new role while psychologically remaining in the old one. (This is why your brilliant new Dean still acts like a Chair.) Question 3: "Can I make decisions WITH this team, or do I just announce decisions TO them?" If you're married, you don't make major life decisions unilaterally and then expect your spouse to get on board. Why do we think that works with leadership teams? The teams that can answer all three questions affirmatively? Those are the ones where trust isn't a nice-to-have. It's the infrastructure underneath everything else. CASE STUDY: THE TEAM THAT REBUILT TRUST FROM LEVEL 1 A community college president (let's call her "Maria"—and yes, she knows I'm telling this) inherited a cabinet of seven VPs. All credentialed. All experienced. All completely siloed and performing trust instead of practicing it. Her first 90 days, she tried what most new leaders try: strategic planning. Vision alignment. Goal cascading. Professional development. Nothing changed. Then she did something most leaders won't: She admitted the problem wasn't strategy. It was trust. She brought in our TEAM INTELLIGENCE assessment . Results showed her cabinet at Level 1-2 on Building Trust, yet they were attempting Level 5 work (managing major institutional change). The developmental logic violation was obvious. Here's what she did: She stopped leading cabinet meetings and started building trust infrastructure. She asked each VP privately: "Who on this team would you call at 11 PM if something went sideways in your personal life?" Zero VPs named anyone on the cabinet. Then she asked: "Who on this team knows what you're genuinely worried about regarding your work right now—not the polished version you present in meetings, but the real anxiety?" Two had someone. Five didn't. The gap between "colleagues" and "people who trust each other through seasons" was costing them everything. Maria created monthly one-on-one conversations where the only agenda was: "Who are you becoming as a leader, and how can this team help you get there?" Not performance evaluations. Identity evolution conversations. She stopped managing performance and started shepherding transformation. Within 90 days, VPs started texting each other their real concerns instead of people outside the room. Within six months, they'd formed what I call "micro-alliances"—2-3 people who processed real thinking together between formal meetings. Within a year, the cabinet made a controversial curricular decision unanimously because they'd made it WITH each other. Student success metrics? Increased 12 percentage points. Faculty satisfaction? Up 23%. But Maria told me: "The strategy didn't change. The trust infrastructure underneath the strategy changed. Turns out, that's what actually matters." She rebuilt from the foundation up. Level 1 to Level 4 in 18 months. That's not magic. That's developmental sequence done right. 📋 HERE'S WHAT TO DO MONDAY MORNING (BEFORE YOUR FIRST CABINET MEETING) STEP 1: RUN THE TRUST LEVEL AUDIT (20 MINUTES) Pull out our Leader Competency Assessment—or just grab a piece of paper and be brutally honest. For Building Trust, where is your cabinet actually operating? • Level 1 : Inconsistent reliability, limited transparency, misaligned words and actions • Level 2 : Basic reliability but limited vulnerability • Level 3 : Consistent integrity, demonstrates vulnerability, advocates for team members • Level 4 : Creates psychological safety systems • Level 5 : Builds institutional trust cultures Don't rate where you want to be. Rate where the evidence says you are. Then—and this is the hard part—ask 2-3 trusted people on your team to rate you honestly. (If the gap between your self-assessment and their assessment is more than one level, that gap IS your leadership problem.) STEP 2: ASK THE THREE TRUST QUESTIONS (30 MINUTES TOTAL, 10 PER QUESTION) Schedule 30 minutes alone. Write down honest answers to: 1. "Who on my cabinet would I call at 11 PM if my world were falling apart?" (Names, not theory.) 2. "Who on my team knows the leader I'm becoming, not just the role I'm performing?" (If nobody comes to mind immediately, that's your answer.) 3. "Am I making decisions WITH my team, or announcing decisions TO them?" (Check your last three major decisions. How many were truly collaborative vs. performatively collaborative?) If you can't name at least 2-3 people for questions 1 and 2, you don't have a performance problem. You have a trust infrastructure problem. (Objection handling: "Joe, this feels soft. We need to focus on results." Fair pushback. But here's the data: Leaders in the top quartile for Building Trust competencies are significantly more likely to achieve institutional objectives. The teams that outperform yours? They already figured this out. You can dismiss it as soft, or you can build the foundation that makes results possible.) STEP 3: CREATE ONE "IDENTITY EVOLUTION" CONVERSATION THIS WEEK (45 MINUTES) Pick one cabinet member. Schedule 45 minutes. No agenda except this: "I want to understand who you're becoming as a leader, not just how you're performing in your role." Ask: • "What identity from your previous role are you still carrying that might not serve you here?" • "What new leadership identity are you nervous about stepping into?" • "How can this team hold space for who you're becoming?" Then—critically—share your own answers first. Model the vulnerability you're asking for. This isn't therapy. This is recognizing that leadership transitions require identity evolution, and teams that can't hold space for that will always underperform their talent level. (Pro tip: This conversation will feel awkward the first time. That awkwardness is diagnostic. If you can't have this conversation, you're operating at Level 1-2 trust. Which means you can't do Level 5 work. The math doesn't lie.) ⚡ THE MATURITY SHIFT: FROM COMPETENCE WITHOUT FOUNDATION TO TRUST-BASED TEAM INTELLIGENCE IMMATURE TEAM INTELLIGENCE: • Promotes leaders based on technical competence, ignores trust capacity • Attempts Level 5 work (change management, conflict transformation) with Level 1-2 trust • Believes competence creates collaboration • Confuses "getting along professionally" with psychological safety • Optimizes for efficient meetings over authentic relationships • Measures team health by completed initiatives, not trust infrastructure • Views vulnerability as weakness rather than foundation MATURE TEAM INTELLIGENCE: • Develops leaders sequentially through competency levels starting with trust • Recognizes you cannot skip developmental stages without creating fragility • Knows trust creates the conditions where competence becomes performance • Distinguishes "colleagues who collaborate" from "teams that trust each other through seasons" • Prioritizes identity evolution conversations over performance management • Measures team health by the "11 PM phone call test" and vulnerability indicators • Views Building Trust as the oxygen that makes all other competencies possible The shift isn't about being less professional. It's about being honest that principles without competencies are wishes—and competencies without sequential development are illusions. Your cabinet doesn't need another initiative. It needs the foundational competency that determines whether any initiative actually works: Building Trust at Level 3 or higher. Everything else is decoration on a house with no foundation. P.S. THE FOUNDATION UNDER THE FOUNDATION I was meeting with a superintendent recently who said something that's stuck with me: "Joe, I've read every leadership book. Attended every conference. My team is credentialed, experienced, and talented. But we're still not clicking. What am I missing?" I asked him one question: "On a scale of 1-5, where's your cabinet on Building Trust?" Long pause. Then: "Probably a 2. Maybe a 1.5 if I'm being honest." "And what level of work are you attempting?" Another pause. "Change management. Conflict resolution. Developing future leaders. So... Level 5?" There's your answer. You cannot skip developmental stages. Leadership competencies build sequentially—each creates the foundation for those that follow. Attempting Level 5 work with Level 1-2 trust isn't a strategy problem. It's a physics problem. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 "Principles without competencies are wishes—and competencies without sequential development are illusions." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ And here's what I've learned after 25 years of this work, grounded in principles that go way beyond organizational theory: The foundation under the foundation is actually faith. Not faith as religion forced on secular space. Faith as the recognition that we're building something bigger than our own ambition. That how we lead matters as much as what we achieve. That trust isn't a technique—it's the recognition that we're all navigating uncertainty together, guided by principles beyond self-interest. I know I'm among friends here who share those values. Who understand that excellent leadership flows from internal alignment with something transcendent. Who get that Building Trust isn't manipulation—it's stewarding relationships with the care they deserve. This fall, we ran Team Institute sessions with campus leadership teams focused specifically on this: Building Trust as the foundational competency that determines everything else. We used the Leader Competency Assessment to help teams see where they actually are (not where they think they are), then gave them sequential tools to develop from Level 1 to Level 4. The feedback? Teams are finally addressing the real problem instead of decorating around it. If your cabinet is talented but underperforming, you don't need another strategic planning session. You need to build the trust infrastructure that makes strategy actually work. New campus teams enroll in the Team Institute each month. We start with Building Trust. We develop sequentially through the seven competencies. We use the Team Intelligence framework to multiply individual development into collective performance. Want the full Leader Competency Assessment to run with your team? Message me directly or email info@higherperformancegroup.com and I'll send it to you. No cost, no strings—just a tool to help you see where you actually are versus where you're attempting to operate. If you're interested in what Team Institute might look like for your team, let's have a conversation about where your team is and where sequential development could take you. But even if you never reach out, do me one favor: Before your next cabinet meeting, honestly assess—Where are we on Building Trust? And what level of work are we attempting? If there's a gap of 2-3 levels, you just diagnosed your entire performance problem. The question is: Are you willing to go back to the foundation and build it right? ONE MORE THING... If this resonated, I need your help with three things: 1. Repost this with your honest answer: "Where is my team on Building Trust (Level 1-5)? And what level of work are we attempting?" Tag me so I can see your assessment. (The gap between those two numbers tells you everything.) 2. Tag someone on your leadership team who's committed to building from the foundation up—not just decorating around dysfunction. Tell them specifically why you're tagging them. 3. Comment below with this: What's one moment when you realized your team's performance problem was actually a trust problem? What did you do about it? (I read every single comment because your reality shapes what we build next.) Tag DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group in your repost or comment. And if you're serious about moving your team from Level 1-2 to Level 3-4 trust, message me about TEAM INSTITUTE enrollment. New cohorts launching monthly. Or email info@higherperformancegroup.com to get the full Leader Competency Assessment for your team. Most important question: Who on your cabinet would you call at 11 PM? If you can't immediately name 2-3 people, you just found your starting point. NEXT ISSUE PREVIEW "The $847,000 Meeting Tax: Why Your Cabinet Is Bleeding Budget in 90-Minute Increments" You know those weekly cabinet meetings where everyone reports out, but nothing actually gets decided? I ran the numbers. For a typical superintendent cabinet, those meetings cost $847,000 annually when you calculate salary, prep time, and opportunity cost. That's not a meeting problem. That's a TEAM INTELLIGENCE deficit costing you nearly a million dollars a year. (Spoiler: The highest-performing cabinets meet half as often and decide twice as fast. We'll break down exactly how they do it.) See you next week. Keep building from the foundation up. —Joe  P.S. - If this issue helped you see something differently, take 10 seconds to repost it with your biggest takeaway. Your network needs this too.

How (Well-Intended) Collaboration Becomes An Endless Rehearsal Your CFO just scheduled another "alignment call" before Tuesday's cabinet meeting. Your Chief Academic Officer wants to "preview concerns" over coffee. Your VP of Enrollment has "quick questions" that definitely aren't quick. This isn't collaboration. This is diplomatic relations between separate nations who happen to share a building. Here's what's killing American education—and it's not enrollment cliffs, funding cuts, or your board's 90-minute AI debate (it's both a threat AND opportunity, you're welcome, moving on). It's this: THE MEETING TAX CALCULATOR 4.7 hours per week in pre-meetings × 8 cabinet members × 42 working weeks × $140K average salary = $1,127,520 per year That's not a line item in your budget. That's a yacht. A medium-sized yacht you're sinking annually into talking ABOUT talking. And here's the devastating part: After all those meetings? You still don't have alignment. You have consensus cosplay. Everyone nodding while mentally drafting the email they'll send AFTER this meeting, explaining why this meeting's decisions won't work for their division/building/department/reality. Your turn: Calculate your Meeting Tax below. Weekly pre-meeting hours × team size × 42 weeks × average salary = ? Drop your number in the comments. Let's see who's got the most expensive collaboration theater. (Spoiler: 67% of educational leadership teams spend more time preparing FOR decisions than making them. That's not collaboration. That's endless preparation with no execution. And while you're stuck in meeting purgatory, enrollment is shifting, your board is asking questions you answered three meetings ago, and your teachers are wondering if leadership actually... leads.) THE DIAGNOSIS: Why Smart Teams Build Stupid Processes Let's talk about this like adults who've survived multiple strategic planning cycles, at least one superintendent/chancellor search that somehow took longer than an actual presidential election, and that January board meeting where someone definitely said something that made everyone else wonder if they'd accidentally joined a different organization. Here's what your last two weeks actually looked like: Monday, 6:30 AM: Cabinet member A messages you about "aligning before Tuesday's meeting." Translation: Lobbying for their position before anyone else can. You spend 45 minutes on a call that could have been handled in the actual meeting if your team trusted each other enough to think out loud together. If you're K-12, this happened before school started, which means you arrived at 6:30 AM for a 7 AM "quick chat" that made you late to bus duty. If you're higher ed, this happened over coffee that got cold while you listened to why the enrollment strategy conflicts with academic affairs priorities for the ninth time this semester. Tuesday Morning: Three separate people Slack you "quick questions" before the 10 AM cabinet meeting. None of these questions are quick. All of them are positioning. Your CFO wants to "preview budget concerns." Your chief academic officer wants to "discuss the implications." Your principal/dean wants to "clarify expectations." You're now late to your own meeting because you've essentially held three mini-meetings in your office doorway while your actual calendar said you had 30 minutes to prep. Tuesday 10 AM: The actual cabinet meeting. Where everyone performs the kabuki theater of collaborative decision-making while carefully avoiding any actual disagreement because—and here's the kicker—you haven't built the emotional infrastructure for productive conflict. So instead of 90 minutes of real thinking, you get 2.5 hours of strategic ambiguity that technically sounds like agreement but practically means nothing. Decisions get made with enough wiggle room that everyone can interpret them differently later. Tuesday Afternoon Through Thursday: The post-meeting meetings. Your CFO "wants to clarify something." Your Provost/Chief Academic Officer "has concerns they didn't want to raise in front of everyone." Your VP of Enrollment/Director of Student Services "interprets the decision differently" than your VP of Student Affairs/Principal. In K-12, you're now translating cabinet decisions to building leaders who weren't in the meeting but will definitely have opinions about implementation. In higher ed, you're explaining to deans why what seemed clear in cabinet somehow needs three follow-up conversations before it reaches department chairs. Friday: You're exhausted. They're exhausted. Nothing is actually decided. But everyone's calendar is full, so at least it LOOKS like leadership is happening. And somewhere, a teacher is wondering why the new initiative lacks clarity, a faculty member is asking when leadership will actually lead, and a parent/student is experiencing the downstream consequences of decisions that took four meetings to not-quite-make. I know the loneliness of being the only person who sees this pattern. Of feeling like you're herding cats, except the cats all have advanced degrees, strong opinions about governance structures, and believe their version of reality is the correct one (because in their building/division/department, it actually is). Of wondering if you're the problem because surely—SURELY—leadership teams at other districts/institutions don't operate like a group project where everyone's doing their part but nobody's read anyone else's sections. But everyone's calendar is full, so at least it LOOKS like leadership is happening. You're not crazy. Your team isn't incompetent. You've just been optimizing the wrong variable while the world outside your conference room keeps moving. Comment "FRIDAY" if this was literally your week. Here's What's Really Happening Your team has high individual intelligence but catastrophically low collective intelligence. They're brilliant people who've never learned to think together under pressure. So they compensate with preparation. Lots and lots of preparation. Pre-meetings to feel safe. Post-meetings to repair damage. Side conversations to build coalitions. It's not malicious. It's mathematical. IQ × EQ × PQ = TQ | TEAM INTELLIGENCE Your team has high IQ (obviously—you don't accidentally become a VP, Assistant Superintendent, Provost, or Principal). But your collective EQ is basically a group chat where everyone's typing and nobody's reading. And your PQ—the Perspective Intelligence (social awareness) about who should be thinking about what and how roles intersect—is a Venn diagram that's actually just eight separate circles pretending to overlap. High individual scores. Zero multiplication happening. You're adding when you should be multiplying. Math doesn't care about your org chart or your governance handbook. When any variable equals zero, the entire equation equals zero. That's not a metaphor. That's math. THE FRAMEWORK: The Three-Meeting Cascade Call this the Meeting Multiplication Dysfunction. Or don't. It'll still explain why your "agile leadership team" needs three attempts to make one decision while everyone else is asking why leadership can't just decide things. 1. THE PRE-MEETING MEETING: When Trust Goes to Die Monday, 6:30 AM. You're meeting your Assistant Superintendent for "quick alignment" before school starts. This happens in your car in the parking lot because your office isn't unlocked yet. You're late for bus duty. The "quick" chat takes 47 minutes. Tuesday, 8:15 AM. Your principal "just needs 5 minutes" before the 10 AM cabinet meeting. Those 5 minutes happen in your doorway while you're trying to review the agenda. It takes 23 minutes. You're now late to your own meeting. Tuesday, 9:45 AM. Three Slack messages. Two "quick questions." One "can we preview something real fast." This is the one that happens before the real meeting because someone "wants to get aligned first." Sounds reasonable. Feels professional. It's actually a symptom of terminal team dysfunction. Here's what pre-meetings actually signal: "I don't trust that my perspective will be heard/valued/understood in the group setting, so I need to lobby individually first." If this were a romantic relationship, we'd call it triangulation and recommend therapy. In leadership teams, we call it "stakeholder management" and put it on our calendars as if it were a virtue. THE PRE-MEETING TRANSLATION GUIDE: "Can we align before Tuesday?" = I'm lobbying before anyone else can. "Quick question before the meeting." = I'm positioning my stance early. "Want to preview this?" = I need your backing before the group. "Can we sync?" = I don't trust the team process (This is why your 10 AM cabinet meeting has six shadow meetings happening between 8-9:45 AM. Everyone's preparing for collaboration like it's game day, except nobody's having fun, and the actual game somehow still disappoints. In K-12, these happen before the buses even arrive. In higher ed, they occur over coffee in offices while students walk past, wondering what administrators actually do all day.) The pre-meeting exists because your team lacks shared language for productive disagreement. So instead of effectively disagreeing in the meeting, they pre-negotiate positions outside it. It's like UN diplomacy except you all work in the same building and could just... talk to each other. But you won't. Because someone might push back. In the actual meeting. Where productive conflict belongs. Comment "TRIANGULATION" if you've scheduled a pre-meeting this week. 2. THE ACTUAL MEETING: Performance Art Masquerading as Decision-Making Tuesday, 10:00 AM. The meeting itself becomes theater. Everyone's performing "collaborative leader" while mentally composing the follow-up email that will walk back whatever gets decided. You can spot this pattern when: Someone says, "I think we're all saying the same thing." Reality: You are clearly NOT all saying the same thing Someone volunteers to: "Take this offline." Translation: "I'll fix this later through a different process because this process is broken." The VP/Principal/Dean, who was VERY CLEAR in your pre-meeting, becomes suddenly philosophical and abstract in the group setting. Decisions get made but somehow lack the specificity needed for implementation, which is how you end up with "strategic priorities" that mean different things to different people and somehow create more work for teachers/faculty who definitely didn't ask for another initiative. In K-12: Building principals leave with three different interpretations of the same directive, and by the time it reaches teachers, it's basically telephone. In higher ed: Deans leave with enough ambiguity to interpret the decision in whatever way least disrupts their college, and by the time it reaches faculty, nobody's sure what was actually decided. This isn't collaboration. This is collaborative fan fiction. Everyone's writing their own ending and hoping it somehow aligns. Meanwhile, your board is asking why implementation is slow, your community is wondering why nothing changes, and your front-line educators are experiencing leadership as a series of contradictory messages that all claim to be "strategic." The actual meeting fails because you've optimized for harmony over clarity. Your team has high individual EQ but low collective EQ. They can each read a room. They've never learned to build a room together where truth-telling doesn't feel dangerous. Repost this if your last cabinet meeting made decisions that still need "clarification." 3. THE POST-MEETING MEETING: Where Decisions Go to Be Reinterpreted This is my personal favorite because it's so predictable you could set your calendar by it. Within 47 minutes of your cabinet meeting ending, someone will ping you to "clarify something." That something is never a clarification. It's a renegotiation. They're reopening what seemed closed because it was never actually closed—it was just ambiguous enough that everyone could leave the meeting believing their interpretation won. THE POST-MEETING PATTERN: Tuesday, 12:30 PM: CFO wants to "clarify budget implications." Tuesday, 2:15 PM: CAO has "concerns they didn't want to raise in front of everyone." Wednesday, 9:00 AM: VP "interprets the decision differently." Thursday, 3:30 PM: You're explaining to the next layer of leadership what was "decided." The post-meeting meeting exists because your team lacks Perspective Intelligence. Nobody's clear on who has decision rights about what. So everything feels like it needs consensus, which means nothing ever gets truly decided, which means the decision-making process becomes an infinite loop of meetings about meetings about meetings. If your PQ were functioning, people would know: "This is my decision domain. This is your decision domain. Here's where they intersect and how we coordinate." Instead, everyone's domain is "strategic leadership," which practically means everyone has opinions about everything and decision rights about nothing. In K-12, this creates a phenomenon in which superintendents make district-level decisions that principals then "adapt" for their buildings, resulting in teachers experiencing inconsistent leadership. In higher ed: This creates the phenomenon where presidents make institutional decisions that provosts then "contextualize" for academic affairs, which deans then "interpret" for their colleges, which department chairs then... you get the idea. By the time it reaches the classroom, nobody's sure what the original decision was. Tag your cabinet member who's best at "clarifying" decisions after meetings (do it cowardly—don't name what they're actually doing). THE CASE STUDY: Marcus and the 14-Hour Miracle Let me tell you about a leader I'll call Marcus (not his real name, but Marcus, your former CFO absolutely knows this story is about you two and is probably smirking right now). Marcus led a mid-sized institution—a regional public university that could just as easily have been a suburban school district of 8,000 students dealing with declining enrollment, rising costs, and a board asking increasingly uncomfortable questions about efficiency. His cabinet: 7 people with an average of 19 years in education. Combined credentials that could stock a small academic conference. Combined ability to make a decision without three meetings? Roughly equivalent to a committee asked to choose pizza toppings while honoring everyone's dietary restrictions and also addressing systemic inequity in pizza distribution. Before we worked together, Marcus's calendar was a crime scene. I'm talking 23 hours per week in cabinet-related meetings. Not including the "quick syncs" that somehow always took 40 minutes. Not including the "can we talk about Tuesday" messages that turned into strategy sessions in the parking lot. Not including the time spent translating cabinet decisions to the next layer of leadership who would then need their own meetings to process what leadership decided. His team wasn't lazy. They were meeting themselves to death. They'd have the Monday cabinet meeting. Then, on Tuesday morning, his CFO would "want to clarify the budget implications." Tuesday afternoon, his Chief Academic Officer would "need to discuss how this affects instructional priorities / academic programs." Wednesday, his VP of Advancement would "have concerns about community perception" (in K-12, substitute "Director of Communications" worried about parent reaction). By Thursday, Marcus was re-meeting about Monday's meeting while preparing for the following Monday's meeting. By Friday, he was exhausted and wondering why leadership felt more like crisis management than strategic direction. His team had an average TEAM INTELLIGENCE score of 4.2 out of 10. For context, that's the score where teams are technically functioning but primarily through heroic individual effort and way too many meetings. High IQ (9.1 average). Catastrophically low EQ (3.8 collective). And a PQ configuration that made about as much sense as their parking situation (which, coincidentally, also frustrated everyone daily). Then Marcus did something radical: He killed the pre-meetings. Not by policy. You can't policy your way out of a trust problem. He did it by creating conditions in which pre-meetings became unnecessary. His team took the TEAM INTELLIGENCE assessment (results were humbling—to quote his CFO: "Well, this explains why I schedule all those 'alignment conversations'"). His team wasn't lazy. They were meeting themselves to death. They built a shared language for disagreement (turns out you can just... disagree in meetings if you've practiced how to do it productively first). They clarified decision rights so people stopped feeling like everything needed consensus (spoiler: most things don't need consensus, they need a clear decision-maker and good communication after). Six months later: Same people. Same challenges. Same budget constraints and enrollment pressures. 61% fewer meetings. They still had cabinet meetings. But those meetings became actual decision-making sessions instead of performance art. They still had hard conversations. But those conversations happened IN the meeting, not in the shadow government of pre- and post-meetings surrounding it. Decisions got made with clarity. Implementation happened faster. Teachers/faculty experienced leadership as more coherent. The board stopped asking, "Why does everything take so long?" His calendar went from 23 hours of cabinet meetings per week to 9. That's 14 hours back per week. That's 588 hours per year. That's 3.5 months of 40-hour workweeks. Marcus got back by teaching his team to think together instead of preparing to perform. The difference? They stopped optimizing for comfort and started optimizing for clarity. Revolutionary? No. Obvious? Yes. Common? Based on the data from 987 leadership teams across K-12 and higher ed—absolutely not. Now, if you're thinking, "this makes perfect sense, but how do I actually facilitate this conversation with my team next Tuesday without it turning into another meeting about meetings?"—I get it. That's the gap between insight and implementation. This is what The GROUP is for. Each week, I turn the newsletter topic into a Leader CORE Lesson and Guide: facilitation notes, discussion prompts, the Meeting Audit tool, team exercises for building disagreement infrastructure, diagnostic questions—everything you need to lead your team through this content without spending Sunday night building materials from scratch. It's free (because I'm not going to charge you to solve a problem that's already costing you half a million dollars annually), built for busy leaders who need practical resources —not more theory —and designed for Monday morning meetings when you're already exhausted from last week's meeting cascade. Grab this week's guide: But if you join The GROUP or not, here's what you'll be able to implement immediately... THE APPLICATION: What To Do Monday Morning (Assuming you survived last week's meeting marathon and aren't currently hiding in your car eating lunch alone to avoid more "quick syncs") Step 1: The Meeting Audit (20 minutes) At your next cabinet meeting, put this on the agenda: "Before we dive into today's topics, let's do a 10-minute mapping exercise. Everyone, take out your calendar. Count the hours you spent last week in: pre-meetings for cabinet decisions, the actual cabinet meeting, and post-meetings clarifying cabinet decisions. Include the 'quick chats' and 'alignment conversations.' Be honest—nobody's grading this except your own calendar." Then go around the room. Say your numbers out loud. Add them up. If the total is under 30 hours for your whole team, you're doing better than 73% of leadership teams (congrats, you can skip the rest of this newsletter and go actually lead something). If it's 40-60 hours, you're average (which in this context means "acceptably dysfunctional"). If it's over 60 hours, you have a yacht-sized problem (see opening paragraph). Now multiply that weekly total by 42 working weeks. Then multiply by your team's average fully-loaded compensation rate (salary + benefits, divided by 2,080 working hours per year). That number you just calculated? That's not your collaboration investment. That's your collaboration tax. And unlike your actual taxes, this one is optional. (If someone says, "But we NEED all these meetings to stay aligned," you've just identified who benefits most from the current system. Usually, it's the person with the lowest collective EQ who's compensating with individual relationship management. We love them. They're exhausting. We'll address this in Step 3.) Step 2: The Trust Diagnostic (15 minutes, uncomfortable but worth it) Still in that same meeting, ask this question: "On a scale of 1-10, how comfortable are you disagreeing with someone in this room during our meetings—not in a pre-meeting, not in a post-meeting, but in the actual meeting when the whole team is present?" Write down your own answer first. Then go around the room. If everyone says 8+, somebody's lying (probably the person who scheduled three pre-meetings last week). If answers differ by more than 4 points, you don't share a common understanding of your team's emotional infrastructure. If anyone says below 5, you've just identified why the pre-meetings exist. If your K-12 principals or higher ed deans are giving answers different from those of your central office/administrative team, you've identified a systemic problem—trust doesn't cascade; it has to be built at every level. Here's the thing about trust in teams: It's not built through retreats or trust falls or that time you did an escape room and technically escaped, but Susan will NEVER forgive Brad for not listening to the red herrings. Trust is built through successfully navigating disagreement together. Your team doesn't trust each other because they've never practiced disagreeing productively. So they've created an elaborate system of side conversations to avoid disagreement entirely. You can't policy your way out of this. You have to practice your way through it. Step 3: The Decision Rights Map (30 minutes in next meeting) This is where you fix the PQ dysfunction that's causing half your post-meetings. Create a simple chart with three columns: MY DECISION (I decide, I inform you) OUR DECISION (We decide together, consensus required) YOUR DECISION (You decide, you inform me) Then list your top 10 most common decision types. In K-12: budget reallocation, curriculum adoption, staffing changes, facility use, discipline policies, community communication, and program modifications. In higher ed: budget reallocation, academic program changes, enrollment strategy shifts, policy updates, resource distribution, faculty matters, student services changes. Go through each one. Assign it to a column. Watch the discomfort happen when people realize they've been treating "Your Decision" items like "Our Decision" items, which is why everything takes three meetings and someone's always unhappy. If more than 40% of items land in "Our Decision," you have a consensus addiction problem. Leadership teams that require consensus for everything make zero decisions quickly. They make elaborate compromises slowly. There's a difference. And while you're compromising, your teachers are waiting for clarity, your faculty are wondering if anyone's actually in charge, and your students are experiencing the consequences of slow leadership. The goal: Clarity about who decides what. Not consensus about everything. Not dictatorships about anything. Clarity. So people stop reopening decisions that weren't theirs to make and stop avoiding decisions that are. OBJECTION HANDLING "But we don't have time for this meta-conversation about meetings." You just spent 47 hours last week in meetings ABOUT meetings. You don't have time NOT to have this conversation. Also, this isn't meta. This is the actual work. The strategic planning you keep meeting about? That's the distraction. The real work is building a team that can think together efficiently enough to actually execute the strategy you keep strategizing about. You're not too busy to fix this. You're too busy BECAUSE of this. And while you're busy meeting, enrollment decisions are being made by families who won't wait for your cabinet to align, competitive institutions are moving faster, and your best teachers/faculty are wondering if leadership will ever actually lead. "My team needs those pre-meetings to feel prepared." Your team needs those pre-meetings because they don't feel safe being unprepared in front of each other. That's not a preparation problem. That's a psychological safety problem disguised as professional courtesy. Teams with high collective EQ think out loud together. They bring half-formed ideas to meetings and refine them collectively. They disagree productively and leave aligned. Teams with low collective EQ think separately, prepare extensively, perform agreement publicly, then repair privately. Your team is currently doing the second thing. It's costing you 588 hours per year per leader. The bar for "better" is underground. And the opportunity cost? While you're meeting about meetings, other districts/institutions are outpacing you. Not because they're smarter. Because they're faster. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "We need more meetings to stay aligned." Mature leaders think: "We need better TEAM INTELLIGENCE, so we need fewer meetings." Immature leaders optimize calendar coverage—if it's not on the calendar, it's not important. Mature leaders optimize decision velocity—how fast can we move from question to clarity to action while everyone else is still scheduling pre-meetings? Immature leaders treat pre-meetings as strategic stakeholder management. Mature leaders treat pre-meetings as symptoms of broken team infrastructure that need diagnosis, not optimization. Immature leaders believe slow decision-making demonstrates thoughtfulness. Mature leaders know slow decision-making demonstrates dysfunction (and demonstrates it to everyone who's waiting for leadership to lead—teachers, faculty, students, families, boards, communities). The difference is the difference between managing around your team's limitations and eliminating those limitations. One makes you busy. One makes you effective. One gives you a calendar that looks impressive in screenshots. One gives you time, actually, to lead while the world keeps changing around you. The meeting about the meeting isn't a best practice. It's a red flag wrapped in Outlook invites. And unlike your actual challenges (enrollment shifts, budget pressures, political polarization making every decision feel like navigating landmines, AI disrupting everything, including how you're supposed to lead), this one is 100% fixable. Today. By you. With your team. Your Turn How many hours did YOU spend last week in pre-meetings, actual meetings, and post-meetings for cabinet decisions? Bonus points if you can calculate what that costs in actual dollars using your fully-loaded compensation rate. Double bonus points if you can calculate what that time could have been spent on instead—instructional leadership, strategic thinking, community building, literally anything that serves students instead of serving meeting culture. Drop a comment. Tag the cabinet member who schedules the most pre-meetings (do it cowardly—tag them without naming what they do). Or screenshot this and text it to your entire cabinet with the subject line "Wednesday's agenda just changed." Found value in this? Help other educational leaders discover it: → Repost this with your calculated meeting tax number → Tag a leader who lives in pre-meeting purgatory → Comment with your most absurd "quick sync" story—your story helps others feel less alone The more leaders shift from meeting about meetings to actually making decisions, the better our educational systems become. And given everything happening in education right now—political pressure, financial constraints, enrollment uncertainty, technology disruption—we need leaders who can actually lead, not leaders stuck in meeting purgatory while the world changes around them. Follow @Dr. Joe Hill and @Higher Performance Group for weekly # TEAM INTELLIGENCE insights. Next Issue: "Your Strategic Plan Has Group Project Energy (And Everyone's Doing Their Part Wrong)" We'll explore why your five-year vision feels like that college group project where everyone submitted their section without reading anyone else's, the bibliography has three different citation formats, and somehow you still got a B- because the professor gave up grading it halfway through. Spoiler: You're not having a strategic alignment problem. You're having a "nobody read the Google Doc instructions" problem, and someone keeps editing it without track changes while another person is still working in the old version they downloaded to their desktop three weeks ago. P.S. If you're thinking "I don't have time to turn this newsletter into a facilitation plan for Tuesday's cabinet meeting"—I already did it for you. The GROUP is a free community where every newsletter becomes a ready-to-deploy Leader CORE Lesson and Guide. This week's implementation guide includes: · The Meeting Audit tool · The Trust Diagnostic script · The Decision Rights Map template · Facilitation notes for navigating the discomfort · Discussion prompts for the inevitable "but we're different" objections · Plus adaptations for both K-12 and higher ed contexts Because a superintendent's cabinet operates differently from a university president's cabinet, and the guide honors both. Join The GROUP here - it's free! Think of it as the Costco version of team development. You buy in bulk (one membership, unlimited resources). You save money and time. And unlike Costco, you won't leave with a kayak you don't need and 47 pounds of muffins you'll never finish. Plus, you get access to hundreds of educational leaders across K-12 and higher ed who are also trying to escape meeting hell and understand why their calendar looks like a game of Tetris designed by someone who hates them.  The implementation guides save you hours. The peer conversations? Those might save your sanity and possibly your marriage (because you'll stop working until 9 PM to "catch up" from all the meetings).

When the words sound right, but something still feels off I watched Jimmy Kimmel's apology three times before I realized he never actually apologized. 73% of public apologies fail to restore trust—not because people are unforgiving, but because the apologies were never real. Here's how to spot the difference (and why it matters for every leader reading this). What separates real remorse from performative damage control? Here's my confession: When Jimmy Kimmel issued his apology following controversial comments about Charlie Kirk's assassination, I watched it the morning it dropped and thought, "Okay, this guy gets it." I'm a raging moderate with no dog in this fight—I think Kimmel's a talented comedian, late-night TV is harmless background noise, and political tribalism is exhausting everyone equally. So I gave him a mental fist bump and moved on. Then I watched it again. And again. And something started feeling off. By the third viewing, I realized I'd been played. Not by malice. By masterclass-level reputation management dressed up as genuine remorse. And that's when this turned from "good for him" into a case study every leader needs to understand. The uncomfortable truth: Most of us have done some version of this performative apology. I know I have. Because, whether you're apologizing to your team, your partner, or a national audience, the gap between "sorry" and actually sorry is where trust goes to die. Let's dissect what happened—not as political commentary, but as adults who've had to apologize without a communications team smoothing out the uncomfortable parts. THE DIAGNOSIS: WHY MOST APOLOGIES FAIL Let's talk about this like adults who've had to issue apologies that actually cost us something. You know the drill. You mess up. Badly. The kind of mess-up where you can feel the weight of it in your chest before you've even processed what happened. People are hurt. Rightfully angry. And now you have to face it. Here's where most of us split into two camps: Camp A: You grab your phone at 2 AM, draft seventeen versions of an apology that get progressively more defensive, delete them all, and eventually post something that leads with "I'm sorry you felt..." (Translation: Your feelings are inconvenient to me right now.) Camp B: You sit in the discomfort long enough to realize what you actually did wrong, own it completely, and accept that some people might not forgive you even after you apologize correctly. Most of us live in Camp A because it's cheaper. Emotionally, politically, professionally. But cheap apologies cost you everything that actually matters: trust, respect, and the ability to lead when it counts. We want the pain to stop. We want to be understood. We want people to know we're not bad people who did a bad thing—we're good people who made a mistake. But here's what nobody tells you: Real apologies require admitting you were wrong about something you thought you were right about. And that's psychologically expensive in a way that "I'm sorry you felt hurt" will never be. This is what happened with Kimmel's apology. It had all the aesthetic elements of accountability—emotion, acknowledgment, vulnerability. But when you strip away the performance, what remains is a textbook example of reputation management. And the worst part? It almost worked on me. I wanted to believe it. Because believing it would be easier than confronting the uncomfortable truth: We've all done some version of this. Quick question before we continue: What's your default apology phrase when you're not actually owning it? Mine was "I'm sorry you felt..." Drop it in the comments—I'm curious if we all have the same tells. THE FRAMEWORK: THE 4 ELEMENTS OF GENUINE APOLOGY Call this the Accountability Architecture. Or don't. It'll still explain why that apology you issued last month landed like a lead balloon, even though you "said all the right things." 1. Specific Ownership Without Caveats A genuine apology names the actual harm you caused. Not the harm you intended. Not the harm people perceived. The actual harm. What fraud sounds like: "I'm sorry if anyone was offended by my comments." What genuine sounds like: "I said [specific thing]. That was wrong because [specific harm it caused]." The test: Can you state what you did wrong without using "but," "however," or "though"? If not, you're still defending yourself rather than apologizing. The Kimmel example: In his original monologue, Kimmel said "we've hit new lows" and explicitly stated that "MAGA is desperately trying to paint the picture that this shooter was..." implying right-wing motivation. When facts revealed the shooter was motivated by left-wing, anti-American sentiment, Kimmel needed to own: "I blamed the wrong people on national television." What he said instead: "It was never my intention to blame any specific group." But... it was. Everyone who watched knew it was. That was literally the point of the monologue. This is where apologies die—in the gap between what you actually did and what you're willing to admit you did. 2. Impact Over Intent Your intent doesn't erase impact. This one's hard because we're all heroes in our own stories. If you step on someone's foot, whether you meant to or not, their foot still hurts. What fraud sounds like: "It was never my intention to cause pain." What genuine sounds like: "Regardless of my intent, my actions caused [specific harm]. That's on me." The Kimmel example: He opened with "it was never my intention to make light of the murder" and "nor was it my intention to blame any specific group." But leading with intent asks the hurt party to comfort you about your good intentions while they're still dealing with your bad impact. That's not accountability. That's emotional outsourcing. A genuine version would flip it: "My comments blamed an entire group of people for this assassination. That was wrong and harmful, regardless of what I intended." 3. No Blame Shifting or Gaslighting This is where Kimmel's apology completely fell apart for me on the third viewing. What fraud sounds like: "I'm sorry some people felt I was pointing fingers." What genuine sounds like: "I pointed fingers. I was wrong." The Kimmel example: "I understand that to some that felt either ill-timed or unclear, or maybe both, and for those who think I did point a finger, I get why you're upset." Wait. "For those who THINK I did"? No. He DID. On camera. To millions. "MAGA is desperately trying..." wasn't ambiguous. It wasn't a perception issue. This is textbook gaslighting—making people question what they clearly observed. And gaslighting in an apology causes more damage than the original offense because now you're saying: "The thing I did wasn't that bad AND you're crazy for thinking it was." 4. Name the Name (The Humanization Principle) Here's the subtle tell that convinced me this wasn't genuine: Kimmel never said "Charlie Kirk." He apologized for making light of "the murder of a young man." Not Charlie Kirk. Just... a young man. Why this matters: Saying someone's name is an act of recognition. It's the difference between abstract harm (easy to minimize) and human harm (forces you to confront actual cost). By refusing to say "Charlie Kirk," Kimmel avoided being associated with a positive statement toward someone whose politics he opposes. It was a calculated omission that prioritized brand positioning over genuine acknowledgment. This isn't about politics. This is about basic human dignity. When you refuse to say someone's name in an apology about harm done to them, you're telling everyone watching: "My brand matters more than their humanity." That calculation might protect your image. It destroys your credibility. Whether you agree with Charlie Kirk's politics or not is completely irrelevant. The man was murdered. He deserves to be named in an apology about comments made following his assassination. This applies to every apology: Use people's names. Make it personal. Because the harm was personal. WHY THIS MATTERS FOR LEADERS (AND THE TEAMS WHO DEPEND ON THEM) Here's what nobody tells you: The way you apologize doesn't just affect you—it cascades through your entire organization. When leaders issue performative apologies, they're not just protecting their reputation. They're teaching their teams that accountability is optional, that impact doesn't matter as much as intent, and that political calculation beats genuine ownership. Your team is watching. Your cabinet is taking notes. And whether you realize it or not, you're modeling what "accountability" means in your culture. Leaders who apologize genuinely—who own specific harm without caveats, who prioritize impact over intent, who refuse to gaslight what happened—build cultures where trust compounds. Where people can admit mistakes without career risk. Where "I was wrong" doesn't signal weakness, it signals strength. Leaders who apologize performatively build cultures where everyone optimizes for reputation management instead of relationship repair. Where politics matter more than truth. Where trust erodes one careful, calculated statement at a time. The question isn't just "did I apologize correctly?" The question is: "What did I just teach my team about accountability?" THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature apologizers think: "I need to explain my side so they understand I'm not a bad person." Mature apologizers think: "I need to own my impact so they understand I see the harm I caused." Immature apologizers spend energy protecting their self-image. Mature apologizers spend it repairing relationships. Immature apologizers hire communications specialists to craft statements that are "politically mostly right with the human touch of being mostly wrong." Mature apologizers sit in the discomfort until they know what they actually need to own. The difference is the difference between reputation management and genuine accountability. One is about you. One is about them. Here's what a genuine Kimmel apology would have sounded like: "In my monologue last week, I said MAGA was desperately trying to deflect blame for Charlie Kirk's assassination, and I implied the shooter was motivated by right-wing ideology. I was wrong. The shooter was motivated by left-wing, anti-American sentiment. I falsely accused millions of people and dishonored Charlie Kirk's memory by making his death about my political perspective. I'm sorry. I own what I said—not how it was received." Uncomfortable? Yes. Vulnerable? Absolutely. Genuine? That's the point. Your turn: Think about the last time you apologized. Honest assessment—were you apologizing to end your discomfort or to repair the harm? What's your caveat tell? The word or phrase you always use when you're apologizing but not really owning it? Drop a comment with your caveat tell. Or screenshot this and send it to someone who needs to see it—maybe because they owe you a real apology, or maybe because you owe them one. The 24-hour challenge: Think of one apology you need to give (or one you've accepted that wasn't real). Apply this framework. See what changes. Accountability is a practice, not a performance. This is where it starts. P.S. The hardest apologies are the ones where you have to admit you were completely wrong about something you were certain you were right about. Those are also the ones that matter most. That's where character gets built—in the gap between who you thought you were and who your impact revealed you to be. Found this helpful? Share it with someone who needs to understand the difference between "sorry" and actually sorry: → Repost with your biggest takeaway → Tag someone who needs this framework → Comment with your apology failure story (we all have one) Want to lead accountability conversations your team actually respects?  This framework isn't just for analyzing public apologies—it's for building cultures where genuine accountability becomes the norm, not the exception. higherperformancegroup.com

(They’re Just Waiting For Permission To Tell You The Truth) Here's a pattern nobody talks about: You implement weekly communication drills for your leadership team. They get better at board presentations. Faculty meetings improve. Parent nights run smoothly. Then something unexpected happens—feedback starts flowing everywhere. Not just in the drills. In hallway conversations. During budget reviews. In crisis moments, when you need honest input yesterday. You didn't plan for this. You were just trying to stop your VP of Academic Affairs from saying "um" seventeen times per sentence during accreditation visits. Turns out you'd accidentally built what researchers call a "keystone habit"—one small practice that triggers a chain reaction of positive changes across your entire organization. (Kind of like how buying running shoes somehow leads to meal prepping and going to bed before midnight. Except this one actually sticks.) 73% of educational leaders report their cabinet stays silent during critical decisions. That's not a personality problem. That's a systems problem. And the system you think you have? It's probably optimizing for politeness instead of performance. THE DIAGNOSIS Let's talk about this like adults who've survived at least three strategic planning retreats where someone suggested "blue sky thinking" with a straight face. Your last cabinet meeting looked like this: You asked for input on the enrollment decline strategy. Got three nods. Two "I think that could work" responses. One person checked their phone under the table (we saw you, CFO). Meeting adjourned. Everyone left. Then what actually happened? Your VP of Student Affairs texted your VP of Enrollment Management: "Did you understand what we're actually supposed to do?" Your Dean of Faculty sent a carefully worded email, "just checking on a few details," that was really code for "this plan makes no sense." Your Chief of Staff scheduled a one-on-one with you to "clarify next steps," which translated to "I have seventeen concerns, but didn't want to say them in front of everyone." You've got three concurrent conversations happening about the same topic. None of them are with each other. All of them are happening because your cabinet meeting optimized for agreement instead of alignment. Here's what nobody tells you in leadership development programs: Your principals, vice presidents, and department chairs might be brilliant at their individual roles and absolutely terrible at having difficult conversations with each other. Not because they're bad people. Because you've never created an environment where they can practice being bad at it first. Think about it. When was the last time your leadership team had a conversation that felt genuinely risky? Where someone said something that hadn't been pre-vetted in sidebar conversations? Where disagreement happened live instead of in post-meeting debriefs? That silence isn't a sign of respect for your leadership. Sometimes it's fear. Sometimes it's exhaustion from being a tool serving the strategic plan instead of a valued human solving real problems. Sometimes it's just learned behavior from every other organization they've worked in, where speaking up got them labeled "not a team player." Research on high-performing teams shows psychological safety—where people believe they can speak honestly without consequences—is the most critical factor in team effectiveness. More important than intelligence. More important than experience. More important than your strategic priorities or mission statement or the fifteen core values you spent two days workshopping. But here's the plot twist: Psychological safety doesn't manifest because you're nice or because you included "respect" in your values statement. It has to be practiced. Systematically. Repeatedly. Until it becomes more uncomfortable NOT to speak up. (This is actually why I created The GROUP —a free community where insights like this become Leader CORE Lessons you can facilitate with your team Monday morning, complete with discussion prompts and practice scenarios. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) The real problem? You're running a graduate-level organization with middle-school communication patterns. High IQ, catastrophically low Team Intelligence. Everyone's smart. Nobody's connecting. THE THREE CONVERSATIONS YOUR CABINET ISN'T HAVING Call this the Communication Layer Framework. Or don't. It'll still explain why your last "quick sync" turned into a 90-minute therapy session that resolved nothing. Communication research identifies three types of conversations happening simultaneously—often in the same meeting, frequently without anyone realizing they're in different conversations entirely: 1. Practical Conversations (The "What We're Supposed to Be Doing" Layer) This is where you live. Problem-solving. Action plans. Metrics. Timelines. "What are we going to do about the enrollment decline?" You think everyone's in this conversation with you. They're not. Half your cabinet is two layers away, and you're talking past each other like ships in the night. Very polite, very professional ships that will definitely send each other courtesy waves while completely missing the fact that one of you is about to hit an iceberg. 2. Emotional Conversations (The "How We're Actually Feeling" Layer) This is where your leadership team actually is when things get hard. Sharing feelings. Seeking empathy. Processing change. "I'm terrified we're going to have to lay people off, and I don't know how to lead through that." If you walk into a performance review in practical mode and your administrator walks in emotional mode, you're about to have two completely different conversations in the same room. You'll think you gave clear feedback. They'll think you don't understand their situation. Both of you will leave frustrated and confused about why the other person "isn't getting it." 3. Social Conversations (The "Who We Are to Each Other" Layer) This is about identity, relationships, and hierarchy. How we relate. Who has power. Whose voice matters. "Do I belong in this cabinet?" "Does the superintendent actually value what I bring?" "Am I about to get thrown under the bus for something that wasn't my fault?" When you're trying to discuss practical strategy and someone's operating in the social layer, they're not hearing your plan. They're scanning for threats to their position, value, or belonging. Every word you say gets filtered through "What does this mean for my standing here?" Here's what makes this devastating: Most leadership breakdowns happen because we don't match the conversation the other person needs to have. You walk into a meeting thinking, "I need to give practical feedback on instructional leadership." They walk in thinking, "I'm about to lose my job and nobody values what I've sacrificed for this school." Until you address the emotional and social layers first, your practical feedback lands like instructions shouted at someone who's drowning. The same dynamic plays out when your principals meet with teachers, when department chairs evaluate faculty, and when anyone on your team attempts a difficult conversation. THE CASE STUDY Let me tell you about a superintendent I'll call Marcus (not his real name, but Marcus, your cabinet definitely knows this is about them). Marcus had eight direct reports. Combined experience of 186 years. Multiple PhDs. National recognition. They could individually crush any challenge you put in front of them. As a team? They communicated like they were playing telephone through a series of closed doors during a fire drill. Cabinet meetings followed a predictable pattern: Marcus would present an issue. Ask for input. Get thoughtful-sounding responses that were really just people restating the problem using different words. Someone would volunteer to "take this back to their team." Meeting would end with a vague sense of progress. Then nothing would change. The real conversations happened after. In parking lots. In text threads. In carefully scheduled one-on-ones where people would share what they actually thought but "didn't want to say in front of everyone." Marcus kept trying to solve this with better agendas. Clearer objectives. More efficient meeting structures. (Classic practical-layer solution to an emotional and social-layer problem.) Then Marcus did something that felt almost uncomfortably simple: He started weekly communication practice sessions with his team. Not role-playing. Not trust falls. Actual practice giving and receiving feedback on low-stakes topics. Week one: Practice giving positive feedback about something specific. Week two: Practice receiving feedback without getting defensive. Week three: Practice disagreeing without it becoming personal. It felt forced at first. (One VP literally said, "This feels like kindergarten but for grown-ups.") But something shifted around week four: People started using the same language in actual cabinet meetings. "I'm in emotional mode right now—can we address that before jumping to solutions?" "I think we're having different conversations—let me check if I'm understanding correctly." Six months later, same people, different system. Cabinet meetings got shorter because people said what they meant the first time. Difficult conversations happened earlier instead of festering. Most importantly: The parking lot conversations moved into the conference room where they could actually be productive. Marcus told me: "We didn't become a better collection of individuals. We became an actual team. Turns out that matters more than I thought." The difference? They practiced being bad at communication in low-stakes environments so they could be good at it when it mattered. Now, if you're thinking "this makes sense, but how do I actually implement communication drills without my cabinet staging a revolt?"—I get it. That's the gap between insight and implementation. This is what The GROUP is for. Each week, I turn the newsletter topic into a Leader CORE Lesson and Guide: facilitation notes, discussion prompts, practice scenarios, diagnostic tools—everything you need to lead your team through this content without spending Sunday night googling "how to teach feedback to people who've been leaders longer than I've been alive." It's free, built for busy leaders, and designed for Monday morning meetings when you need something that actually works instead of theory that sounds impressive. Grab this week's communication practice guide: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group But whether you join The GROUP or not, here's what you can implement immediately... THE APPLICATION Here's what to do this week (assuming you're not currently managing a crisis, in which case bookmark this and revisit when things calm down to a dull roar): Step 1: Practice "Looping for Understanding" in Your Next One-on-One Ask a question. Repeat back what you heard them say. Ask if you got it right. That's it. Three steps. Takes 10-15 seconds. Proves you're listening. If they say "yes, exactly"—you understood correctly and can move forward. If they say "not quite, what I meant was..."—you just prevented a massive miscommunication that would have caused problems three weeks from now. If they look surprised that you actually listened—you have a bigger problem than this one conversation can solve, but you've just started solving it. This isn't just good practice for you. It's modeling the behavior you want them using with their teachers, staff, and faculty. Every time you loop in for understanding with your VP of Finance, you're teaching them to do the same with their department heads. Step 2: Start Developmental Conversations with Self-Assessment Before your next performance conversation, ask: "Tell me two things you think you do really well in your role and two things you think you could improve." Ninety percent of the time, what they identify as growth areas will match what you've observed. (Turns out people usually know their own weaknesses. They just don't know if it's safe to admit them.) Now they've given you permission to address those issues together. No defensiveness. No surprise. No "nobody ever told me this was a problem." Just collaborative problem-solving between two adults who both want the same outcome. Step 3: Ask Permission to Shift Conversation Types If a principal or dean comes to you in emotional mode about a difficult parent situation, and you need to move to practical problem-solving, try this: "I hear what you're saying. I've felt that way too. Can I share some approaches that helped me work through similar situations?" You're acknowledging their emotional reality before asking to move to practical solutions. You're not dismissing their feelings. You're not jumping immediately to fix-it mode. You're creating a bridge between the conversation they need to have and the conversation you need to have. If they say yes, you can move forward productively. If they say "I'm not ready for solutions yet"—they need more time in emotional mode, and pushing practical advice will backfire spectacularly. OBJECTION HANDLING "My team won't go for structured communication practice" Your team is currently having three different conversations about every issue, none of which are with each other, resulting in decisions that die in parking lots and initiatives that fragment the moment everyone leaves the room. They're already "going for" something—it's just catastrophically ineffective. The bar is on the floor. You're not asking them to do something dramatically harder. You're asking them to stop doing something that demonstrably doesn't work. "We don't have time for communication drills" You just spent 90 minutes in a cabinet meeting that could have been 30 minutes if people had said what they actually thought the first time instead of having seven follow-up conversations afterward. That's one meeting. Now multiply by four meetings per month. You're spending roughly 240 extra minutes per month—four hours—on communication inefficiency. That's 48 hours per year. You're hemorrhaging two full work weeks annually while claiming you don't have time to practice being clearer. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "My cabinet needs to communicate better." Mature leaders think: "We need to practice communicating better together." Immature leaders assume communication skills are innate—either you have them or you don't—and spend board retreats wondering why their brilliant team can't seem to align. Mature leaders build systems where communication skills are practiced regularly until they become second nature. Immature leaders address communication problems after they explode. Mature leaders practice communication before crisis hits. The difference is the difference between hoping your team can have difficult conversations and knowing they can because they've practiced. One makes impossible feel permanent. One makes impossible feel temporary. Cabinet silence isn't a personality problem. It's a practice problem. And unlike enrollment declines or budget cuts, this one is completely within your control. Your turn: Think about your last cabinet meeting. How many conversations do you think were happening simultaneously that weren't actually being spoken out loud? What would change if you named those conversations explicitly? Drop a comment. Tag a cabinet member who needs to see this. Or screenshot this and text it to your Chief of Staff with the message "Let's talk about our next meeting." P.S. If you're thinking "I don't have bandwidth to create communication practice resources for my team"—I already did it for you.  The GROUP is a free community where every newsletter becomes a ready-to-deploy Leader CORE Lesson and Guide. Practice scenarios. Discussion prompts. Diagnostic questions. Everything you need to lead your team through structured communication development without the Sunday night scramble.

Your Institution Has 18 Months, and Here's What 23 Leaders Did on October 1st to Model the Way Forward "We've got about 18 months to figure this thing out." That's the window educational leaders have to transform proactively—or be forced to transform reactively in survival mode. On October 1st, 2025, twenty-three district superintendents and college presidents stopped planning alone and started building together. Not the leaders waiting for perfect strategic plans. Not the ones defending comfortable systems. The BUILDERS—leaders whose institutions have grown enrollment 15-40% despite demographic headwinds, who've launched partnerships generating $50M+ in regional economic impact, who've redesigned curricula around employer needs that traditional institutions haven't touched. What emerged in those 60 minutes wasn't comfortable. It was clarifying. Here's what 1.7 million lost higher education students and 1.2 million departed K-12 students since 2019 actually tell us: Students didn't drop out. They opted out. Traditional education lost not because our teaching failed, but because our thinking stayed small while the world moved fast. The market already voted. And it didn't vote for more performance optics. The Four Types of Leaders DR. JOE HILL opened with a framework that landed hard:  Four types of leaders populate education today. Coasters worship stability and avoid controversy. Climbers optimize metrics but often overlook whether those metrics matter to students. Dreamers create gorgeous strategic plans that rarely launch. And Builders —rare, hungry, idealistic—who possess what Hill calls "moral ambition."

The New POWER Model To Break Through Your Institutional Stranglehold What if I told you that right now, as you read this, a 16-year-old with a $47 smartphone is getting a better physics education than students at $80,000-per-year private schools? And what if the real threat to education isn't the technology that makes this possible—but the army of insiders desperately protecting their preferences? Picture this scene, happening in your institution right now: While a teenager in rural Kenya outscores Ivy League applicants using AI that costs $47, your innovation committee is on month six of debating whether ChatGPT should be "allowed" in classrooms. Who's really in that room? The union rep protecting job security. The department chair defending territorial boundaries. The IT director gatekeeping technology budgets. The compliance officer citing policies written in 1987. The parent board members clutching their own college experiences like religious texts. Notice who's missing? Students. The ones we claim to serve. The uncomfortable truth: Every disrupted institution dies the same way—not from external threats, but from internal antibodies attacking their own cure. The Resistance Playbook -The Seven Horsemen of Educational Stagnation 1. The Union Wall: "This wasn't collectively bargained" 2. The Compliance Shield: "State standards don't allow it" 3. The Equity Trap: "Not every student has access" (while ignoring that current inequality) 4. The Safety Theater: "What about screen time/data privacy/cheating?" 5. The Budget Fortress: "We don't have funds" (for $60/year AI that replaces $50/hour tutoring) 6. The Committee Quicksand: "Let's form a task force to study this" 7. The Tradition Anchor: "We've always done it this way—and look at our alumni" Each of these sounds responsible. Each is actually sabotage. Your Counter-Intelligence Manual: The POWER Framework P - Preempt with Pilot Programs The Resistance: "We need district-wide consensus first" Your Move: Start with 5% of students as an "experimental pilot." Call it "action research." Make it opt-in. Document everything. Power Principle: Small wins bypass big resistance. By the time committees notice, you'll have data they can't ignore. Real Example: A principal in Texas started an AI tutoring "study" with 30 struggling math students. No announcements. No permissions beyond standard research protocols. Results after 60 days: 73% improvement in test scores. The school board that would have said "no" suddenly wanted it district-wide. O - Orchestrate Unlikely Alliances The Resistance: Traditional power brokers uniting against change Your Move: Build a coalition of the overlooked: · Parents of struggling students (they're desperate for anything that works) · Young teachers (they're already using AI secretly) · Local employers (they know graduates aren't prepared) · Students themselves (give them a voice before they vote with their feet) Power Principle: When students and employers align, bureaucrats lose their cover. Tactical Nugget: Create a "Future Ready Task Force" with 60% external stakeholders. Internal resisters can't dominate a room they don't control. W - Weaponize Their Own Data The Resistance: "Our current approach is working fine" Your Move: Deploy the Mirror Strategy: · Pull your institution's own strategic plan (look for "innovation" and "21st-century skills") · Document the gap between rhetoric and reality · Present AI as fulfilling THEIR stated goals Power Principle: People can't argue against their own published commitments. Script for Your Next Meeting: "I'm confused. Our strategic plan says we're committed to personalized learning. Here's a solution that delivers exactly that for $60 per student. Help me understand why we wouldn't want to achieve our own goals?" E - Establish Facts on the Ground The Resistance: "We need to wait for policy guidance" Your Move: While they're waiting for permission, you're creating reality: · Get teachers to "supplement" with AI tools (not "replace" anything) · Frame as "supporting" traditional teaching (not "transforming" it) · Use their language: "differentiated instruction," "scaffolding," "engagement" Power Principle: Policy follows practice, never the reverse. The Jujitsu Move: When resistance emerges, ask: "Are you suggesting we stop helping struggling students while we wait for bureaucratic approval?" R - Reframe the Risk Conversation The Resistance: "What if something goes wrong?" Your Move: Flip the risk narrative: · "What's the risk of NOT adapting while our students fall further behind?" · "Which lawsuit scares you more: Using AI, or failing students for an AI world?" · "Show me the damage from innovation. I'll show you the carnage from stagnation." Power Principle: Make inaction scarier than action. The Data Bomb: Share enrollment projections. Show competitor schools adopting AI. Calculate lost tuition/funding. Make status quo feel like standing on burning ground. Three Ways Leaders Are Breaking the Power Structure The Parallel Program Strategy One superintendent facing union resistance: Created an "optional enhanced learning program" running parallel to traditional classes. Parents could opt in. Teachers could volunteer for extra pay. Within one semester, 70% opted in. The union couldn't fight what members were choosing. The Budget Jujitsu Approach A principal denied AI funding: Calculated the cost of current failure—summer school, remedial classes, dropout recovery. Showed AI would save 3x its cost. Framed it as "fiscal responsibility." The same board that said "we can't afford it" suddenly couldn't afford NOT to do it. The Grassroots Inevitability Method A department chair at a major university: Knew faculty senate would block any top-down change. Instead, got three professors to run "independent experiments" with AI. Published results internally. Other professors demanded access. By the time administration noticed, faculty were driving the change themselves. The Nuclear Option: The Student Uprising Strategy When all else fails, remember: Students have ultimate power—they can leave. The Activation Sequence: 1. Survey students about their AI use (spoiler: it's already 90%+) 2. Share what competitor schools are offering 3. Ask: "Should we prepare you for the future or the past?" 4. Let them present to the board (boards fear students more than faculty) The Penn State Precedent: Students created their own AI learning collaborative when administration dragged feet. 300 members in week one. The university suddenly found urgency. Your 30-Day Power Shift Playbook Week 1: Map the Resistance · Identify your three biggest blockers · Document their stated concerns · Find contradictions in their positions Week 2: Build Your Shadow Cabinet · Recruit three innovative teachers · Connect with five frustrated parents · Engage ten ambitious students Week 3: Launch Your Trojan Horse · Start your "pilot program" · Frame it as "research" · Make participation voluntary Week 4: Create Irreversible Momentum · Share early wins broadly · Get testimonials from students/parents · Present to board as "update" not "request" The Conversation That Changes Everything Script for Your Next Leadership Meeting: "I need clarity on our priorities. Are we primarily serving: · Student success or adult comfort? · Future readiness or present convenience? · Learning outcomes or institutional traditions? Because AI is forcing us to choose. And our students are watching." The Answer to Our Opening Question Remember that 16-year-old in Kenya with her $47 education? She's not winning because she has better technology. She's winning because she has no bureaucracy to protect, no union contracts to honor, no traditions to defend, no committees to consult. She has only one concern: Learning. The power struggle in education isn't about AI. It's about who we really serve—the students demanding transformation or the system demanding preservation. The leaders who survive won't be the ones who managed the resistance. They'll be the ones who made resistance irrelevant by creating unstoppable momentum. Your Courage Checkpoint Three questions that determine your next decade: 1. When did you last make a decision that scared your biggest donors/board members but thrilled your students? 2. If your own child could choose between your institution and an AI-powered alternative, what would they choose? (Be honest.) 3. Are you willing to be the villain in the old story to be the hero in the new one? The Leadership Moment That Will Define You You have 18 months before the choice gets made for you. The committee won't save you. The board won't lead this. The union won't embrace it. The parents won't understand it at first. But the students? They're already there, waiting for you to catch up. Your move, boss. READY TO RECLAIM YOUR VOICE IN THIS REVOLUTION? Stop letting committee-approved messages dilute your vision for transformation. Start speaking human again—because that's what makes revolutionaries out of educators. Just as the Overton Window has shattered in education, the window of acceptable leadership communication has expanded. Yet, most educational leaders are still trapped in conference room-speak, while their institutions face an existential transformation. The first step is discovering how your authentic voice got lost. In just 5 minutes, you can uncover: · Where institutional polish killed your ability to inspire real change · Which of your natural communication styles your teachers and students actually crave · How to transform policy memos into messages that create movements  → Take the 5-Minute Authentic Leadership Communication Assessment

94% of enrollment decisions ignore your amenities. You just spent $50 million on a new student center—rock wall, meditation pods, juice bar—the whole package. Your board loves it. Tours showcase it. Marketing splashes it everywhere. You're certain this moves the needle. Here's the thing: Fresh amenities matter. But they're not why families choose you. The disconnect is devastating. While you're unveiling architectural renderings, students are having panic attacks about unemployability. While you're celebrating meditation pods, families are calculating whether bankruptcy hits before or after graduation. That beautiful climbing wall? It's proof you might not get it. The Amazon Lesson Every Leader Needs Jeff Bezos built the world's largest retailer with a philosophy your board would call insane: "We are not competitor focused. We are customer focused." Imagine announcing at your next cabinet meeting: "We're done tracking peer institutions." They'd check your temperature. Yet, institutions that spend 30% or more of their strategic planning analyzing competitors lose enrollment 23% faster than those focused on actual student needs. That climbing wall? You built it because State College has one. That honors program? Because Regional U launched theirs. You're playing defense in a game your students aren't even watching. The $20,000 Truck That Explains Everything A startup called SLATE just entered the most crowded market imaginable—electric vehicles. Tesla, Ford, and GM are all fighting for attention. Their launch video mentioned zero competitors. No range comparisons. No horsepower charts. Instead, one line: "Chris thinks new cars are too expensive and too complicated." That's it. One problem. One enemy. Done. Result? Millions of views. Servers crashing. Pre-orders flooding in. Now translate this to education: What K-12 Says: ❌ "Ranked top 10 in state test scores" ✅ "Your kid will actually want to come Monday morning" What Higher Ed Says: ❌ "We're climbing in rankings" ✅ "You'll graduate employed, not just educated" One makes you forgettable. The other makes you matter. 🚀 The Three Bowling Ball Principle Every message you send families is like handing them a bowling ball. Cognitive science suggests that humans can juggle up to three complex ideas at a time. Count what you're throwing at them: K-12's Bowling Ball Avalanche: IB authorized ✓ STEM certified ✓ 1:1 devices ✓ SEL curriculum ✓ Project-based ✓ Restorative justice ✓ Mindfulness ✓ Maker spaces ✓ Enrichment programs ✓ Test prep ✓ Higher Ed's Bowling Ball Tsunami: 200+ majors ✓ Study abroad ✓ Research opportunities ✓ Career center ✓ Division I athletics ✓ Honors program ✓ Living-learning communities ✓ Climbing wall ✓ Largest dining hall in region ✓ You just dropped everything. 🎳 What if you only threw three? K-12's Three: Known personally (not processed efficiently) Love learning (not survive testing) Ready for life (not just next grade) Higher Ed's Three: Graduate employed (not just graduated) Afford life after (not debt forever) Belong here (not compete constantly) The President Who Understood the Assignment Small liberal arts college. Declining enrollment. The president inherits the crisis. Every peer institution fought over rankings—moving from #47 to #45 was the battle cry. 🏆 She asked different questions: "What do students actually fear?" Answer: "Graduating unemployed with six-figure debt." New promise: "Job by graduation or we pay your loans for a year." Applications up 30%. Zero climbing walls mentioned. 💡 The Superintendent Who Stopped Playing Michigan superintendent. Neighboring districts bragging about test scores. She asked parents: "What keeps you up at night?" Answer: "My kid crying Sunday about Monday." Her response: "If your child dreads school, we've failed—regardless of test scores." State officials questioned her priorities Neighboring districts called her "soft" Enrollment up 18% in declining demographics Parents moving specifically for her schools She never mentioned competitors. Not once. The "What They Actually Want" Revolution Stop asking "What makes us different?" Start asking "What do they actually need?" What K-12 Students Want: Teachers who see them (not test scores) Friends without competition toxicity Decent sleep To personally matter Hope for their future What College Students Want: Professors who know their name Skills employers actually value To change majors without adding years Mental health support today (not 6 weeks) Friends, not networking competitions Proud parents without going broke What Nobody Wants: Your climbing wall Your ranking changes Your strategic plan Your competitive analysis They want transformation, not amenities. 🎯 The Framework That Actually Works Forget SWOT analyses. Use CARE: C - Core Problem: What actually keeps them awake? A - Against Declaration: What will you publicly fight? R - Real Evidence: What changes in week one? E - Emotional Truth: What feeling do you deliver? Your Million-Dollar Blind Spot "But State University just built a new rec center, so we need..." Stop. 🛑 Stanford studied 10,000 enrollment decisions: 8% mentioned other schools 94% mentioned actual problems 0% mentioned climbing walls You're solving for the wrong variable. 📈 The College That Gets It While universities build amenities, one college president asked students directly: "Why do people drop out?" Answer: "Credits don't transfer, and we waste time and money." Solution: "100% transfer guarantee or 100% refund." No facilities upgraded. No amenities added. Highest enrollment growth in the state. 🚀 The Transformation Question Stop asking: "What facilities do our competitors have?" Stop asking: "How do we move up in rankings?" Stop asking: "What's our differentiator?" Start asking: "What do families actually need that everyone else ignores?" When you answer that, you don't compete—you matter. Once you stop building climbing walls, you start building futures. Once you stop tracking competitors, you start seeing humans. You stop competing. You start transforming lives. The climbing wall is obviously a metaphor - a monument to looking sideways when you should be looking forward. Your families don't care about your amenities. They care about their tomorrow. Build that instead. THE MILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION: 👉🏼 What's your metaphorical climbing wall? What courage would it take to course correct? READY TO STOP COMPETING AND START MATTERING?  Executive Leader Roundtables translate theory into humanity: ✓ The REAL Method for viral culture language ✓ Monthly peer learning (virtual available) ✓ Scripts that spread without enforcement ✓ Leaders who've moved from complexity to connection