Your Campus Remote Work Policy Might Be Right But Not Good

May 24, 2022

We’ve had every wrench known to Home Depot thrown into the mix as campus leaders are working to telegraph the COVID-19 variant punches over the last few years.


What was expected to be a mass migration back to the happy office spaces last fall was halted as leaders protracted their work-from-home policies indefinitely into another miserable pandemic winter.


As spring winds down, you are once again preparing for what your new office environment will look like to start up the 2022-2023 academic year while praying not to lose any of your best talent, right?



What hangs in the balance is a ton of tension to manage. Many leaders I serve are scrambling to solve this conflict via fixed policies and practices designed to be RIGHT (efficient) but not always GOOD (effective).

What hangs in the balance is a ton of tension to manage. Many leaders I serve are scrambling to solve this conflict via fixed policies and practices designed to be RIGHT (efficient) but not always GOOD (effective).


I hear ideas from leaders across the country which are widely divided and (in my opinion) narrowly grounded in personal bias and views rooted in a pre-pandemic framework for how the work should be done.


Grounded Perspective

Gallup has been a trusted base for making sense of the mucky middle of these types of tensions for years. I have appreciated their most current study conducted to give voice to the needs and plans of more than 140,000 U.S. employees surveyed since the pandemic. These insights paint a vivid picture of how campus leaders might not want to FIX the problem but FLEX it to keep their best talent and attract more of the same in the year ahead.


Spoiler alert: Employees with the ability to work remotely universally desire a hybrid office environment, which allows them to spend part of their week working remotely and part in the office.


Hybrid work in the educational space is increasingly complex but can’t be set apart as a non-starter. Some campuses are mustering up the courage to take on a learning posture in this new reality. The following lessons will define our work lives for years to come. Ultimately, how a hybrid campus unfolds will depend on the capacity of work teams to be uber-clear about the work priorities and how leaders adapt to the changing needs of the learner experience.


Let me make a bold statement that will make half of you want to stop reading. I believe it is becoming shallow and a bit selfish to say that the work of education must be 100% on-site. Equally, I don’t think it is best practice to allow everyone to work and learn 100% remotely. It’s the middle ground where we will find leaders in the winner’s circle.


Based on Gallup’s insights, approximately half of the U.S. full-time workforce (representing about 60 million workers) report that their current job can be done remotely by working from home, at least part of the time. The new term for these workers is "remote-capable employees."


Before the pandemic, very few remote-capable employees worked exclusively from home (8%), while one-third had a hybrid work arrangement.


Then the pandemic hit, and most remote-capable employees were forced to work from home in some capacity.

Fast forward to the current day, most campuses are wondering what to do with this new group that CAN work from home. Those who are seeking to even the playing field are calling them back to campus.


When asked how these remote-capable employees desired to work into the near future, about 53% preferred a hybrid arrangement, and 24% would choose to work exclusively remote.


Nine in 10 remote-capable employees currently prefer some degree of remote-work flexibility in the future, and six in 10 specifically prefer hybrid work. Most employees have developed an affinity for remote-work flexibility that has matured into an expectation for those now coming into the workforce.


While permanent plans for remote flexibility are lagging in the educational space, more and more demand is trending in this direction.


What does this mean in the battle for talent? I suspect that many of your best talent on campus will not receive the flexibility they desire, and many (more) will leave.


Fact: Remote work isn’t a fad. It is here to stay, and hybrid work is the future for most remote-capable employees.


Working for a campus that doesn't consider the unique needs of remote-capable employees might create more inertia than engagement. When employees are required to work entirely on-site but would prefer to work hybrid or fully remote, employees experience:


  • significantly lower engagement
  • significantly lower wellbeing
  • significantly higher intent to leave
  • significantly higher levels of burnout


Counter Fact: To be fair, the long-term effects of mass-scale remote work in education are yet to be seen.


Nonetheless, attracting and retaining top talent amid today's "Great Reshuffling" of the workforce will require all campus leaders to address the remote-work question in a fluid, vs a fixed manner.


Failing to offer flexible work arrangements is a significant risk to campus hiring, employee engagement, performance, wellbeing, and retention strategies.


Why Hybrid?

Gallup asked remote-capable employees who prefer hybrid work why they desired this arrangement.

The most common responses won’t surprise you.


The top reason employees prefer hybrid work is to avoid commute time.


We all can agree that a large slice of the life pie is taken away from us in the time it takes to get ready for work, travel to the office, and return home every day.


The other key reason employees prefer hybrid work represents a strong desire for more personal freedom to work when, where, and how it best suits them. Their demands for better well-being, work-life balance, and flexibility represent a new "will of the workplace” that won't consent to the traditional office attitudes in the future.


For balance, the study also pointed out that remote-capable employees are increasingly isolated by the digital world and need to feel connected to their coworkers and their organization. There is a common agreement that connecting with the team and feeling a part of the campus culture is easier to experience in person.


Although remote employees enjoy their flexibility, four in 10 would give up some time at home to have in-person office experiences.


Overall, the top reason people want a hybrid work arrangement is to have the flexibility to manage their week while still feeling connected to their organization.


These sentiments align with adjacent Gallup research showing that achieving work-life balance and improved personal wellbeing are top reasons people would change jobs.


Hybrid work helps employees get the most out of their day while ensuring they feel connected to coworkers and the organization.


So, What’s the RIGHT and GOOD Response? 

For starters, campus leaders should delineate between the work.


What’s your team’s interdependent work?


What’s your team’s independent work?


Highly interdependent teams must stay tightly connected and rely on one another to work in a real-time/high-definition world. The more interdependent your teams are, the more explicit leaders must be about when work must be done collectively and on-site.


These teams require a certain amount of air traffic control and more face-to-face time to keep everything moving cohesively.

Conversely, when teams work independently (doing tasks that require less real-time collaboration and more asynchronistic focus), they can be given more autonomy and flexibility over work schedules.


In a hybrid environment, highly independent teams must double down on quality communication, ownership of performance outcomes, and team connection. Their most significant risk is working in isolation for too long or at the wrong moments. Highly independent teams also risk culture erosion and the neglect of remote-working coworkers.


While hybrid work schedules should look different by campus and team, it is universally important to keep assessing, adjusting, and reassessing how the current arrangement is working.


In the end, campus leaders who retain their best talent and attract more of the same will have apparent answers to WHY people should come into the office and HOW they should spend that time together.


Campus leaders are working to create firm ground for this new normal in the face of increasing volatility. It can be easy for leaders to get bogged down in policies and rules concerning hybrid work. Based on the needed efficiencies (right) and desirable effectiveness (good), the modern hybrid workplace needs to provide three things:


  • Productivity: Workplaces that execute upon 90-day priorities for all teams.
  • Flexibility: Workplaces that allow personalized work schedules that honor the remote-capable voice to thrive in life and work.
  • Connectivity: Workplaces that encourage the spirit of partnership, teamwork, and organizational culture


Here are a few recommendations to help campus leaders stay focused on what's essential while managing the tension of work triage.


Boost Productivity

Shape work strategies around objective productivity, not just policy compliance.

Now is the time to redefine what Higher Performance looks like for your team and how to best work together to achieve that vision. Ensure collective focus on the immediate performance outcomes and have the right tools for tracking your progress. Assess which team activities are best on-site and which can be done remotely.


 Consider the interdependency of the work. 

As previously discussed, when teammates are more interdependent, they need more coordination of schedules and time on campus. Team members are responsible for a mix of interdependent and independent work. These individuals should consider where they can best focus on their assignments and when they should be in the office to boost collaboration and team culture.


Boost Flexibility

Allow for flexibility within a framework. 

There is likely no single campus work policy that will be ideal for all teams. Allowing leaders some authority to individualize policies is necessary, given your campus' different kinds of work and life circumstances. It is also essential to set boundaries for when employees are expected to be in person and allowed to work remotely.


 Warning: Flexibility and autonomy can create ambiguity and coordination issues.


Experience (and the research) find that leaders communicate less frequently and effectively in the remote modality. However, hybrid team engagement can actually surpass on-site engagement when managers proactively check in with their teams multiple times per week. As flexibility increases, leaders need to increase communication about work priorities, progress, and handoffs between team members.


Boost Connectivity

Think virtual first. 

When team members in the office behave as if everyone is working remotely, remote workers are more likely to feel part of the team. For example, having laptops at team meetings, so everyone has an on-screen presence can create a more inclusive experience. Also, taking time to learn together is a great way to grow into a hybrid team.


Consider a few of our Higher Performance Team Workshops to sharpen your advantage and raise your team engagement. 


Give people a compelling reason to come to the office.


“I come to the office with a smile because of a policy,” said not one of your high-capacity team members. A policy is not an answer to why people should be working on campus. Leaders need to develop a compelling workplace value proposition representing the culture, benefits, and interactions your people will experience on-site.


Say Hello to the Modern Workplace


Saying your campus is a modern workplace is much easier than creating an effective one. Undoubtedly, hybrid work will be more challenging for leaders than their old ways of working. Flexibility for workers makes coordination difficult. Remote workers can feel neglected, technology requirements must change, and hybrid work will raise additional complex issues of trust, equity, and accountability.


Because of this, you might want to armor up and shut your eyes tight. However, "hybrid" isn’t just a work schedule or employee perk -- it's an entirely new way of working together.


Crafting an exceptional hybrid work experience (culture, not policy) will be worth it -- if you put in the hard work to make it worth it.


I have already seen the benefits for those who did it before the pandemic and are living it today with lines of people who are ready to fill open positions.


These exceptionally led hybrid teams tend to have more engaged employees, more intentional and meaningful interactions, and, ultimately, better flexibility to integrate work and home life.


All signs indicate that hybrid is fast becoming a new expectation of your high-capacity employees and teams.


I am fired up to experience the next chapter of this tremendous global work experiment and its impact over the next few years.


One Question

What valuable lessons did you and your team receive by working differently over these past two years?


One Challenge

I am encouraging (and challenging) every campus executive team to block off time this summer to critically think about your work triage assessed against your 90-day priorities. What work can be done independently? What work must be done interdependently? How can you boost productivity, flexibility, and connectivity?


The Research

Check out the Gallup article on hybrid workplace.


P.S. Here are the two best ways I can help you right now:


1) Get your FREE guide:  
5 Evidence-Based Practices to Reclaim More Team Engagement with Less Effort. Download this free guide now. 


2) Schedule a Call:  
Let’s talk about the obstacles (and opportunities) that you & your team are currently facing. Schedule a call with Joe.

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Higher Performance Insights | YOU'VE BEEN WINNING THE WRONG GAME

By HPG Info • March 10, 2026
Why Your Cabinet Is Exhausted and Your Results Are Flat LEADER INSIGHTS: Weekly Team Intelligence for Educational Leaders | Dr. Joe Hill | Higher Performance Group A superintendent I know — twenty-one years in education, relentlessly strategic, the kind of leader other leaders call when they're stuck — sat down at a regional convening last fall and said something I haven't stopped thinking about. "I feel like we're sprinting. Everybody's exhausted. Nobody can point to what changed." He wasn't describing failure. His district is moving. His board is happy. His cabinet shows up. He was describing something harder to name: the specific exhaustion of motion without transformation. 73% of educational leaders in our 987-team study report feeling perpetually behind — behind on initiatives, behind on trends, behind on where they think they should be by now. You're not behind. You've been playing the wrong game entirely. The institutions actually winning? They stopped playing catch-up years ago. They're running a fundamentally different game — with fundamentally different rules. And here's the plot twist: the game they're playing is actually simpler than the one you're exhausting yourself with right now. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. When your team's collective attention is fragmented across twenty-three initiatives, the PQ dimension — positional intelligence, the clarity about who does what and why — collapses toward zero. Anything multiplied by zero produces exactly the strategic outcomes you've been getting. The Diagnosis: Three Games, One Winner Let's talk about this like adults who've survived multiple strategic planning retreats and at least one initiative that died quietly in a Google Drive folder nobody checks anymore. There's a psychological phenomenon researchers call "temporal comparison bias" that explains why brilliant educational leaders — people who've built entire programs, navigated accreditation, turned around failing departments — feel perpetually three steps behind. Here's how it plays out in real time: Monday, 6:45 AM. You're scrolling LinkedIn before your first meeting. A superintendent three states over just announced a groundbreaking AI initiative. Your immediate thought: We should be doing that. Why aren't we doing that? Tuesday, 2:30 PM. Conference call with peer institutions. Someone mentions their new enrollment strategy showing "promising results." You add "explore enrollment strategy overhaul" to the list of seventeen other things you're currently "exploring." Wednesday, 10:00 AM. Cabinet meeting. Your VP of Academic Affairs wants to discuss three new program launches. Your CFO has concerns about falling behind on facilities. Your Provost is worried about losing ground in faculty development. By Friday, your strategic priorities list has grown from eight items to fourteen. None have moved forward. All are justified by fear of falling further behind. The institutions you think are "ahead" aren't managing more initiatives better. They're managing fewer with singular focus. That superintendent with the AI initiative? She killed four other initiatives to create space for it. You're not behind them. You're just carrying different weight. They're running a 5K. You're running a marathon with a 50-pound backpack and wondering why you can't keep pace. The real problem? You've been optimizing for coverage when you should be optimizing for impact. Coverage thinking: We need to be doing something in every area — enrollment, retention, innovation, facilities, faculty development, student experience, community engagement, technology, equity. Impact thinking: What's the one thing that, if we did it exceptionally well, would make everything else easier or unnecessary? Coverage creates the illusion of progress. Impact creates actual transformation. (This is exactly why The Team Institute exists — not to add more to your plate, but to help your entire leadership cabinet build the collective capacity to decide what belongs on the plate in the first place.) The Framework: The Three Games Call this the Strategic Games Framework. Or don't. It'll still explain why your last strategic plan produced a beautiful document that nobody references six months later. Every educational institution is playing one of three games. Most don't realize they have a choice. The ones winning? They chose deliberately. Game 1: The Comparison Game (Where 70% of leaders live) Success means keeping pace with everyone else. Winning looks like never falling too far behind the pack. Losing looks exactly the same as winning — just with more anxiety. Average strategic priorities per institution playing this game: 12 to 18. Average implementation completion rate: 34%. Leadership energy spent managing initiatives vs. actually transforming: 85% management, 15% transformation. This game is unwinnable. The moment you catch up, the benchmark moves. It's an infinite treadmill where "ahead" doesn't exist — only "less behind." The insidious part? It feels productive. Lots of meetings. Lots of planning. Lots of slide decks. Zero transformation. Game 2: The Innovation Game (Where 20% of disruptors live) Success means being first. Winning looks like conference keynotes and site visits from peer institutions. Losing looks like spectacular failures that become cautionary tales. The Innovation Game is seductive because it feels like leadership — you're not following, you're pioneering. But here's the trap: innovation without implementation infrastructure creates what I call pilot program purgatory — brilliant ideas that launch with fanfare, then quietly fade when the hard work of institutionalization begins. 8 to 12 new initiatives launched per year. 2 to 3 that survive past Year 2. 60% of cabinet capacity consumed managing "innovation." You're pioneering new approaches faster than your institution can absorb change. It's like trying to teach someone to swim by throwing them in the ocean during a storm. Technically teaching swimming. Practically creating trauma. Game 3: The Multiplication Game (Where the 10% who actually win live) Success means multiplying what already works. Winning produces consistent, compound growth that looks boring from the outside but transforms everything from the inside. Your strategy: Subtraction before addition. Multiplication before innovation. Depth before breadth. The institutions winning this game look unimpressive in conference presentations. No flashy AI initiatives (yet). No radical restructuring (yet). Instead: they took the three things they were already decent at and became exceptional at them. Then they built the capacity to add a fourth. That sequencing is everything. It's the TQ formula applied to institutional strategy — not scattered individual initiatives, but collective focus that compounds. IQ × EQ × PQ, multiplied at the team level, aimed at three things instead of twenty-three. The Case Study: Michael's $0 Transformation Let me tell you about a president I'll call Michael. (Not his real name — but Michael, your former Provost absolutely knows this story is about your first two years together, and she's probably nodding vigorously right now.) Michael led a regional public university: 11,000 students, seven colleges, a cabinet of 10 VPs averaging 21 years of experience each. Combined credentials that could staff a small think tank. Combined ability to finish what they started? Roughly equivalent to a book club that's been "reading" the same book for three years. What Michael inherited: 6 major strategic priorities. 23 sub-initiatives. 14 presidential task forces. 8 pilot programs in "evaluation." 147 action items. Zero clear accountability for whether any of it was working. His first six months were consumed by progress reports: "We had three focus groups." "We're gathering stakeholder input." "We're exploring best practices." Activity everywhere. Impact nowhere. Then Michael did something radical. He stopped playing the Comparison Game. He asked his cabinet one question: If we could only do three things exceptionally well over the next two years — three things that would demonstrably transform student outcomes — what would they be? The room went silent. His VP of Student Affairs said what everyone was thinking: "Are you saying we stop doing everything else?" "I'm saying we stop pretending we're doing everything else. Right now, we're doing 23 things at 40% quality. I'm proposing we do 3 things at 95% quality." Months 1–3: Eliminated 20 of 23 initiatives. Dissolved 11 of 14 task forces. Concentrated resources on three priorities: first-year experience transformation, career-connected learning, and faculty excellence in teaching. Months 4–12: Meetings dropped from 3.5 hours to 90 minutes. Decision velocity increased 4x. Implementation completion rate went from 34% to 89%. Year 2 results: First-year retention: +8.7% — largest single-year increase in school history Career placement within 6 months of graduation: +12.3% Faculty teaching excellence scores: +15% across all colleges Cabinet meeting time: cut in half Leadership team: "Finally feels like we're making progress instead of managing chaos" Same people. Same budget. Same external constraints. Same competitive environment. Different game. If you recognize the gap between your cabinet's talent and what you're actually producing together — and you suspect another individual development program won't close it — this is exactly what The TEAM INSTITUTE was built for. Not a workshop. Not a retreat. An 8-month sequential operating system your entire cabinet builds together, from trust to focused execution, applied to your actual strategic challenges. We don't fix people. We multiply systems. More on that below. The Application: Switching Games Here's what to do this week — assuming your calendar isn't already booked with meetings about meetings, in which case, that's actually your first problem: Step 1: The Brutal Subtraction Audit (90 minutes, next cabinet meeting) Put every current "strategic priority" on the board. Not just the official ones — the real ones. Every initiative people are actually working on. Every pilot being "evaluated." Every task force meeting monthly. Ask three questions about each: Does this produce measurable transformation in student outcomes — not stakeholder engagement, not data gathered, actual outcomes? Are we providing 70% or more of what this initiative actually needs to succeed, or are we setting people up to fail while calling it strategic? And does this build future capacity, or will it always require its own dedicated resources? Then force rank everything. Not 'these are all important.' Actual forced ranking. Stop at three. Everything below three? Stop doing it. Not 'deprioritize.' Not 'put on hold.' Stop. (Someone will invoke sunk cost: 'But we've already invested so much in X!' The investment is already gone. The question is whether you keep throwing resources at it. That's not strategy. That's loyalty to a decision that isn't working.) Step 2: The Capacity Calculation (30 minutes, solo) For each of your top three priorities, calculate the actual hours per week required — from the leadership team and from implementation teams — multiplied by 42 working weeks. Add all three together. Do you actually have that capacity, or are you assuming people will "make it work" by eliminating evenings and weekends? If the honest answer is no, you're still in the Addition Game. Reduce scope, eliminate something else, or accept that you're asking people to work unsustainably. Pick one. Step 3: The Multiplication Protocol (Ongoing) For the next 90 days, before adding any new initiative, task force, pilot, or "exploration," your cabinet must answer one question: What are we stopping to create space for this? Not "we'll find time." An actual answer. If you can't name what you're stopping, you can't start the new thing. Track two numbers: addition-to-subtraction ratio (1:1 or better means you're in the Multiplication Game) and implementation completion rate (below 50% means scattered attention producing scattered results; 80%+ means you've actually switched games). On the Objections: "But our board expects us to address all of these areas." Your board expects outcomes, not activity reports. What would happen if you walked in with this: "We focused all our capacity on three priorities. First-year retention is up 8.7%. Career placement is up 12.3%. Faculty excellence scores are up 15%." Boards don't micromanage success. They micromanage stagnation. Produce compound results and they stop asking why you're not doing more. The Maturity Shift On priorities: "We need to be doing more to stay competitive." → "We need to be doing less, exceptionally well, to actually transform." On activity: Confuses meetings completed with momentum. → Measures transformation produced, not initiatives launched. On the competition: Watches what peers are doing and adds to the list. → Watches what's working internally and multiplies it. On capacity: Assumes "we'll find time." Burns people out. Repeats. → Calculates actual capacity. Subtracts before adding. Compounds. You're not behind. You've been playing the wrong game. The Multiplication Game is harder to start — subtracting things you've invested in, having honest conversations about actual capacity, saying no to things that matter — but it's infinitely more sustainable. And the institutions winning it? They look boring from the outside and transformational from the inside. Your Turn: Which game is your cabinet actually playing? Drop one word in the comments: COMPARISON, INNOVATION, or MULTIPLICATION. Then tag a cabinet member who you think would answer differently than you would. That gap in perception? That's the data. Or screenshot the three game descriptions and text them to your leadership team with one question: "Which game are we actually playing right now?" Ready to Stop Playing Catch-Up? Here's what I know after studying 987 leadership teams across 43 states: the cabinet that can't agree on three priorities isn't struggling with strategy. It's struggling with trust. Without trust, subtraction conversations become political. Capacity calculations become weaponized. Forced ranking becomes a turf war. That's why the Multiplication Game isn't something you implement from a newsletter. You need your entire cabinet in the room, building the same foundation, in sequence — not a two-day retreat you'll never quite finish, but a sustained developmental arc that actually rewires how your team thinks together. That's what The TEAM INSTITUTE was built to do. The TEAM INSTITUTE is an 8-month journey that takes your cabinet from individually brilliant to collectively unstoppable — sequentially, through trust, empowerment, collaboration, and focused execution, each month building on the last. You can't skip trust and go straight to strategy. That's not leadership development. That's wishful thinking with a facilitator. The results from teams that complete the full sequence: 3x performance improvement. 29% higher engagement. 27% better organizational outcomes. Zero burnout increase. Not because we fixed anyone — because we changed the system they were operating in. The requirement is simple and non-negotiable: full cabinet participation. Partial engagement produces partial results. You cannot build team-level multiplication with individual-level development. That's the model that got you here. If you're a leader who sees the gap between your cabinet's talent and your collective results — and you're ready to stop treating that gap as a motivation problem — let's talk. Schedule a 30-minute consultation to explore whether The Team Institute is the right fit for your leadership context. This isn't a sales pitch. It's a conversation between people who refuse to accept that "busy" and "effective" mean the same thing. [LEARN MORE] higherperformancegroup.com [SCHEDULE CONSULTATION] Found value in this? Help other educational leaders find it: → Repost with your honest answer — which game is your cabinet actually playing? → Tag a leader who's exhausted from the Addition Game and ready to switch → Comment with the one initiative you know you should stop but haven't — naming it is the first step The more leaders who shift from addition to multiplication, the better our educational systems become. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights. Next issue: "Your Cabinet Mistakes Consensus for Alignment (And It's Killing Every Decision)" We'll explore why your leadership team spends three meetings nodding in agreement, then fragments in seventeen different directions the moment they leave the room. Spoiler: You don't have an alignment problem. You have a 'we've never actually defined what alignment means' problem. And the text messages your VPs send each other after cabinet meetings? Those are where your real strategic plan lives. Dr. Joe Hill | Higher Performance Group | The Team Institute higherperformancegroup.com

Higher Performance Insights | WHAT YOU WERE MADE FOR HAS NOT LEFT YOU

By HPG Info • March 3, 2026
A note before we begin — because this is the first one. Every Saturday, Leader Insights goes out. Sharp. Data-driven. Built to move you toward better team performance, clearer decision-making, and collective capacity that actually multiplies. Saturday speaks to your mind and your will. This is something different. For a long time, I've wanted to write something Saturday doesn't have room for. Something that goes underneath the frameworks and the research and the Monday morning protocols — to the person carrying all of it. The leader who gets the strategy right and still drives home empty. The one who's too professional to say out loud what they're actually feeling at 10 PM on a Sunday. So I built The Source. Same topic as Saturday. Same truth. Carried somewhere Saturday cannot go. Sunday speaks to your soul and your identity. It's not a framework delivery system. It's not a productivity tool. It's a few minutes of restoration before the week begins again — written for the leader who needs to be reminded, regularly and plainly, that they are more loved than their performance suggests and more made for this than their calendar currently reflects. This is the first edition. I'd genuinely love to know if it lands for you. Does this resonate? Drop a comment and tell me — honestly. This is new territory and your feedback shapes where it goes. Before the week finds you again — Before you become the person everyone needs you to be — Can I ask you something? When was the last time you walked out of a building — not to your car, not to your next meeting — but just to feel what was alive in it? Sit with that for a moment. Not as a productivity question. As an invitation. Because somewhere in the answer — if you're willing to follow it — there's something about you that is more true than your title, more permanent than your tenure, and more loved than you've probably allowed yourself to believe on a Tuesday afternoon. Here's what I keep coming back to. The superintendent I mentioned this week — twenty-three years in education, genuinely brilliant — described his work as "managing the temperature in rooms." Temperature management. That's what it had become. Not because he stopped caring. Because somewhere along the way, the system stopped making room for him to do anything else. What if that's not a failure of vision? What if it's something more specific than that? What if the temperature-managing leader isn't someone who stopped caring — but someone who is so deeply wired for creation that being kept from it doesn't just frustrate them? It slowly empties them? What if the feeling he couldn't name on that drive home — the one that arrived even when everything went right — is the sound of a maker being kept from making? That ache has a source. And it is not your job description. Think about the moment you first knew this work was yours. Not the day you got the job. Before that. The moment you looked at something broken — a kid, a school, a system, a community that had stopped believing anyone with your title was worth trusting — and felt something rise in you. Something that said: this doesn't have to stay this way. Where did that come from? You didn't manufacture it. You didn't learn it in a doctoral program or develop it in a leadership workshop. It was there before the credentials and the career. It was there in you the way a river is there in a landscape — not because you built it, but because something larger carved the channel and set the water moving toward everything that needed it most. That impulse is not accidental. It is not psychological. It is not even professional. It is the image of the maker, alive in you, doing exactly what it was placed there to do. And the God who placed it there has not revised the plan. He has not forgotten why. He is, right now, this morning, holding the full vision of what you were made for — and looking at you with the kind of patience that only infinite love and infinite time can sustain — and saying the same thing He has always been saying: I know. I see it. Keep going. I'm not finished with you yet. I want to say something that has nothing to do with your cabinet, your enrollment numbers, or your Maker-Keeper ratio. You are loved. Not when you figure it out. Not when the team finally multiplies. Not when the board stops calling on Friday afternoons. Not when the Neither column gets smaller, or the EQ dimension stops dragging, or the strategic plan finally survives first contact with reality. Right now. Today. In the middle of the incomplete and the imperfect and the still-being-worked-out. You are known completely — every exhausted drive home, every moment you wondered if the machinery was producing anything real, every quiet prayer before a board meeting nobody knew you were scared of — and you are loved anyway. Without revision. Without condition. Without waiting for you to perform your way to worthiness. There is a plan for your life that is older than your leadership challenges and larger than your current capacity to see it. And the one who holds that plan has not once looked at you and thought, "Wrong person." Not once. So go into this week as the person you were made to be. Not the person the role requires — the person the role exists to express. You are not the calendar. You are the calling that existed before the calendar was full. You are not the organizational distance between you and the work. You are the one who was made — specifically, irreplaceably, unrepeatably you — to close it. You are not the temperature manager. You are the maker. And what was placed in you to make has not left you. It is waiting. With extraordinary patience. For you to stop managing long enough to remember. The temperature in the room was never your assignment. The transformation was. And that assignment has not been reassigned. The plan for your life is not in trouble. It is in progress. And you are exactly where you need to be to take the next step. If this landed somewhere strategy doesn't reach — you're not alone. There's a community of leaders doing this work together, not just professionally but personally. Come as you are. higherperformancegroup.com You are more loved than you know. You were made for more than you're currently living. And this week is not in your way — it's in your hands. — DR. JOE HILL & Higher Performance Group | The TEAM INSTITUTE
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