13 Tell-Tale Signs Your Campus Brand Is Going to Diminish

13 Tell-Tale Signs Your Campus Brand Is Going to Diminish (Or Die)

June 6, 2023

Brand: A public image, reputation, or identity conceived of as something to be marketed or promoted

How do you know if your campus brand has one foot in the grave?

It’s a question that all leaders should ask – even leaders of growing campus communities.

As with almost everything in life, there are subtle signs that your peak may be near or cresting past it.

Other times, the signs of a dying campus brand are evident to everyone but the leader.

If you recognize that your campus is in trouble early enough, you can reverse the trend, regain energy and momentum, and run fervently into a new season.

Let the signs go unattended long enough, and things could be very different.

So, how do you know your campus brand is in trouble?

Here are 13 tell-tale signs that your campus brand is diminishing in value to your community.

1. Your Leaders are Losing their Hunger

A Higher Performance Team comprises Smart, Humble, and HUNGRY leaders.

Hunger is a rare and beautiful thing.

It’s often easy to come by in your first years of leadership but hard to sustain for a lifetime.

Yet passion is vital to leadership because the hunger of a campus to thrive and develop will rarely exceed the hunger of its leaders.

How hot is your hunger? Here are 5 Signs Your Edge May Be Dulling As A Leader.

2. Your Campus is Afraid of Innovation

In the startup days, most campuses could pivot overnight.

You had to.

But as your impact grows, it’s easy to let innovation wane, especially when your campus has a rich history of success.

How are you ensuring that your future is brighter than your past?

Teams who celebrate what they have been with more bluster than what they intend to BECOME will continue to watch their high-capacity leaders skip town and throw their energy behind another innovative campus culture willing to modernize the student experience.

Down the road, that will leave you in a place where – even when you want to innovate – you can’t because all your smartest people have abandoned ship.

When was the last time you did something genuinely aggressive and cutting-edge? If you can’t answer that question, beware.

You may become a history lesson.

Most people want to be a part of a winning team, and winning teams are reinventing how the game must be played.

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3. Campus Management is Replacing Campus Leadership

As your campus grows from a start-up pirate ship to a well-established Navy ship, you must manage what you’ve built.

Without great systems, executive clarity, and organization, you’ll never be able to sustain something that size, let alone steward it well.

The trap is that once you start managing, you may stop building anything of value. Instead, you manage what you’ve already built.

If all you do is manage what you’ve already built, your campus will likely die, and you won’t have much left to manage.

The key is to manage well but to keep leading – keep innovating, keep changing, keep experimenting, and keep figuring out new ways to accomplish your mission.

4. Maintenance is Overtaking Your Campus Mission

When I meet leaders of dying campus brands, they’re almost always in what I call ‘maintenance mode’ – maintaining the organization they’ve built has become more important than the mission that got them started.

In fact, when you drill down, very few can articulate or agree on what their mission truly is besides what they are managing each day. They just agree they need to maintain what they’ve got.

You'll have a bright future as long as the mission is central.

The end is near when maintenance begins to trump the mission and practices take over principles.

5. Your Campus Leadership is Fixated on Being Popular Rather than on Purpose

Leaders with a soft heart (empathy) and a firm backbone (authority) are easy to spot. They are also scarce.

How you treat your people AND your purpose is vital to the success of your system.

Weak leaders are supportive of the needs of people yet unwilling to challenge them when those needs run against the core of their mission’s purpose.

We’ve all seen leaders who “give the farm away” by becoming more interested in KEEPING their job than DOING it.

If you are the leader and your campus brand is falling out of demand with your community, AND you are collecting loads of underperforming talent, put your finger on your nose, boss. Tag. You are it.

If you are honest, your people are not your most important investment. Some of them are a SPEND to your institution.

Your people wearing the team jersey of PURPOSE are your most important investment.

6. You Criticize Younger, Upstart Leaders

Every leader is a young emerging leader at some point.

Young leaders bring innovation, ideas, and strategies to the table. In fact, they likely got your campus to where it is today, which is amazing.

But no one stays young forever.

After a decade in leadership, you’ll find yourself surrounded by younger leaders with different ideas.

Rather than deciding to learn from them, leaders of dying campus brands resist them, dismiss them, and sometimes ridicule them.

That’s a critical mistake if you want to stay relevant.

When you find yourself sitting around a table criticizing the ideas of young leaders, get nervous.

Back in the day, someone may have dismissed you, and look at what happened to them.

7. Your Personal Relationship with Your Values is on the Backburner

Every leader has ups and downs in their relationship with their campus values.

Over a prolonged period, you cannot let your personal relationship with your beliefs go flat. Yet it does for so many leaders.

When your relationship with your core values goes flat, sound the alarm:

Stop
Reflect
Reset
Reclaim
Re-Boot
Reconnect

Behind every vibrant campus, you find leaders with a deep belief system.

When recruiting new leaders to your team, find leaders whose passion for your values burns white hot.

If values-centric people surround you, you’ll almost automatically become more on fire.

If your values have grown stale or are not as potent as your community deserves, we can help you RE-IGNITE here.

8. Your Best Talent is Burning Out Faster than you Can Replace Them

A clear sign that your campus brand is dying is that your RIGHT people are leaving, and your WRONG people are staying.

Like the proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” regular departures of your best and brightest talent indicate that your campus work culture is approaching toxic levels. It’s also a sign of bad leadership. Too many leadership vacancies could suggest that departing leaders warn other potential leaders to stay away.

Campus sites should be the healthiest places on the planet to work, but, as many of you know, that’s not often the case. And campuses with a high turnover rate or a reputation for having a toxic work environment, can’t carry out their mission with integrity or effectiveness.

Luckily, plenty of resources are available to help you and your team overcome this barrier.

In the Lead Team Institute, I’ll show you how to foster a healthy workplace environment and build a culture of Higher Performance.
In the Leading from Peace Keynote and Workshop, I’ll teach you and your team my burnout-avoidance strategy to help you align your time, energy, and priorities and work in your favor.

9. Everyone on your Team Looks and Thinks Just Like YOU

The next time you’re facilitating your next all-campus team meeting, really look at the people staring back at you.

Do they truly represent a cross-section of your community? Or do they all fit neatly within the same racial, economic, age, orientation, cultural, and political boxes?

Campuses that lack diversity often need help to connect with their communities and reach new people.

Your campus diversity might indeed be limited by its location, but there’s more to diversity than race and politics. Another form of diversity has to do with what happens between someone’s ears.

A lack of conflict is often seen as a positive to team culture. After all, it means everyone on your team is aligned, right?

Wrong.

If everyone on your campus lead team looks, thinks, and acts the same, one of two things is probably happening:

Your team members are self-censoring their personal beliefs and concerns out of fear of ridicule or ostracization.
Those same people feel unwelcome and silently exiting your “back door.”

Make no mistake, a campus should draw a line in the sand on specific value-based issues (like student success), but there are plenty of other areas where some diversity of thought should be tolerated and encouraged.

Remember, campus unity is not the same as conformity. An unintended consequence of conformity is that engagement tends to stall out – small group conversations become stale, people get comfortable within their bubble, and “outsiders” feel increasingly unwelcome.

Suppose your team members are uncomfortable expressing doubts, asking questions, voicing concerns, or engaging in respectful dialogue on sensitive issues and topics. In that case, your campus is probably attractive to one type of person: People just like you.

And that’s a well that’ll quickly run dry.

10. Your Campus Finances are Always in the Red

I get it.

No one likes it when “education” and “money” are tightly woven into a sentence. But campuses require money to function – and that’s not a secret.

Poor fiscal management can hurt campuses as much as an individual’s livelihood and well-being. If your campus constantly runs over budget, you must initiate serious conversations with your people.

The fiscal cliff of 2024-2025 is real and should not be scary for those preparing appropriately for this season.

You may have inherited a bad financial situation from your predecessor, but a campus with out-of-whack finances will join the long list of those shutting their doors.

Like personal credit card debt, this situation can sneak up on you and get worse the longer you ignore it – so you need to make a game plan and stick to it.

11. Your Campus Has Little Presence in the Community

Let me ask you a question: Would anyone in your community who’s not a student even notice if your campus closed its doors tomorrow- like permanently closed?

Ouch.

Your campus exists for the sake of your community. This means a campus should be actively engaged in the greater community. Whether hosting food drives, community nights out, or disaster relief responses, campus involvement in the local community should be unmissable and tangible.

Even if it means partnering with other schools, agencies, and nonprofits in your area, a campus should strive to be a blessing to the community it serves.

But if all of your campus's energy and ideas are expended internally, it could be a sign that you are becoming irrelevant to your community and on the cusp of a death spiral.

12. You’re Focused More on Keeping the Peace than Reaching New Students

A subtle sign of a dying campus brand is that it has completely given up on reinvention and is directing all of its resources to keep its current program and load.

This is a sad reality, but it happens more often than you think. In these situations, the goal is to make the faculty and staff as happy and comfortable as possible to prevent any conflict or potential of a “Vote of No Go.”

The problem with this approach (of which there are many) is that instead of being a pro of the future, you’re letting the con dictate how you lead and vision forward. In other words, the “tail wags the dog.”

In the short run of your tenure, this strategy makes sense. Your vision for success can’t be reached if you get thrown out. But the long-term consequences – like not investing in the innovative programs your community desires – will inevitably signal a death blow down the road. There comes a time when each leader must step into the arena, right?

13. You View Every Change in Culture as a “Threat” to Your Campus

Railing and ranting against regressive culture or the latest outrageous headline are easy ways to gain an audience (and maybe even earn a few hearty “Amens” from your people on the inside) in today’s polarized environment.

But this approach to “relevance” will eventually backfire. As I said in Point 12 above, short-term gains aren’t the best indicator of long-term health. And campuses that stoke political and cultural resentment are slowly dying from the inside out.

The biggest problem with campus teams that focus on “culture war” grievances is that they foster an antagonistic and defensive campus culture. So, instead of focusing on reaching the culture, the emphasis is on judging the culture.

Think of it this way: The world is a big place. Would you enroll in an institution that did nothing but ridicule and judge how you and people like you live? Of course not. And if you wouldn’t, why would anyone else?

Every community has enough cynicism and resentment. Your campus should be a neutral and safe place to the ways of the nutty world – not a contributor. A dying campus brand focuses on judging the world. A thriving campus community focuses on building a refreshing alternative for the world.

Transform Your Future | Lead With Clarity | Grow Your Performance

You aren't alone if you've struggled to find clarity in leading your team forward.

Teams function at less than 60% of their performance potential and community trust is at an all-time low.

Simply put, leading people and systems has never been more complex.

The Lead Team Institute {LTI} will equip you to break through your growth barriers.

Whether it's leading results-based teams, communicating with success, improving your engagement, increasing influence, refreshing your vision, building trusting communities, or many other challenges we face as campus leaders, you'll know exactly what steps to take to generate momentum for your community.

If you want to build an irresistible campus brand, you will want to join the waiting list to enroll in the next Lead Team Institute {LTI} Campus Cohort.

Accelerate Your Team’s:

Communication
Connection
Alignment
Capacity
Execution
Culture

Reserve Your Spot for Fall 2023. Join the Lead Team Institute Waitlist Today!

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Higher Performance Insights | YOU ARE RIDICULOUSLY IN CHARGE (YOU JUST FORGOT)

By HPG Info • February 24, 2026

Two lists exist in every cabinet meeting. What you don't control: State funding. Board dynamics. Demographic shifts. Competitor success. Generational attitudes. What you do control: How much time you spend on the first list. Do this math: 4.7 hours of uncontrollable discussion × 8 cabinet members × 42 working weeks × $140/hour = $221,060 per year. That's not strategic planning. That's expensive therapy without the breakthrough. The leaders who thrived post-pandemic weren't dealing with easier circumstances. Same enrollment pressures. Same board dynamics. Same funding constraints. The difference? They stopped cataloging what they couldn't change and started obsessing over what they could. You are ridiculously in charge of your institution's future. You've just forgotten which levers you actually pull. THE DIAGNOSIS: HOW BRILLIANT LEADERS LEARN TO FEEL HELPLESS Let's talk about this like adults who've survived at least one budget cycle that made you briefly reconsider your career choices. There's a neuroscience phenomenon called learned helplessness — and it doesn't happen to struggling leaders. It happens to brilliant ones. Here's how it works. Scientists put dogs on a mat with a small fence. Mild shock, but the dog could hit a lever to stop it. The dog learned: I have control over my circumstances. Then they disconnected the lever. The dog tries, still gets shocked. Tries again. Eventually stops. The brain literally changes — goes inactive. Depression sets in. Here's the devastating part: they removed the fence. The dog could simply hop off the mat. But it didn't. Because the brain had learned that action is useless. Monday, 7:30 AM. Your CFO wants to "preview concerns" before the 9 AM cabinet meeting. You're discussing the demographic cliff, declining birth rates, economic pressures facing your student population. None of which you control. Tuesday, 2:15 PM. Your Provost wants to "debrief" yesterday's board meeting. You're discussing board member personalities, their unrealistic expectations, their fundamental misunderstanding of higher ed economics. None of which you control. Wednesday, 10:00 AM. Cabinet meeting. Agenda item: "Enrollment Strategy." What actually happens: 90 minutes lamenting Gen Z work ethic, competitor pricing models, and the state funding formula. None of which you control. By Friday, your brain has learned: The lever doesn't work. Action is useless. Nothing I do matters. Psychologists call this the Three P's Personalization ("I'm not good enough") Pervasiveness ("the entire system is broken") Permanence ("this is the new normal") Once these three patterns solidify, you don't need actual constraints to feel powerless. Your brain manufactures helplessness even when the fence is gone. Here's what nobody says out loud: the most expensive line item in your budget isn't salaries. It's the cognitive and emotional energy your leadership team spends every week on variables they cannot influence — while the controllable levers that would actually move your institution sit untouched in the corner like the gym equipment you bought with great intentions and excellent guilt. Comment "FRIDAY" if this was literally your last week. THE FRAMEWORK: THE CONTEXT EXCUSE TEST Call this the Context Excuse Test . Or don't. It'll still explain why your strategic plan died somewhere between "approved by the board" and "implemented by the deans." Last semester, I worked with educational leaders in two different cities. Los Angeles area: "Enrollment growth would be easier if we were in a stable Midwest market — where people have roots and extended family networks." Chicago area, two days later: "Enrollment growth would be easier if we were in a market like LA — where there's constant population influx and people are actively seeking new opportunities." Different contexts. Identical excuses. Same helplessness pattern. Here's the reality check: if your context theory were true — that your specific circumstances make success impossible — then Apple wouldn't sell iPhones in your market. Netflix wouldn't have subscribers. Starbucks wouldn't have locations. But they do. Because while tactics must adapt to context, universal human needs remain constant. Your students need education. Your faculty need purpose. Your community needs the outcomes your institution provides. The question isn't whether your context is hard. The question is: are you adapting your tactics while everyone else is cataloging their constraints? And here's the deeper truth the Context Excuse Test reveals: when you keep asking "why is that?" about any organizational problem, you eventually land at the one person who can actually do something about it. That person is usually you. A global CEO once explained to his executive coach why his company missed quarterly targets. "We brought in this executive from a competitor, and he infected the culture..." Coach: "Why is that?" CEO: "Because he came from a different organizational culture..." Coach: "Why is that?" CEO: "Because I didn't properly vet cultural fit during hiring..." Coach: "Why is that?" CEO: "Because... I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I?" Coach: Not always. Legitimate external constraints exist. But far more rarely than we pretend. THE CASE STUDY: THE QUARTER MILLION DOLLAR CONVERSATION Let me tell you about a superintendent I'll call Mark (not his real name, but Mark, your former CFO definitely knows this story is about your first six months together, and he's smirking right now). Mark led a mid-sized district — 8,000 students, six buildings, an eight-member cabinet, and an average of 19 years in leadership. Combined credentials that could stock a regional conference. Combined ability to stop discussing constraints and start building solutions? Roughly equivalent to a committee asked to agree on lunch while honoring everyone's dietary restrictions, philosophical beliefs about food systems, and strong opinions about parking. His cabinet meetings broke down like this: 45 minutes on state funding cuts, 30 minutes on board behavior patterns, 20 minutes on competitor enrollment trends, 15 minutes on staffing shortages. Controllable variables got 12 minutes — squeezed in at the end when everyone was already mentally ordering lunch. Mark kept going to conferences. Kept getting better at being a superintendent. Kept paying the translation tax trying to implement what he learned with a team that remained fundamentally unchanged. Then he did something radical. He recorded three consecutive cabinet meetings, counted the minutes, and calculated the annual cost. $247,000. He presented the data to his cabinet with one question: "Are we okay with this?" The room went silent. Then his Director of Curriculum said what everyone was thinking: "We're spending a quarter million dollars per year complaining. That's... actually insane." That single sentence changed everything. Not a consultant's recommendation. Not a conference framework. Just the data, held up to the light, in front of the people who created it. Here's what Marcus built over the next three months: a meeting protocol where the first 90 minutes covered controllable variables only — decisions, execution, systems. The final 30 minutes became an "Environmental Scan" where constraints could be named, but only to identify tactical adaptations, never to vent. He implemented a "3 Why's Test" — any problem brought to the cabinet had to answer why it was persisting and why they were the right people to solve it. If the answers kept pointing to uncontrollable externals, it didn't belong on the agenda. Six months later: cabinet meetings dropped from 3.5 hours to 90 minutes. Decision velocity tripled. Implementation completion went from 42% to 78%. Annual complaint cost dropped from $247K to $27K. Same people. Same board. Same funding challenges. Same enrollment pressures. Different system. What you focus on expands. Mark's cabinet was expanding helplessness. Now they're expanding agency. BEFORE THE APPLICATION: WHY MARK'S SHIFT STUCK The shift didn't happen because he attended another conference or hired another consultant. It happened because he built a team operating system that made agency automatic — not a one-time intervention, but a sequential change in how his cabinet thinks together. This is the pattern The TEAM INSTITUTE was built to eliminate at scale. While most leadership development gives you frameworks to translate back to your team alone, we build the operating system that makes the shift from helplessness to agency structural — through 8 monthly sessions that develop from trust to empowerment to collaboration to breakthrough results. We don't fix people. We multiply systems. But whether you ever join The TEAM INSTITUTE or not, here's what you can implement Monday morning... THE APPLICATION: YOUR CONTROL AUDIT Here's what to do Monday morning (assuming you're not in crisis mode — in which case, bookmark this and do it Tuesday): STEP 1: RUN THE COMPLAINT AUDIT (45 minutes across two meetings) Have someone track — with timestamps — time spent on controllable vs. uncontrollable variables. Three columns. Tally the minutes. Calculate the annual cost using Marcus's formula. Then ask your cabinet Mark's question: "Are we okay with this?" Don't editorialize. Don't present solutions. Just hold the data up to the light and let the room sit in it. What this reveals: if uncontrollable discussion outnumbers controllable action 3-to-1, you have a learned helplessness crisis, not a strategy problem. And if nobody wants to track this in the first place — your team already knows what the numbers will say. STEP 2: RUN THE CONTEXT EXCUSE INVENTORY (30 minutes) Put this question on your next cabinet agenda: "What would have to be true for us to succeed despite our constraints?" Have each person list the three constraints they cite most frequently, then — this is the part that matters — what they would do differently if those constraints never changed. Go around the room. Read answers out loud. Watch what happens when every "if only..." statement reveals a corresponding "but we could..." action that's been sitting right next to it, ignored. If answers keep pointing to external changes needed, you're waiting for rescue. If someone says, "There's nothing we can do until X changes," they've adopted learned helplessness as a professional identity. That's a different conversation, but a necessary one. STEP 3: THE 30-DAY CONTROLLABLE SPRINT (Ongoing) For 30 days, 80% of cabinet meeting time covers variables your team directly controls. Track two numbers weekly: Complaint Ratio: Uncontrollable discussion ÷ Controllable action time Implementation Velocity: Days from decision to execution start After 30 days, measure whether the ratios moved. If they didn't, someone on your team is invested in the current story — and that's worth a very direct conversation. OBJECTION: "We don't have time for this" You're currently spending 245 hours per year generating helplessness. You're underwater BECAUSE your team invests energy in uncontrollables, not despite it. What feels like "we're too busy" is almost always "we're afraid of what the data will reveal." OBJECTION: "My board keeps demanding answers about uncontrollables" Your board is asking about uncontrollables because you haven't given them confidence in your controllables. Boards don't micromanage competence. They micromanage uncertainty. When you shift from "here's why we can't..." to "here's what we're doing about what we CAN control," the temperature in the room changes. Your board is paying you to exercise agency — not to be a sophisticated narrator of external circumstances. Which of these objections is your system's default? Drop it in the comments. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "If only our context were different, we could succeed." Mature leaders think: "What can we control that creates success despite our context?" Immature leaders collect constraints like Pokemon cards — gotta catalog 'em all, display them in meetings, occasionally take them out to admire how impossible everything is. Mature leaders acknowledge constraints once, then obsessively focus on controllable variables. Immature leaders wait for circumstances to improve. Mature leaders improve their response to circumstances. The difference is the difference between a superintendent who survives until retirement and a superintendent whose district becomes the model everyone else studies. One explains to the board why demographic shifts make growth impossible. One shows the board enrollment growth data despite demographic shifts. The Three P's aren't permanent. The lever might not have worked yesterday. But the fence is gone. You can hop off the mat anytime you choose. Your turn: what's one constraint you've been citing for the past year that — if you're honest — you've been using as an excuse to avoid action on controllable variables? Drop it in the comments. Naming it is the first step past it. Tag a cabinet member who's ready to make this shift. Or screenshot this and text it to your CFO with the message: "We're spending 4.7 hours complaining. Let's calculate our actual number Tuesday." IF YOU'RE TIRED OF TRANSLATING INSIGHTS ALONE You just diagnosed the gap — a cabinet spending a quarter million dollars annually on variables no one in the room can change, while the controllable levers sit untouched. That pattern is the symptom. The cause is operating at 60% capacity while funding 100%. Research shows that most leadership teams perform at only 60% of their potential — not because they lack talent, but because brilliant individuals never learned to multiply their intelligence together. If your cabinet costs $1M annually, the 40% gap represents $400K in annual burn. When 100% workload hits 60% capacity, you rotate through three bad options: Lower Standards Burnout Public Failure Most teams cycle through all three while the market decides. The problem isn't your people. It's the model. You're trying to multiply intelligence using addition. Multiplication requires a different system. THE TEAM INSTITUTE: 8 Months From Helplessness to Agency The TEAM INSTITUTE is a sequential developmental journey that transforms your cabinet from individually brilliant to collectively unstoppable — not through episodic workshops forgotten in 30 days, but through capability building applied directly to your actual challenges. Month 1: Base Camp — Team Profile and {BEST FIT} framework Month 2: Building Trust — The foundation that makes honest problem-solving possible Month 3: Empowerment — Distributing authority over controllable variables Month 4: Collaboration — Multiplying intelligence instead of fragmenting it Month 5: Broadening Influence — Leading beyond positional authority Month 6: Managing Change — Transformation without casualties Month 7: Managing Conflict — Using friction as refinement Month 8: Developing Others — Multiplying agency across your organization Each 2-hour monthly session builds on the previous foundation. You can't skip trust and jump to empowerment — that's abandonment, not leadership. What's Included: Team {BEST FIT} assessment and mapping. Team 360 baseline and follow-up. Type-specific protocols for your team's configuration. Monthly expert facilitation on your actual challenges. Between-session accountability. Executive coaching for senior leaders. The Results: 3x performance improvement. 29% higher engagement. 27% better organizational outcomes. Zero burnout increase. The Requirement: Full leadership team participation. Partial engagement produces partial results. If you're ready to stop explaining why things are impossible and start demonstrating what's controllable — let's talk. Schedule a 30-minute consultation to explore whether The Team Institute is the right intervention for your context. We'll discuss your team's current patterns, explore readiness, and determine whether this produces the systematic agency your institution requires. This isn't a sales pitch. It's a conversation between people who refuse to accept that learned helplessness is permanent. [LEARN MORE] [SCHEDULE CONSULTATION] FOUND VALUE IN THIS? Help other educational leaders discover it: → Repost with your calculated complaint tax — 4.7 hours × your team size × 42 weeks × hourly rate. Drop your number. → Tag a leader who's paying the learned helplessness tax right now → Comment with the constraint you've been using as an excuse — your honesty helps others feel less alone. The more leaders who shift from learned helplessness to ridiculous agency, the better our educational systems become. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights.

Higher Performance Insights | THE MULTIPLICATION GAP: Why Your Good Cabinet Isn't Great (Yet)

By HPG Info • February 17, 2026

Last semester, I watched the same thing happen: The boss announced a major initiative. Everyone nodded. Three weeks later? Eight separate executions masquerading as one strategy. Your cabinet doesn't have a dysfunction problem. You have a pronoun problem—and it's costing you $400K in wasted capacity each year. Count how many times someone in your last meeting said "myself" instead of "me." Then count how many times anyone said "we." That ratio? It predicts everything about your team's performance. Here's the pattern: "The board and myself decided..." "Between the Provost and myself..." "My cabinet and myself are aligned..." Two syllables instead of one. Grammatically incorrect. Functionally revealing. We've inflated from "me" to "MYSELF"—and in that linguistic upgrade, we lost the only word that actually creates multiplication: "we." Your cabinet has a multiplication problem. Eight talented leaders who've mastered individual excellence but haven't built the collective infrastructure that turns good performance into breakthrough performance. That gap between good and great? It's about shifting from "myself" to "we." And most leaders never learn how because "myself" has been rewarded your entire career. THE DIAGNOSIS: GOOD AT ADDITION, MISSING MULTIPLICATION Let's talk about this like adults who've led talented teams that perform well but wonder "what if?" Tuesday, 9 AM cabinet meeting. Everyone's prepared. Updates are thorough. Questions are smart. The meeting runs professionally. (Everyone nods in agreement. The strategic plan gets approved. Then eight people leave the room and interpret it eight different ways. This is what we call "alignment.") But when you announce a major initiative, you can see the mental calculation behind eight sets of eyes: "How does this affect MY area? What do I need to protect? How much can I delegate vs. do myself?" Three weeks later, the initiative moves forward. Sort of. Everyone executes their part. Professionally. Competently. But it feels like eight separate projects that happen to share a name , not one integrated effort multiplying collective intelligence. Or this: Your CFO and Provost are both brilliant. They collaborate when required. They're not territorial. But they've never called each other just to think through a complex problem together. They coordinate. They don't co-create. (They schedule "sync meetings" to align before the actual meeting. Then debrief after. That's not collaboration—that's collaboration theater with intermission.) Here's Why This Keeps Happening You hired for individual excellence. You measured individual performance. You rewarded individual achievement. Then you put eight individual high-performers in a room and expected them to spontaneously operate as a multiplied "we." They can't. Because multiplication requires different infrastructure than addition. Here's what nobody admits at leadership conferences (because we're all performing competence for each other): You hired people whose entire identity is built on being individually exceptional. Then you put them in roles where their primary job is to make OTHER people successful. That's asking Olympic sprinters to suddenly care more about the relay team's time than their individual split. They'd rather protect their reputation as "the smart one" than risk looking average by actually multiplying with others. Your "good" cabinet is actively choosing addition over multiplication because multiplication requires vulnerability they've spent careers avoiding. The real problem? You've built a cabinet optimized for individual excellence in roles that require collective multiplication. The Team Intelligence Formula: TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ Notice it's multiplication, not addition. Any dimension near zero collapses everything. IQ: Individual competence. You hired for this. Your cabinet is brilliant. EQ: Common language for communication and culture. This is where "myself" performers fragment—eight people fluent in different languages trying to have strategic conversations. PQ: Understanding how each person is wired and how roles multiply. Your CFO doesn't have to lead innovation just because they're smart. When any dimension is low, multiplication collapses to addition. Your cabinet isn't broken. It's just never been built to multiply. THE FRAMEWORK: THE A/50 VS B+/3 PATTERN Your cabinet is full of A/50 performers —people who earned A grades by investing 50 hours of effort. Grinding. Perfecting. Out-working everyone. The formula that built their careers: More effort = Better results. A/50 performers struggle with collective multiplication. (And yes, they're exhausted. Which they mention. Frequently. Usually in the context of explaining why someone else's approach won't work.) They've been rewarded for individual excellence through heroic effort. They don't know how to operate in "we multiply together" mode because they're still counting contributions. "I stayed until 8pm Tuesday." "I sent three emails over the weekend." "My section is more thorough than yours." This is why your high-performer cabinet operates at 60% capacity despite 100% effort. Because A/50 performers can't multiply—they can only add and compare. B+/3 performers? They earned B+ grades with just 3 hours of effort. Not the highest grade, but remarkable efficiency. Smarter strategy beats harder grinding. Here's what they figured out: Study groups beat solo grinding (collaboration multiplies understanding) Asking the right questions beats reading everything (leverage others' knowledge) Good enough on time beats perfect too late (execution matters more than perfection) Who gets credit doesn't matter if the team wins (ego takes back seat to results) B+/3 performers default to "we" because "I alone" was never enough. They say things like: "What if we combined your approach with mine?" "Who else should be thinking about this?" "This got better because of what you added." They've developed the one skill A/50 performers never needed: multiplication instinct. (Your A/50 performers secretly think B+/3 people are lazy. Your B+/3 performers know A/50 people are inefficient. Both are right. Neither is winning.) "A/50 performers earned success by grinding harder. B+/3 performers earned it by thinking smarter. Your cabinet is full of A/50s trying to multiply. That's why good stays good instead of becoming great." If your entire cabinet is A/50, you've built a team of individual excellence that underperforms collectively. That's why multiplication feels impossible. THE 60% CAPACITY CRISIS Research shows leadership teams typically perform at 60% of their potential. If your cabinet costs $1M annually, that's $400K burning every year. Not from incompetence. From interference. High IQ leaders who lack common language (EQ) and understanding of how each person is wired (PQ). Here's the good news that changes everything: Your cabinet isn't broken. They're not resistant. They're not incompetent. They're operating on addition infrastructure while attempting multiplication work. That's a design problem, not a people problem. Design problems are solvable through architecture, not heroics. You don't need different people. You need different infrastructure. The talent is already there. The potential is already funded. You're just missing the multiplication system that turns "good" into "great." Your turn: The Multiplication Audit Think about your last three strategic initiatives. For each one: Did it fragment into eight separate executions? (+1 for each YES) Did anyone call someone ELSE just to think through a problem together? (+1 for each YES) Did results feel like stapled-together work or genuinely integrated thinking? (+1 if integrated) Score: 0-2: Addition mode. $400K+ burning annually. 3-5: Transitioning. Some multiplication happening. 6-9: You've cracked the code. You're multiplying. Drop your score below. THE APPLICATION: BUILDING MULTIPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE STEP 1: The Pronoun Audit (15 minutes, solo) Open your last three cabinet meeting notes. Count pronouns: How many times: "I," "me," "my," "myself" How many times: "we," "us," "our" "If 'I/me/myself' outnumbers 'we/us/our' by more than 2:1, you don't have a team. You have a meeting where individuals report progress on separate projects that happen to share a budget." (If this exercise makes you defensive—"but context matters!" "But nuance!"—that's data too. Multiplication doesn't require defending yourself from your own meeting notes.) STEP 2: The Monday Morning "We" Ritual (20 minutes) Start every cabinet meeting with this question. You answer first. "What's one thing happening in your life—work or personal—that you're genuinely excited about OR struggling with? Real answer. Not your portfolio update. Something true about you as a human." Go around the room. Just listen. Don't fix. Don't problem-solve. After everyone shares: "Thank you for trusting us with that." Do this for 8 weeks. Watch your pronouns shift from "myself" to "we." STEP 3: The Multiplication Question (30 minutes in the next cabinet meeting) Put this on your agenda: "How do we shift from coordinating excellence to multiplying it?" Ask: "Was our last initiative eight excellent individual executions that got coordinated? Or one integrated effort where the whole exceeded the parts?" Then: "What would need to be true for us to multiply intelligence instead of just adding it?" Write down 3-5 agreements. This becomes your multiplication infrastructure. THE MATURITY SHIFT: FROM ADDITION TO MULTIPLICATION Immature leaders think: "My team is good enough." Mature leaders think: "Good is the enemy of great, and multiplication is how we get there." Immature leaders accept professional collaboration. Mature leaders architect collective multiplication. Immature leaders think "we" happens naturally among talented people. Mature leaders know "we" requires intentional infrastructure. "Immature leaders accept professional collaboration. Mature leaders architect collective multiplication. The difference is the difference between a cabinet that works hard and a cabinet that works exponentially." One produces solid results through heroic individual effort. One produces breakthrough results through collective intelligence. Your cabinet is good. The question is: Are you ready to build great? Real talk: Which of your cabinet members is an A/50 performer (heroic individual effort) vs. B+/3 performer (multiplication instinct)? Don't name names publicly—but if you counted and your entire cabinet is A/50, that's not a people problem. That's a hiring-for-the-wrong-variable problem. Comment below: How many of your cabinet members have multiplication instinct vs. addition mindset? Your honest answer reveals whether you're one hire away from transformation or one system away. Tag someone on your team who defaults to "we" before "myself"—they've earned the recognition. THE TEAM INSTITUTE : FROM ADDITION TO MULTIPLICATION IN 8 MONTHS Your cabinet just diagnosed the gap between addition and multiplication. That gap? It represents every strategic initiative that fragments, every decision that requires three follow-up meetings, every brilliant idea that dies in translation. This is the pattern The Team Institute was built to eliminate. While most leadership development teaches YOU frameworks to translate back to your team (hello, translation tax), we build the multiplication infrastructure WITH your entire team—through 8 monthly sessions that develop from trust to empowerment to collaboration to breakthrough results. We don't fix people. We multiply systems. The 8-Month Architecture: Month 1: Base Camp - Understanding your Team Profile Month 2: Building Trust - The foundation of multiplication Month 3: Empowerment - "We" distribute authority Month 4: Collaboration - "We" create together Month 5: Broadening Influence - "We" lead beyond hierarchy Month 6: Managing Change - "We" transform without casualties Month 7: Managing Conflict - "We" use friction as refinement Month 8: Developing Others - "We" multiply talent What's Included: Team {BEST FIT} assessment revealing addition vs. multiplication patterns Team 360 baseline measuring current EQ and PQ Monthly expert facilitation applied to your actual challenges Between-session accountability that embeds multiplication Executive coaching for senior leaders The Results: 3x performance improvement. 29% higher engagement. 27% better organizational outcomes. Zero burnout increase. The Requirement: Full team participation. You can't build multiplication with "some of us." YOUR NEXT MOVE If you're ready to transform addition into multiplication—if you sense your good cabinet could be great—let's talk. Schedule a 30-minute consultation to explore whether THE TEAM INSTITUTE will build the multiplication infrastructure your organization requires. This isn't about selling you something. This is about whether you're ready to build multiplication. [SCHEDULE CONSULTATION ] Found this valuable? Help other leaders discover it: → Repost with your honest answer: "Does my cabinet add or multiply?" → Tag a leader building multiplication infrastructure → Comment with your Multiplication Audit score The more leaders who shift from addition to multiplication, the better education becomes. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group