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