Builder Insights from December's Peer-to-Peer Roundtable

2.9 million students walked away from traditional education in the last decade.

Not because they hate learning. Because they discovered something educational leaders are just now admitting to each other in private Zoom rooms.

Last Wednesday, a college president stood up (metaphorically—we were on Zoom, but you could feel him standing) and said something that made every superintendent in the room physically lean forward:

"We have become habituated to viewing educational leadership through filters—analogous to social media platforms where individuals present curated identities disconnected from reality. Trinity Valley was profoundly guilty of this pattern—appearing to external audiences as an institution meeting mission while internally delivering bare minimum performance."



Jason Morrison, Ed. D., President of Trinity Valley Community College in Texas, just named the thing everyone in educational leadership feels but nobody says out loud.

Welcome to the Snapchat Filter Effect. Your institution looks great in the photos. The reality? That's a different story.

And here's why this matters right now, today, in December 2025:

1.7 million students lost in higher education since 2014. 1.2 million departed K-12 since 2019. Combined, that's roughly the population of New Mexico—students who didn't disappear, they just opted for educational providers who weren't performing behind a filter.

The market already delivered its verdict. The only question is whether educational leaders will respond with the courage this moment demands—or keep adjusting the filter settings while enrollment evaporates.

Comment "FILTER" if this describes your institution right now. (I'll go first in comments. Yes, I've been guilty of this too.)

Builder Insights from December's Peer-to-Peer Roundtable

2.9 million students walked away from traditional education in the last decade.

Not because they hate learning. Because they discovered something educational leaders are just now admitting to each other in private Zoom rooms.

Last Wednesday, a college president stood up (metaphorically—we were on Zoom, but you could feel him standing) and said something that made every superintendent in the room physically lean forward:

"We have become habituated to viewing educational leadership through filters—analogous to social media platforms where individuals present curated identities disconnected from reality. Trinity Valley was profoundly guilty of this pattern—appearing to external audiences as an institution meeting mission while internally delivering bare minimum performance."

Jason Morrison, Ed. D., President of Trinity Valley Community College in Texas, just named the thing everyone in educational leadership feels but nobody says out loud.

Welcome to the Snapchat Filter Effect. Your institution looks great in the photos. The reality? That's a different story.

And here's why this matters right now, today, in December 2025:

1.7 million students lost in higher education since 2014. 1.2 million departed K-12 since 2019. Combined, that's roughly the population of New Mexico—students who didn't disappear, they just opted for educational providers who weren't performing behind a filter.

The market already delivered its verdict. The only question is whether educational leaders will respond with the courage this moment demands—or keep adjusting the filter settings while enrollment evaporates.

Comment "FILTER" if this describes your institution right now. (I'll go first in comments. Yes, I've been guilty of this too.)

Peer-2-Peer December Cohort

THE DIAGNOSIS: WHY SMART LEADERS BUILD STUPID SYSTEMS

Let's talk about this like adults who've survived multiple accreditation cycles, at least one superintendent search that somehow took longer than an actual presidential election, and that January board meeting where someone said something that made everyone wonder if they'd accidentally joined a different organization.

Here's what December looks like for educational leaders right now:

Your calendar is suffocating. Your inbox has emails from three months ago you'll never read.

You're managing semester-end chaos while simultaneously planning for spring enrollment, navigating board politics, addressing personnel issues that should've been handled in October, and pretending the budget projections for next year don't terrify you.

And somewhere in that chaos, you're supposed to be "transformational."

But here's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to acknowledge:

Most of us have been optimizing for optics, not outcomes.

We've professionalized educational leadership so thoroughly that we've accidentally made it functionally impossible to tell the truth about how our systems actually perform.

I know the loneliness of being the only person who sees this pattern. Of wondering if you're the problem because surely—SURELY—leadership teams at other districts/institutions don't operate like a group project where everyone's doing their part but nobody's read anyone else's sections.

You're not crazy. Your team isn't incompetent.

You've just been optimizing the wrong variable while the world outside your conference room keeps moving.

(This is actually why research across 987 leadership teams reveals that 60% of organizations operate at barely half their potential capacity despite having individually brilliant team members. We keep adding talent to broken systems, which means we're just scaling dysfunction. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

THE INTERFERENCE AUDIT: A FORMULA THAT EXPLAINS YOUR ENTIRE DECEMBER

During Wednesday's Peer-to-Peer Leadership Roundtable, I dropped a formula that made everyone stop nodding politely and start taking screenshots.

Because it explained why their last three strategic initiatives died:

P = p - I

Performance = Potential - Interference

Here's what it means:

Performance (P): The non-negotiable outcomes your career depends on. Enrollment. Graduation rates. Student success. Board satisfaction. The stuff that determines whether you still have this job in 18 months.

Potential (p): The aggregate talent, resources, and expertise within your organization. You've got brilliant people. You've got programs that could be excellent. On paper, you should be crushing it.

Interference (I): The systemic obstacles preventing potential from translating into performance. Legacy processes consuming disproportionate time. Cultural norms inhibiting accountability. The "this is how we've always done it" crowd showing up to every meeting to protect status quo.

Here's what you're doing wrong: Performance drops, you hire more people. Still underperforming? Add more programs. Still stuck? Expand infrastructure.

You're adding capacity to dysfunction, which means you're just scaling the thing that's already broken.

Mike Johnson, Superintendent of Eau Claire Area School District in Wisconsin, said it perfectly:

"The factor that most significantly impacts our performance is interference—legacy patterns embedded in phrases like 'this is how we've always operated.' When I assumed this role in 2020, our literacy performance was unacceptable. We had to acknowledge that reality without equivocation."

The temptation when confronting performance gaps is to add resources—more personnel, more programs. However, given our enrollment trajectory, that approach is financially unsustainable. Our imperative is systemic redesign first, then strategic talent deployment aligned to that redesigned system."

Translation: Adding talent to a broken system doesn't fix the system. It just gives you more talented people operating inside dysfunction.

💡 "Adding talent to a broken system doesn't fix the system. It just gives you more talented people operating inside dysfunction."

(This is why your last three strategic initiatives died somewhere between the VP of Finance and the VP of Academic Affairs. You added capacity. You didn't address interference.)

THE 7,000 RPM QUESTION: DO YOU ACTUALLY KNOW YOUR SYSTEM'S LIMITS?

Dr. Nathan S. Schilling, CSBO, Superintendent of Lansing School District 158 in Illinois, introduced an analogy that made every leader in the room immediately screenshot the Zoom and text it to their cabinet:

He referenced the film Ford v Ferrari—specifically the scene where the driver receives authorization to push the vehicle to 7,000 RPM, a threshold that risks catastrophic failure if the system can't sustain it.

"As organizational leaders, we bear responsibility for equivalent understanding of our institutional systems. We must know our organizations with sufficient depth to identify optimal performance thresholds—pushing hard enough to maximize outcomes, but not so aggressively that we damage the system's capacity for sustained excellence."

Here's the leadership gut-check:

Do you know your institution well enough to push it to 7,000 RPM without breaking it?

Most leaders don't.

We push harder when enrollment drops. We add initiatives when boards get nervous. We demand more when community perception shifts.

But we rarely ask: Can this system sustain this level of performance? Or am I about to blow the engine?

Nathan's honest admission: "Unfortunately, we are experiencing significant personnel challenges this year—a pattern my Illinois colleagues report as well. The human capital dimension—recruitment, retention, development, support—demands substantial leadership attention currently. My focus is sustaining our district's operational performance at that optimal threshold while navigating unprecedented personnel complexity."

This is the reality December 2025 brings:

• You've got demographic decline eating your enrollment projections
• You've got personnel challenges unlike anything pre-pandemic
• You've got boards asking uncomfortable questions about efficiency
• You've got communities wondering why education feels increasingly disconnected from their kids' actual needs

And you're supposed to lead transformation while keeping the engine from exploding.

The bar for "better" is underground.

THE FRAMEWORK: THREE LEADER ARCHETYPES SABOTAGING YOUR TRANSFORMATION

During the roundtable, I introduced a framework that helped leaders diagnose not just their systems, but their teams.

Because here's the uncomfortable reality:

You don't just have dysfunction in your processes. You have dysfunction in your people.

Think about two axes: Ambition and Idealism.

You've got leaders who want to climb (high ambition). You've got leaders who dream about mission (high idealism).

The magic happens when you find leaders who operate with both—high ambition married to high idealism, focused on building what students need.

But most of your team? They fall into three other categories:

1. THE COASTERS

Low Ambition, Low Idealism

These are the folks with 30+ years in, sitting on every committee, collecting a solid paycheck, and sleeping better than you do.

They resist by doing basically nothing. They're in your boat, but they're not rowing. And honestly? They're comfortable with that.

2. THE CLIMBERS

High Ambition, Low Idealism

Good people. Smart people. But they're optimizing the wrong metrics.

They'll move mountains to hit their KPIs, but they're bothered by the messy, complex, human reality of education. They want spreadsheets that make sense.

Students? Students don't make sense.

So they resist by demanding more data, more analysis, more proof—anything to avoid the discomfort of acknowledging that you can't always measure what matters most.

3. THE DREAMERS

Low Ambition, High Idealism

These folks have read every leadership book under the sun. Seven Habits. Five Dysfunctions. The One Thing.

They've got beautiful visions. Zero execution.

They resist by studying everything to death. In Texas, we call these "Big Hat, No Cattle" leaders. Lots of talk. No cows.

Then you've got the BUILDERS.

High Ambition, High Idealism

These are your people. The ones willing to dismantle what doesn't work and construct what does.

The ones who understand that moral ambition isn't optional—it's the fuel that keeps you fighting when everything feels impossible.

Here's the leadership question you need to answer this week:

How much of your energy is spent managing Coasters, redirecting Climbers, and grounding Dreamers—versus empowering Builders?

Because if you're spending 60% of your time managing the first three categories, you don't have an execution problem.

You have a talent allocation problem.

And that's fixable.

💡 "You don't have time to fix everybody. You have time to build with the Builders and create systems that make Coasting uncomfortable."

YOUR TURN: CALCULATE YOUR COASTER TAX

Quick math:

• Number of Coasters on your team: _____
• Average salary: _____
• Percentage of time spent managing their dysfunction: _____%
• Hours per week: _____ × 42 weeks = _____ hours annually

That number you just calculated? That's not a personnel budget line. That's leadership energy stolen from Builders and students.

Multiply by your hourly rate. That's your annual Coaster Tax.

Now ask: What could you build if that energy went to Builders instead?

Drop your number in comments (round to nearest thousand—nobody needs exact figures, we need honesty).

THE CASE STUDY: HOW ONE PRESIDENT REMOVED THE FILTER (AND WHAT HAPPENED NEXT)

Jason Morrison walked into Trinity Valley Community College in Texas with a clear-eyed diagnosis:

His institution was operating under what he calls "the Bare Minimum Culture."

Texas had structured community college funding around contact hours—meaning you got paid for enrollment, not completion.

So guess what Trinity Valley optimized for? Butts in seats. Didn't matter if students graduated. Didn't matter if they learned.

Just... show up long enough to generate funding.

Then Texas shifted to performance-based funding tied to completion.

Suddenly, bare minimum wasn't sustainable. It was existential.

Here's what Jason did in January of Year 2—not Year 5 after building relational capital, but Year 2 when most leaders are still smiling pretty and listening carefully:

He stood on stage at convocation and said this:

"I need to apologize. Previous leadership failed you by establishing and tolerating a culture where minimal effort was deemed acceptable. That failure belonged to leadership, not to the dedicated professionals working within a dysfunctional system. This will not be our identity moving forward."

Then he did something most consultants would tell you is career suicide:

He blew everything up.

Not incrementally. Not through a carefully phased change management process with stakeholder input sessions and listening tours.

He established new cultural standards publicly and unequivocally.

He called it the "Championship Mindset"—leveraging the college's athletic success as a cultural metaphor. Not mandates. Not requirements. Expectations.

And then he invited the community to define what those expectations meant operationally.

The result?

The high-capacity professionals—the people buried in advising offices and financial aid departments who'd been doing excellent work in obscurity—they lit up.

Because someone finally said out loud what they'd been thinking for years: This isn't good enough, and we're going to fix it.

The bare minimalists? Some left. Some adapted. Some are still there, but they're no longer setting the cultural tone because the Builders now outnumber them.

Here's the leadership principle:

Culture change requires both clarity and co-creation. Leaders must establish non-negotiable standards while creating space for the organization to define how those standards manifest operationally.

Jason didn't tell people how to build a championship mindset. He told them we will have a championship mindset. Then he let his Builders define what that meant in their contexts.

Revolutionary? No. Obvious? Yes. Common? Based on conversations with 987 leadership teams—absolutely not.

THE TALENT QUESTION: SHOULD YOU EVEN TRY TO CONVERT COASTERS?

Amy Diaz, EdD, President of GateWay Community College in Phoenix (Maricopa system), asked the question that made every leader in the Zoom uncomfortably shift in their chairs:

"Should I invest substantial leadership energy attempting to convert coasters into builders? I question whether such transformation is achievable in most cases. Perhaps a coaster can become marginally less passive, but fundamental identity transformation from coaster to builder may be unrealistic."

My preferred strategy focuses on hiring practices that identify and attract builders from the outset—individuals whose values, work ethic, and orientation toward innovation already align with our institutional culture."

Translation: Stop trying to fix people. Start hiring the right people.

Now, some of you just got really uncomfortable. Because this feels harsh. It feels like giving up on people.

But here's the data:

@Wade Stanford, Superintendent of Westwood ISD in Texas, connected this directly to student outcomes:

"Leadership energy consumed managing adult dysfunction is energy unavailable for student-focused work. And community perception? External stakeholders experience our institutions through these individuals. We inherit the reputation associated with their performance patterns—and community perception becomes institutional reality regardless of broader excellence."

The uncomfortable truth: Your Coasters are costing you more than salary. They're costing you reputation. They're costing you community trust. And they're costing students the leadership attention they deserve.

So here's the strategic question:

What if you stopped investing energy trying to convert Coasters and instead redirected that energy toward:

• Hiring practices that identify Builders from the start?
• Professional development that multiplies Builder capacity?
• Systems that make it harder for Coasters to hide and easier for Builders to thrive?

Amy's right. Your hiring process is probably too sterile. Twenty-minute finalist interviews can't distinguish between people who interview well and people who perform well.

You need performance tasks. You need operational context. You need to assess entrepreneurial mindset, builder orientation, and resilience explicitly—not just credentials and interview polish.

Because here's the reality December 2025 demands:

You don't have time to fix everybody. You have time to build with the Builders and create systems that make Coasting uncomfortable.

THE PARADOX OF EXCELLENCE: WHEN HIGH PERFORMANCE BECOMES THE ENEMY OF GROWTH

Stacey Boyd, Superintendent of GateWay Community College Charter High Schools (operating campuses embedded in actual colleges), introduced a tension most leadership literature ignores:

What do you do when you're already excellent?

His schools: 100% graduation rate. 100% college-going rate. A-rated performance. Students graduating from high school with associate degrees and millions in scholarships.

By every conventional metric? Crushing it.

So here's her question:

"How do you pursue continuous improvement when the organization perceives itself as already excellent? More pointedly: Do I function as superintendent to facilitate growth—or do I represent interference preventing an already-excellent system from maintaining its performance?"

This is the question that leaders of high-performing institutions never publicly ask because it sounds like hubris.

But it's the most important question for sustainable excellence:

How do you move from A to A+ when your team thinks A is the ceiling?

Gordon Amerson Ed.D. (Superintendent, Alvord Unified, California, and our roundtable moderator) synthesized it perfectly:

"Excellence is not a destination but a trajectory. Pursuit of excellence remains constant regardless of current performance level—whether you are far from excellence or operating at its current threshold."

High performance creates organizational conditions that inhibit continued improvement—confidence morphs into complacency, success validates existing practice, critique feels like ingratitude."

The leadership principle: Leaders of excellent organizations must cultivate perpetual productive dissatisfaction—appreciation for current accomplishment coupled with relentless pursuit of unrealized potential.

If you're already performing at A-level, the question isn't "are we good enough?"

The question is: "What does A+ look like, and are we pursuing it with the same intensity we used to reach A?"

Because here's the reality:

The market doesn't care that you're excellent by yesterday's standards. The market cares whether you're relevant to today's students.

And today's students? They have options your A-level performance didn't prepare for.

THE ECOSYSTEM PLAY: WHEN COMPETITORS BECOME COLLABORATORS

Here's where the roundtable shifted from diagnosis to disruption.

Dr. Matthew Flippen, President of Gracelyn University, described a model that should be obvious but somehow isn't:

The Para-Professional Pipeline

The problem: 300,000-600,000 teacher shortage nationwide, disproportionately impacting vulnerable students.

The resource: 1.2 million teacher assistants and para-professionals working in schools right now—people who demonstrably care about education (you don't work for $8-$12/hour unless you love kids), many of whom want teaching credentials but face insurmountable barriers.

Single parents. Economically vulnerable. Can't access traditional pathways requiring full-time enrollment and unaffordable tuition.

Matthew's solution: Can we design a pathway for a single mother earning $12/hour who can invest $100 monthly in education?

The math: $100/month = $44/credit hour.

The results after five years:

• Full accreditation
• 100% placement rate (students upskilling in existing positions)
• 92% retention rate
• 1,000+ students enrolled
• Projected growth: 1,000-2,000 annually

Here's why this matters:

The moment Matthew finished explaining his model, superintendents started connecting dots:

Gordon Amerson immediately saw the "Round-Trip Ticket" strategy:

"Districts possess vested interest in reducing cost burdens for employees pursuing certification because we derive enormous benefit from placing fully-certified teachers who already know our students, culture, and community."

If you graduate from Alvord Unified, matriculate through our partner community college, we can employ you. As you pursue continued education, we supplement tuition costs because your professional growth directly benefits our organization and students."

Jason Morrison (Trinity Valley) reported they'd already launched this:

"This fall we launched our Bachelor of Applied Science in Early Childhood Education specifically targeting para-professionals. Many districts now fund tuition for their para-professionals. We enrolled 40 students; approximately 25% were already employed in regional school districts."

Do you see what just happened?

Three leaders—two superintendents and one college president—discovered a systemic solution to a shared problem by thinking as an ecosystem instead of as isolated institutions.

Nobody competed for market share. Nobody protected territorial boundaries. Nobody worried about enrollment cannibalization.

They asked: What do students and communities need that none of us can build alone—but together we could create?

That's the shift.

💡 "The most effective pathways eliminate artificial institutional boundaries that create friction in student progression."

THE APPLICATION: WHAT TO DO BEFORE YOUR NEXT CABINET MEETING

Alright. Enough diagnosis. Let's talk about Monday morning.

STEP 1: THE INTERFERENCE AUDIT (30 MINUTES)

Grab a whiteboard. Draw three columns:

1. POTENTIAL – List your organization's actual capacity (talent, resources, programs, community support)
2. PERFORMANCE – List your non-negotiable outcomes (the metrics your career depends on)
3. INTERFERENCE – List everything preventing Column 1 from producing Column 2

Be brutally honest in Column 3:

• Legacy processes consuming disproportionate time
• Cultural norms inhibiting accountability
• Structural misalignments between strategy and resources
• Talent management systems that don't actually identify Builders
• Meeting cultures that prioritize optics over outcomes

he strategic question: If you invested the next six months eliminating interference instead of adding potential, what would change?

STEP 2: THE TEAM INTELLIGENCE DIAGNOSTIC (15 MINUTES)

Map your leadership team:

• Coasters (Low ambition, low idealism) – Who's comfortable with status quo?
• Climbers (High ambition, low idealism) – Who optimizes wrong metrics?
• Dreamers (High idealism, low ambition) – Who studies instead of executes?
• Builders (High ambition, high idealism) – Who dismantles and constructs?

Now calculate: What percentage of your leadership energy goes to managing the first three categories versus empowering the fourth?

If it's more than 40% managing/redirecting/grounding, you have a talent allocation problem, not an execution problem.

STEP 3: THE ECOSYSTEM QUESTION (THIS IS THE UNCOMFORTABLE ONE)

Ask yourself:

"If I stopped optimizing my institution's enrollment and started optimizing my region's student success, what partnerships would I pursue? What territorial boundaries would I transcend? What 'competitors' would become collaborators?"

Then ask the follow-up:

"What's preventing me from making those calls this week?"

If the answer is "because we compete for the same students," you're optimizing for institutional preservation, not student success.

If the answer is "because our systems don't align," that's fixable. Make the call anyway.

If the answer is "because I don't know where to start," start by forwarding this newsletter to one leader in a different sector and saying: "Let's have coffee. I think we're solving the same problems in isolation."

OBJECTION HANDLING

"But we don't have time for this meta-conversation."

You just spent the last three months managing Coasters, redirecting Climbers, and grounding Dreamers while your Builders waited for permission to build.

You don't have time NOT to do this.

Also, this isn't meta. This is the actual work. The strategic planning you keep meeting about? That's the distraction.

The real work is building a team that can think together efficiently enough to actually execute the strategy you keep strategizing about.

You're not too busy to fix this. You're too busy BECAUSE of this.

"My team won't go for it."

Your team is currently "going for" individualized development that produces isolated competence while your actual challenges require collective capacity.

They're already bought into something—it's just not working.

The bar is on the floor. You're not asking them to do something dramatically different. You're asking them to stop doing something that's provably ineffective.

And while you're hesitating, enrollment decisions are being made by families who won't wait for your cabinet to align,

competitive institutions are moving faster, and your best teachers/faculty are wondering if leadership will ever actually lead.

THE MATURITY SHIFT: FROM FILTERS TO FOUNDATIONS

Immature leaders think: "We need better marketing to fix our enrollment problem." Mature leaders think: "We need to remove the Snapchat filter and address the systemic dysfunction our marketing is currently hiding."

Immature leaders optimize for: Looking good in accreditation reports. Mature leaders optimize for: Actually being good in ways students and communities experience daily.

Immature leaders believe: Adding capacity solves performance gaps. Mature leaders know: Adding capacity to dysfunction scales dysfunction—you must address interference first.

Immature leaders ask: "How do we compete better?" Mature leaders ask: "How do we collaborate to build what students need that none of us can create alone?"

Immature leaders defend: Institutional structures we inherited. Mature leaders build: Pathways students and communities require, even if it disrupts what we've always done.

The difference is the difference between defending and building.

One protects the past. One creates the future.

Students have already voted with their feet. 2.9 million of them walked away from traditional educational institutions in the last decade.

The only question remaining: Will you remove the filter and build what they actually need—or keep adjusting the lighting until the last student walks out?

YOUR TURN: THE QUESTION YOU CAN'T AVOID

Here's what I want you to do right now—before you close this newsletter and move to the next thing suffocating your inbox:

Answer this honestly:

"If a consultant observed your institution for one week—not your marketing materials, not your strategic plan, but your actual daily operations—what would disturb them most about the gap between what you project and what you produce?"

Be specific. Be vulnerable. Your honesty gives other leaders permission to name their own dysfunction.

I'll go first in comments. (And yes, my consultant WAS disturbed. That's how I know this framework works.)

Comment "FILTER" if the Snapchat Filter Effect describes your institution right now.

Tag a cabinet member who needs permission to name the dysfunction everyone knows exists but nobody discusses. Tell them specifically why you're tagging them.

Screenshot the Interference Audit formula (P = p - I) and text it to your CFO with just this message: "Tuesday's agenda just changed."

FOUND VALUE IN THIS? HERE'S HOW TO MULTIPLY IT:

→ Repost this with your Coaster Tax calculation or your honest answer to the consultant question. Tag DR. JOE HILL so I can see your assessment.

→ Tag a superintendent if you're higher ed, or tag a president if you're K-12 and propose coffee. Ecosystem thinking starts with one conversation across sectors.

→ Forward this to your cabinet with the subject line: "We need to talk about interference." Then actually talk about it.

The more leaders who shift from defending institutions to building what students need, the better our educational systems become.

Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights that turn roundtable conversations into Monday morning resources.

WANT THE SCIENCE BEHIND THIS?

Everything in this newsletter is grounded in research across 987 leadership teams.

The data is clear: 60% of organizations operate at barely half their potential capacity despite having individually brilliant team members.

The gap? It's not talent. It's Team Intelligence—the operating system that transforms individual brilliance into breakthrough collective performance.

Download the full Team Intelligence Whitepaper to see:

• The Three-Intelligence Framework (IQ × EQ × PQ = TQ)
• Why teams with balanced cognitive representation outperform homogeneous teams by 40% in problem resolution
• Case studies from Sourcewell Cooperative ($13B in cooperative purchasing) and Gateway Community College (#1 in Arizona)
• The five cognitive approaches essential for breakthrough performance
• Implementation protocols you can deploy immediately

Get the whitepaper here: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/team-intelligence-assessment

It's free. It's research-backed. And it might explain why your last three strategic initiatives died between the VP of Finance and the VP of Academic Affairs.

GET THE WHITEPAPER HERE

NEXT ISSUE: "THE ROUND-TRIP TICKET: WHY YOUR BEST TALENT PIPELINE IS WEARING A LANYARD AND MAKING $12/HOUR"

We'll explore why workforce development strategies that start with recruitment campaigns are like trying to find your soulmate on dating apps when your best match is already in your contacts—you just haven't called them yet because they're in the "para-professional" folder instead of "potential leaders."

Spoiler: The teacher shortage isn't a talent problem. It's a barrier problem. And you have way more power to remove those barriers than whoever designed your hiring process wants you to believe.

(Hint: It involves thinking like Matthew Flippen, acting like Gordon Amerson, and having the courage Jason Morrison demonstrated in January of Year 2—when most leaders are still smiling pretty and listening carefully.)

P.S. – ABOUT THAT ROUNDTABLE...

If you're thinking "I need to be in conversations like this with peers who are actually building, not just defending," here's your invitation:

Next Peer-to-Peer Leadership Roundtable: February 4, 2026 | 10:30-11:30 AM CST

REGISTER HERE: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9417613317373/WN_qkTP4lWNTfSycggS_ZFKnw#/registration

Who should attend: Superintendents and College/University Presidents who are tired of competing and ready to collaborate. Public and private sectors both welcome.

The only requirement: demonstrated commitment to building what students need, not defending what institutions want.

See you in February—or in the comments below.

Keep your dukes up.

— Joe

Get practical, research-based ideas to Accelerate Higher Team Performance delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday.