Higher Performance Insights | DISRUPTING THE PIPELINE

December 10, 2025
higher performance insights

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


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Higher Performance Insights | GO TO THE ANT, YOU S-WORD?

By HPG Info • December 2, 2025
When Ancient Wisdom Calls Out Your Cabinet Meeting Three thousand years ago, King Solomon looked at lazy people and said, "Go watch the ants work. Maybe you'll learn something." Harsh? Maybe. Accurate? Absolutely. But here's what Solomon didn't know—and what your leadership team desperately needs to understand: The ant's genius isn't that it works hard. It's that the colony has an operating system your brilliant cabinet doesn't. An individual ant has roughly 250,000 neurons. Your CFO has 86 billion. By any measure, your CFO is 340,000 times smarter than an ant. Yet somehow, when you put those ants into a colony, they solve complex routing problems, allocate labor dynamically, adapt to environmental changes, and make collective decisions that consistently optimize for survival. Meanwhile, your cabinet—filled with people 340,000x smarter than any ant—just spent three hours in a meeting and made zero decisions. Again. Here's the profound part nobody in leadership wants to admit: The ants' intelligence doesn't emerge because individual ants got smarter. It emerges because of how they interact. Your cabinet? You've hired smarter and smarter ants. Sent them to better development programs. Given them corner offices and impressive titles. But you've never built the colony operating system. 73% of educational leadership teams in our study have higher individual IQ than collective intelligence. You're paying for genius and getting group project energy where everyone did their part, but nobody read anyone else's sections. Solomon told sluggards to go to the ant. I'm telling brilliant-but-stuck leaders the exact same thing. Comment "COLONY" if you've spent the last year hiring smarter ants and wondering why the colony isn't building anything. THE DIAGNOSIS: WHAT THE ANT KNOWS THAT YOUR PHDs DON'T Let's talk about this like adults who've survived at least one strategic planning retreat that somehow produced a beautiful vision statement and zero change in how your team actually operates. You know this meeting. I know you know it: Your VP of Enrollment presents compelling market data about declining numbers. Solid analysis. Clear recommendations. Your Chief Academic Officer immediately pivots: "We can't just chase numbers—we need to think about mission alignment." (Translation: I'm the guardian of academic integrity, and your proposal feels transactional. Also, I went to grad school for this, not to run a business.) Your CFO is already calculating ROI and asking about costs nobody's thought about yet. (Translation: I'm the adult who understands we can't spend money we don't have. Also, I'm the only one who actually reads the audit reports.) Your VP of Student Affairs is thinking about how this affects current students and whether anyone consulted them. (Translation: While you all strategize in the abstract, I actually talk to students. You know, the humans this is supposedly about?) Four brilliant perspectives. Each one valid. Each one advocating with genuine expertise. Zero synthesis. Zero integration. Zero collective intelligence. The meeting ends with everyone agreeing to "explore this further"—professional code for "we'll have this exact conversation in three weeks, except everyone will be slightly more exhausted." What actually happened? You had four separate monologues performed simultaneously. Four individual ants wandering in circles, each following their own pheromone trail, wondering why the colony isn't building anything. The ants don't do this. They can't afford to. A colony that operates like your cabinet meeting would be extinct in a week. The Loneliness of Seeing the Whole Nest I know the loneliness of being the leader in this moment. Of feeling like you're the only one who can see the whole nest while everyone else optimizes their individual tunnel. Of wondering if you're the problem because surely—SURELY—other leadership teams have figured out how to think collectively instead of just politely taking turns thinking individually. Of going home exhausted, not from hard work but from the emotional labor of being the only person trying to synthesize perspectives that should integrate naturally if you just had the right operating system. But here's what nobody tells you at leadership conferences: You're not the problem. You're trying to solve a colony problem with an ant solution. You keep hiring smarter ants. Sending them to better development programs. But individual ants—no matter how brilliant—can't solve problems that require colony-level intelligence. Solomon wasn't telling sluggards to work harder. He was telling them to work smarter—specifically, to work like a system rather than as isolated individuals. (This is actually why I created The GROUP —a free community where insights like this become Leader CORE Lessons you can deploy Monday morning. Because translating the ant paradox into Tuesday's cabinet meeting without an implementation guide is how good insights die in conference rooms. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) When Individual Genius Meets Collective Mediocrity Let me tell you about a community college president I'll call Marcus (not his real name, but Marcus, you know exactly which budget meeting made you finally admit your Avengers had never actually assembled). Marcus had a dream team on paper. CFO with an MBA from a top program. Chief Academic Officer with a track record of innovation. VP of Student Affairs who'd turned around retention twice before. Individual excellence? Off the charts. Each ant was brilliant—340,000 times smarter than the insects Solomon was watching. Cabinet meetings? Marcus described them as "watching brilliant people talk past each other in high definition while the institution slowly loses momentum." Someone would present an idea. Three others would immediately explain why it wouldn't work from their domain perspective. Decisions got made through exhaustion, not synthesis. Implementation was inconsistent because everyone left with different interpretations. The colony wasn't building anything. The ants were just wandering in increasingly frustrated circles. Marcus tried what you've probably tried: More communication training. Better meeting structures. Expensive retreat with a consultant who taught them "active listening." He sent people to individual development programs. Each person came back smarter, more skilled, better equipped—individually. Nothing changed collectively. Because Marcus was still breeding smarter ants when he needed to build colony intelligence. He was solving an operating system problem with a personnel solution. Tag the cabinet member who came back from their last conference excited and exhausted—whose brilliant insights somehow died in your first meeting back. THE FRAMEWORK: THE ANT PARADOX EQUATION Call this the Ant Paradox. Or don't. Either way, it'll explain why your brilliant cabinet consistently operates at 60% capacity—and what actually changes the equation. P = (p - i) (TQ) Performance equals potential minus interference, X Team Intelligence. This isn't new-age fluff. This is the mathematical expression of what Solomon observed three millennia ago when he watched ants outperform humans at collective work. 1. Your Potential Is Already There (The Ants Are Already Smart Enough) Think about your cabinet. Combined decades of experience. Multiple advanced degrees. Proven track records. Individually? Everyone's operating at 7-8 out of 10. Collectively? Your team is operating at 4-5 out of 10 of actual capacity. That 40% gap? That's not a personnel problem. That's the difference between individual ants and colony intelligence. And you can't close it by hiring better ants. Solomon didn't tell sluggards to become smarter. He told them to observe how already-smart-enough ants become collectively brilliant through their operating system. Your problem isn't insufficient individual intelligence. Your problem is the absence of protocols that turn individual intelligence into collective genius. 2. The Interference Is Killing Your Colony Every time your CFO and CAO have their polite disagreement about fiscal sustainability versus academic mission—without any framework for how both can be true simultaneously—that's interference. Every time someone leaves a meeting unclear about who actually decides what, that's interference. Every time perspectives collide instead of integrate, that's interference. Interference isn't drama. It's the friction that happens when high-performing individuals lack the operating system to become a high-performing collective. The ant colony solved this with pheromone trails—simple communication protocols that turn one ant's discovery into colony-level action. When one ant finds food, it doesn't schedule a meeting to discuss optimal resource allocation. It doesn't form a committee to study implementation. It doesn't send three follow-up emails clarifying the decision-making process. It leaves a chemical trail. Other ants follow it. The colony eats. Simple protocol. Zero interference. Maximum collective intelligence. You need the human equivalent. 3. Team Intelligence Is the Operating System Here's where 99% of leadership development completely misses Solomon's point: They try to make each individual better at communication. Better at strategy. Better at whatever competency is trending. They're breeding smarter ants. But TQ isn't about making individuals better. It's about creating conditions where your team's collective intelligence exceeds the sum of its parts. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ "The ant colony has foragers, soldiers, nurses, builders—specialized roles working in concert. Your team needs the same: diverse perspectives with integration protocols." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The breakthrough isn't getting your CFO to become more emotionally intuitive or your Student Affairs VP to become more financially analytical. The breakthrough is creating the operating system where all perspectives integrate into decisions better than any single leader could make alone. That's what the ants have that you don't: Not smarter individuals. Smarter interaction protocols. That's what Solomon saw that you've missed: The wisdom isn't in the ant. It's in how the ants work together. Marcus Built the Colony Operating System Marcus finally understood what Solomon was saying three thousand years ago: His team didn't need to work harder. They needed to work like a colony instead of isolated individuals. His team took the Team Intelligence assessment. (Results were humbling. His CFO: "Well, this explains why I leave every meeting feeling like I'm the only one who gets it"—which, plot twist, everyone else was also thinking.) They were operating at Level 7-8 individually but Level 3 collectively. High individual IQ, catastrophically low team operating system. They had brilliant ants with no pheromone trails. Here's what changed: Communication protocols —not "let's communicate better" platitudes, but actual rhythms for how perspectives integrate before decisions get made. Simple. Clear. Executable. When presenting a recommendation, include the perspective of at least two other roles. When someone presents, the next person synthesizes before adding. When we disagree, we state what would make both perspectives true before choosing. Decision rights —so people stopped treating every decision like it needed consensus. The ant colony doesn't vote on where to build the nest. It has clear protocols for when different roles engage. They mapped their top 10 decision types. Assigned clear rights. Watched 40% of meeting time vanish because they'd stopped having colony-level conversations about ant-level decisions. Thinking out loud together —not performative agreement, but actual cognitive diversity where "this is financially impossible" and "this is pedagogically essential" became inputs into a solution neither could see alone. Six months later: Same people. Same budget constraints. Same enrollment pressures. Cabinet meetings went from three hours of polite disagreement to 90 minutes of actual decision-making. Not because they agreed more—because they'd built the operating system for integrating disagreement into better solutions. Decisions got made faster, implemented more consistently, and actually stuck. Not because individuals got smarter—because the team got smarter. Marcus got 14 hours per week back. They stopped trying to hire smarter ants. They built the colony operating system that turned brilliant individuals into collective intelligence. They finally went to the ant. Considered its ways. And became wise. Revolutionary? No. Obvious? Yes, once you see it. Common? Based on 987 leadership teams—absolutely not. Now, if you're thinking "this makes perfect sense, but how do I actually facilitate the 'build our operating system' conversation with my cabinet on Tuesday without it turning into another meeting about meetings?"—I get it. That's the gap between insight and implementation. This is what The GROUP is for. Each week, I turn the newsletter topic into a Leader CORE Lesson and Guide: facilitation notes, discussion prompts, the Team Intelligence diagnostic, team exercises for building your operating system—everything you need to lead your team through this content without spending Sunday night trying to translate ant colonies into something your CFO won't roll their eyes at. It's free (because charging you to learn how ants solved this problem 100 million years ago would be peak irony), built for busy leaders who need practical resources, not more theory, and designed for Monday morning meetings when you're already exhausted. Grab this week's Ant Paradox implementation guide: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group But whether you join The GROUP or not, here's what you can implement immediately... THE APPLICATION: BUILDING YOUR COLONY OPERATING SYSTEM (MONDAY MORNING EDITION) Here's what to do Monday morning (assuming your cabinet isn't already in crisis mode from the three decisions you didn't make last week): STEP 1: The Ant Paradox Audit (20 minutes) At your next cabinet meeting, before diving into the seventeen urgent items everyone brought, put this on the agenda: "Solomon told sluggards to go to the ant because the ant had something they didn't. I'm going to suggest we have the same problem. Let's run a diagnostic. On a scale of 1-10, rate two things: 1. How smart is each person on this team individually? 2. How smart are we as a collective when solving complex problems together?" Write down answers privately. Then go around the room. What you'll discover: If Question 1 averages 7-8 and Question 2 averages 3-4, congratulations—you've just discovered you have brilliant ants with no colony operating system. If everyone rates both questions equally high, someone's lying (probably the person who scheduled three sidebar conversations before this meeting to "align" because they don't trust the group process). If answers vary wildly, you don't have shared understanding of whether you're even trying to build colony intelligence or just managing individual ants more efficiently. The diagnostic question: "Are we breeding smarter ants, or are we building a smarter colony?" If you don't know the answer, you're doing the first thing while hoping for the second. Solomon wouldn't be impressed. STEP 2: The Pheromone Trail Mapping Exercise (25 minutes) This one's uncomfortable but worth it: "The ant colony's intelligence lives in its pheromone trails—the communication protocols that turn one ant's discovery into colony-level action. Let's map our equivalent. Think about the last major decision we made. How did information actually flow? Who talked to whom? Whose perspective never made it into the final decision?" Draw it on a whiteboard. Literally map it. You'll probably discover one of three patterns: Pattern A - The Hub and Spoke: Everyone talks to you, but not to each other. You're trying to be the central processor for the entire colony. This is why you're exhausted. The ant colony doesn't work this way because it can't scale. Pattern B - The Siloed Clusters: Your CFO and VP of Operations talk. Your CAO and Student Affairs VP talk. But the two clusters never integrate. You have two colonies pretending to be one. Pattern C - The Random Chaos: Information flows based on whoever happens to run into whom in the hallway. Your "operating system" is geographic proximity and scheduling luck. None of these creates colony intelligence. They create very busy, very frustrated individual ants who are each 340,000 times smarter than actual ants but producing worse collective results. Now ask: "What would our pheromone trails need to look like for information from one perspective to actually inform action across the whole team?" Don't solve it yet. Just name what's missing. That gap between your current communication pattern and actual colony intelligence? That's your TQ deficit. That's what Solomon saw three thousand years ago that you're just now discovering. OBJECTION HANDLING "But we don't have time to think about ant colonies when we have actual crises to manage." You have crises BECAUSE you don't have colony intelligence. You're managing the same problems repeatedly because you've never built the operating system that would solve them collectively. Also, you just spent three hours in a cabinet meeting that produced zero decisions. You have 14 hours per week trapped in meeting cycles that don't work. You don't have time NOT to build this. The ants figured this out while also building nests, farming food, and defending against predators. You can figure it out while managing enrollment and budgets. Solomon didn't tell busy people to go to the ant. He told sluggards—people who were working but getting nowhere. That's the diagnostic: Are you working, or are you building? THE MATURITY SHIFT ❌ Immature leaders think: "I need to hire smarter people." ✅ Mature leaders think: "I need to build the operating system that makes my smart people collectively brilliant." ❌ Immature leaders optimize individual ants. They send people to development programs, hire consultants for better communication, add more expertise to the table, and wonder why team performance stays flat. ✅ Mature leaders build colony intelligence. They create interaction protocols, communication rhythms, and decision-making frameworks that turn brilliant individuals into collective genius. ❌ Immature leaders believe: "If everyone just did their part better, we'd get better results." ✅ Mature leaders know: "If we built better integration protocols, doing our parts would produce exponential results." The sluggard works hard but gets nowhere. The wise person goes to the ant, considers its ways, and builds differently. The difference is the difference between breeding smarter ants and building a smarter colony. One keeps you busy managing individual performance. One makes impossible inevitable because you've unlocked the collective intelligence that was always there—you just never built the operating system to access it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ "You have smarter ants than the ants do. You just don't have their colony operating system. And until you build it, you'll keep hiring smarter individuals while getting the same mediocre collective results." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The ant paradox isn't a cute nature metaphor. It's a brutal diagnosis of why your brilliant cabinet consistently underperforms its potential. Solomon saw it three thousand years ago. The ants figured it out 100 million years ago. You're still trying to solve it with better meeting agendas and individual development programs. That's not a personnel problem. It's an operating system problem. And unlike your budget constraints or enrollment challenges, this one is 100% within your control to fix. YOUR TURN: THE QUESTION SOLOMON ASKED THREE THOUSAND YEARS AGO Think about your last major decision as a cabinet. Honest assessment—did you synthesize multiple perspectives into something better than any single view? Or did you average perspectives into a compromise that satisfied no one? Did you work like a colony? Or like individual ants wandering in circles while calling it collaboration? Drop a comment with your cabinet's Ant Paradox score: Rate individual intelligence 1-10, then collective intelligence 1-10. Post both numbers. Let's see how many brilliant leadership teams are operating at ant-level collective intelligence. Tag the cabinet member who you think sees this pattern too. Or screenshot the ant paradox section and text it to your CFO with the message "We need to talk about Tuesday's meeting." P.S. IF YOU'RE THINKING "I DON'T HAVE TIME TO TURN THIS INTO A TEAM MEETING RESOURCE" I already did it for you. The GROUP is a free community where every newsletter becomes a ready-to-deploy Leader CORE Lesson and Guide. Facilitation notes. Discussion prompts. Team exercises. The Team Intelligence diagnostic that shows your team exactly where their operating system breaks down. JOIN THE GROUP: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group Think of it as the meal kit version of team development. I prep the ingredients and recipe. You just facilitate. Your team gets fed. Everybody wins. Plus, you get access to hundreds of campus leaders who are also trying to eliminate their performance gaps and understand why their last cabinet meeting went sideways. The implementation guides save you hours. The peer conversations? Those might save your sanity. FOUND THIS VALUABLE? The LinkedIn algorithm won't show this to your network unless YOU share it: → Repost with YOUR Ant Paradox score (individual IQ vs. collective IQ—be honest) → Tag 3 cabinet members trapped in the meeting cycle → Comment: "COLONY" if you're ready to build the operating system Tag DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group in your repost. (LinkedIn's algorithm prioritizes posts that generate tags and reposts in first 2 hours. Help other leaders discover this.) The more leaders who shift from individual heroics to team intelligence, the better our educational systems become. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights. NEXT ISSUE: "Your Cabinet Is The Avengers (If Nobody Watched Each Other's Movies)"  We'll explore why your all-star leadership team operates like superheroes who've never fought together—each one brilliant in isolation, each one solving problems with their signature move, but with zero coordination when the real battle starts. Spoiler: You're not having a talent problem. You're having an integration problem, and no amount of individual superpowers fixes a team that's never learned to assemble.

Higher Performance Insights | THE HUMILITY PARADOX

By HPG Info • November 25, 2025
Walk Into Any Leadership Conference and Try This Experiment Read through the conference program. What do you see? 247 breakout sessions on "executive presence." 3 on humility. And those three? Empty rooms at 3 PM on Friday when everyone's already at the airport bar calculating if they can make the earlier flight. Nobody flies to San Diego to learn how to look less certain. Here's the data that should terrify you: 73% of educational leaders in our 987-team study privately admit they're making it up as they go. Yet 94% project absolute certainty in public—in board meetings, cabinet sessions, and all-staff addresses where doubt would be career suicide. That 21-point gap between private reality and public performance? That's not strategic leadership. That's organizational theater. And it's costing you the one thing that actually multiplies team capacity. A cultural analyst recently said something that stopped me cold: "Humility has come under attack in our society. Self-effacement became identified with weakness. A different ethos took over—expressive individualism. Salvation is now found through intimate contact with oneself and exposing the power within." In plain English: We've trained leaders to believe their job is managing their personal brand, not developing their team's collective intelligence. We built an entire leadership development industry around projecting strength. Then we wonder why our teams can't think together under pressure. Here's what nobody tells you at those conferences (because vulnerability doesn't sell tickets): The superintendents and presidents whose teams actually multiply capacity—who turn 8 people into what feels like 25—they've figured out something the confident performers haven't. They've learned that certainty kills curiosity. That "I don't know" opens more doors than "trust me." That the leader who admits confusion creates space for collective problem-solving, while the leader who fakes clarity creates teams that wait for orders. The paradox: Strong teams aren't built by strong leaders performing strength. They're built by secure leaders practicing humility. Your turn: When's the last time you doubled down on a position in a meeting—not because you believed it, but because changing your mind would look weak? Drop a number in the comments: how many times THIS YEAR has that happened? (I'll start: At least 4. Maybe 6. Definitely more than I want you to know about.) THE DIAGNOSIS: Why Smart Leaders Fight Like Street Gangs (And Don't Even Know It) Let's talk about this like adults who've survived multiple board presentations where you had to defend decisions you weren't entirely sure about while projecting absolute conviction the entire time. Here's what actually happened in your last cabinet meeting (the real version, not the minutes): Scenario 1: The Territorial Defense Someone advocated for their position way more forcefully than the data warranted. Not because they were certain they were right. Because they needed to win. Their credibility felt at stake in front of peers. In K-12: Your Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum can't let the Assistant Superintendent for Finance "win" the budget allocation argument—even when Finance's numbers are solid—because losing feels like professional diminishment. In Higher Ed: Your Dean of Liberal Arts can't concede that the Dean of Business has a valid enrollment strategy point, because agreement feels like surrender, and surrender feels like irrelevance. Scenario 2: The Defensive Recoil Someone received actually useful feedback and reacted like they'd been personally attacked. You watched them shut down, get defensive, or start building the counterargument before the feedback was even finished. Scenario 3: The Subtle Undermining Someone couldn't just let their colleague's good idea stand on its own. They had to add a qualifier. Point out a flaw. Subtly reposition it so their own contribution felt equally important. You've seen this. You've probably done this. (I definitely have.) Scenario 4: The Performance Everyone nodded agreement during the meeting. Then three separate people texted their real thoughts to someone NOT in the room afterward. You built a team that performs collaboration but practices competition. And here's what nobody wants to say out loud: This isn't because you hired bad people. This is because you hired humans. The Root Cause Nobody Names Here's the uncomfortable diagnosis, and I'm going to be direct because I spent 25 years in the loneliness of the senior leadership seat: We live in a state of cosmic insecurity. Stay with me for 60 seconds before you dismiss this as psychobabble. Think about street gangs. Young men who don't feel valued by society or their families. They walk down the street, and if you slight them even slightly, they'll pummel you. Why? Because they're what the ancient Greeks called "glory empty"—desperately hungry for respect, for validation, for assurance that they matter. You're thinking: "Well sure, but that's THEM. They have self-esteem issues." Except for those who study history, nation-states have always acted exactly like street gangs. Slight them diplomatically, and they go to war. Why? Because nations are just collections of glory-empty humans operating collectively the same way they operate individually. And your cabinet? Your leadership team? Same dynamics. Just with better credentials and conference rooms instead of street corners. Why? Here's the brutal truth: We were made to live in the presence of something transcendent that gave us permanent, unshakeable worth. But we've built a professional culture where worth is temporary, conditional, and constantly up for negotiation. So we fight. For recognition. For credit. For assurance that we're not ephemeral. That we won't be forgotten. That we matter. A leadership writer captured it perfectly: "Pride in the spiritual sense is refusal to let anything greater than yourself define your worth. It's grabbing ultimate status for yourself—wishing to be self-sufficient, relying only on your own resources. That is the greatest illusion, the cosmic delusion that we can make it as our own gods. Which leaves us empty at the center. " Empty at the center. So we swagger. We bluff. We attack anyone who threatens our fragile sense that we're real. We use people as buttresses for shaky egos. Life becomes a constant battle to prove we count. And leadership teams become battlegrounds dressed up as strategic planning sessions. (This is actually why I created The GROUP —a free community where we stop performing leadership and start practicing actual team development together. Where we name this stuff instead of pretending it doesn't exist. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) I know the loneliness of being the only person in the room who sees this pattern. Of wondering if YOU'RE the problem because surely other leadership teams don't operate like a group project where everyone's protecting their territory. Comment "LONELY" if you've ever felt like the only person who sees how dysfunctional the dynamics actually are. THE FRAMEWORK: What Humility Actually Is (And Why Ancient Wisdom Demolishes Modern Leadership Theory) Call this the Humility Architecture. Or don't. It'll still explain why your cabinet of brilliant individuals produces mediocre collective results. Here's what nobody tells you at leadership conferences: In ancient Greco-Roman culture, humility wasn't a virtue—it was an insult. The Greek word tapeinophrosyne meant "lowliness of mind"—the disposition of a slave. That entire civilization was built on a hierarchy where strength commanded, weakness obeyed, and humility was literally the posture of the conquered. Social order rested on power and fear. Leaders projected dominance. Humility was career death—if you even had a career. Then Christianity showed up and flipped the entire script. Suddenly, the guy washing his disciples' feet was the model of leadership. "Blessed are the meek" became revolutionary philosophy. The last shall be first. The greatest among you must be a servant. This wasn't just religious teaching—it was a civilizational operating system upgrade. Within a few centuries, humility transformed from slave-virtue to leadership virtue. Western culture's entire conception of moral authority shifted from "power over others" to "service to others." (Yes, Christians spent the next 2,000 years frequently forgetting this and building their own power hierarchies. The irony is not lost on me. But the philosophical shift stuck—humility became something worth aspiring to, not hiding.) Fast forward to 1982. That's when the modern self-esteem movement launched in California—naturally—with a state task force literally titled "Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility." The pendulum swung hard. Humility became confused with low self-esteem. Confidence became the currency. "Believe in yourself" replaced "know yourself." We went from servant leadership back to... well, basically Greco-Roman leadership with better presentation decks. By the 2000s, we'd completed the regression: Leadership development became about executive presence, personal branding, and projecting certainty. Admitting "I don't know" became weakness. Changing your mind became flip-flopping. We reverse-engineered our way back to ancient Rome, except now leaders wear Patagonia vests instead of togas. Here's the thing that changes everything: The teams that actually work—the ones that multiply capacity instead of just adding headcount—they're operating on the ancient Christian model, not the modern confidence model. They've figured out what took Western civilization 400 years to learn the first time: Humility isn't weakness. It's the foundation of collective intelligence. When leaders practice genuine humility—not false modesty, not performative self-deprecation, but actual "I might be wrong about this" openness—something shifts. Teams stop performing agreement and start thinking together. The leader who says "I'm certain" creates followers. The leader who says "I'm uncertain, let's figure this out" creates thinkers. One builds a reporting structure. One builds a team. The ancient Greeks would have called the second leader weak. They'd also be confused about why that leader's "weak" team is outperforming everyone else's "strong" one. Turns out civilizational wisdom was right the first time. Let me give you four diagnostic tools—four things humility is NOT. Which means if you're doing these things, you're operating in pride (even if it doesn't feel like it): 1. HUMILITY IS THE OPPOSITE OF DRIVENNESS Be careful here. You can be passionate, hardworking, and pursuing excellence because you genuinely love what you're doing. That's not drivenness. Drivenness is when your competitiveness comes from an inner vacuum rather than outer joy. The test : If your colleague achieves the breakthrough you've been working toward, are you almost as genuinely happy as if you'd achieved it yourself? Or does their success somehow diminish yours? One philosopher nailed it: "Pride gets no pleasure out of having something—only having MORE of it than the next person. You're not proud of being intelligent until you're more intelligent than your colleagues. Pride is comparative. It's the pleasure of being above the rest." Observable reality in your cabinet : The person who can't celebrate anyone else's wins without adding their own accomplishment to the conversation Who tracks whose ideas get implemented more frequently Who measures their worth by comparing their impact to everyone else's Who's always restless, always unhappy with their performance, always needing the next win to feel okay In K-12 : The principal who can't let another principal's building outperform theirs without finding ways to explain why it doesn't really count. The assistant superintendent who subtly undermines district initiatives that didn't originate in their portfolio. In Higher Ed : The dean who can't acknowledge another college's enrollment success without mentioning that college's "different circumstances" or "lower standards." The VP who literally tracks which recommendations the president implements most frequently. If you're driven, restless, always competing—you're not pursuing excellence. You're medicating emptiness. Humility is content. Not complacent—content. Massive difference. 2. HUMILITY IS THE OPPOSITE OF SCORNFULNESS Treating others with contempt—jeering, ridiculing, the constant sarcastic put-down—is always a manifestation of pride. Why? Because you're putting people down (notice that's literally the metaphor we use), so you can position yourself above them. Humility means treating everyone—especially those who are less credentialed than you or opposed to your position—with courtesy, grace, and respect. Always. Observable reality : The leader whose default response to opposing viewpoints is mockery Who uses humor as a weapon Who needs others to be wrong so they can feel right Whose meeting contributions regularly include subtle digs at colleagues' intelligence or competence Quick diagnostic : Do your "jokes" about team members make them smaller so you can feel bigger? 3. HUMILITY IS THE OPPOSITE OF WILLFULNESS One writer observed: "Spiritually proud people are always absolutely sure of every point of their beliefs." Proud people cannot admit they're wrong. Can't take advice. Can't take correction. They don't like repenting—and when they do, it's always under duress. They're not teachable. They're not open to changing their minds. They don't actually listen. Observable reality : That cabinet member who has never once said, "You know what? I was completely wrong about that." Who interprets every piece of feedback as a personal attack Who treats correction as disrespect Who can't distinguish between "your idea needs refinement" and "you are inadequate as a person" The test : When was the last time you admitted you were completely wrong about something you were certain you were right about? Not "I could have communicated better" (that's not admitting you were wrong—that's blaming communication). I mean, actually, substantively wrong. If you can't remember? That's diagnostic. 4. HUMILITY IS THE OPPOSITE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS This is the sneaky one. Because we almost always think proud people are arrogant—self-promoters who constantly brag, with superiority complexes. But pride manifests just as powerfully through inferiority feelings. Because ultimately, pride is insecurity—this desperate need for honor, this hunger for glory. And that expresses itself as much through self-doubt as through self-promotion. If you're always doubting yourself, always beating yourself up, if you're terrified of compliments or attention, it's because you're just as painfully self-aware as the arrogant person. You're just as absorbed in thinking about yourself. You're just looking through a different lens. Here's the insight that changes everything: Real humility is not thinking less of yourself. It's not thinking more of yourself. It's thinking of yourself LESS. Self-forgetfulness. Not self-hatred. Not self-promotion. Self-forgetfulness. The Body Part Test When do you think about your elbow? Only when something's wrong with it. When it's functioning properly, you never think about your elbow at all. Now think about your ego, your sense of self. If you were psychologically healthy, you wouldn't constantly think about: How you're doing How you're looking What people are saying about you Whether that person respects you How you came across in that meeting You'd be thinking about other things—your mission, your team, the people you serve, the problems you're solving. But instead, you're always monitoring yourself. Getting your feelings hurt. Feeling slighted. Wondering if that person likes you. Replaying conversations to analyze your performance. Why? Because something's wrong with your ego. Just like something's wrong with your elbow when you can't stop thinking about it. We're not healthy. We're glory-empty. And as a result, we're filled with drivenness, scornfulness, willfulness, and self-consciousness. Which of these four is your primary struggle? Comment just the word—drivenness, scornfulness, willfulness, or self-consciousness. No explanation needed. (Notice how hard even THAT admission is? That difficulty is itself diagnostic.) THE CASE STUDY: The President Who Stopped Trying to Look Humble Let me tell you about a university president I'll call Marcia (not her real name, but Marcia, if you're reading this, you absolutely know this story is about you and you're smiling right now). Marcia inherited a cabinet of seven VPs. All credentialed. All experienced. Combined IQ that could literally cure diseases. Combined ability to work as a unified team? Roughly equivalent to a committee trying to decide on pizza toppings while honoring everyone's dietary restrictions and also addressing systemic inequity in pizza distribution. Her first 90 days, she tried everything leadership books recommend: Strategic planning sessions Vision alignment workshops Team-building exercises (they did an escape room—everyone escaped, nobody's relationships improved) Nothing changed. Here's what Marcia finally realized: Her team wasn't dysfunctional because they lacked skills. They were dysfunctional because every single person—herself included—was operating from glory-emptiness. ✅ Her CFO needed to be seen as the smartest person in financial discussions. ✅ Her CAO needed recognition as the institutional visionary. ✅ Her VP of Advancement needed credit for revenue growth. ✅ Her VP of Enrollment needed acknowledgment for recruitment strategies. Nobody was thinking about the institution. Everyone was thinking about their reputation within the institution. The Turning Point Marcia did something radical. She stopped trying to fix the team's behavior and started addressing the team's orientation. She asked each VP privately: "When you think about your work here, what are you most afraid of?" The answers were devastatingly honest: "That people will think I'm not adding real value" "That I'll be exposed as not knowing enough" "That my successor will do it better and people will realize I wasn't that great" "That I'll be forgotten after I leave" Glory-emptiness. All of them. Including Marcia. Then she asked a different question at their next retreat: "What if your professional reputation didn't matter at all? What if you were already fully known, fully valued, fully secure in your worth—not because of your accomplishments but just because of who you are? How would you lead differently?" The room went silent for 45 seconds. (Which in a room full of executives feels like 45 minutes.) Then her VP of Finance said: "I'd probably ask for help more. I'd admit when I don't know something instead of pretending I do." Her CAO said: "I'd stop fighting for my ideas and start building on other people's ideas. I'd care more about the best solution than my solution." Her VP of Advancement said: "I'd stop tracking whose initiatives get credit and just focus on what actually grows the institution." Marcia said: "What if we all started operating that way? Not because we've achieved perfect self-actualization, but because we're practicing a different orientation—one where our worth isn't constantly up for negotiation?" The Results Six months later: Same people. Same challenges. Different operating system. They'd built what Marcia called "a culture of self-forgetfulness" —not self-hatred, not self-promotion, but genuine focus on mission over reputation. The changes: Cabinet meetings became 40% shorter (people stopped positioning, started problem-solving) Decision velocity increased 3x (people cared more about right answers than being right) Innovation accelerated (people stopped protecting territory) Voluntary turnover dropped to zero (previously losing 1-2 VPs annually) Student outcomes up 12% Faculty satisfaction up 18% Board confidence dramatically increased (the cabinet finally looked like a team instead of competing empires) Marcia told me: "Humility isn't something you achieve. It's what happens when you stop needing achievement to prove you matter. That shift changes absolutely everything." The difference? They stopped trying to fill their glory-emptiness through work performance. They started operating from a completely different foundation. Now, if you're thinking "this makes philosophical sense, but how do I actually build this into my team's operating system on Tuesday?"—I get it. That's exactly the gap between insight and implementation. This is what The GROUP is for. Each week, I turn the newsletter topic into a Leader CORE Lesson and Guide: facilitation scripts for vulnerability-based conversations, diagnostic tools for identifying glory-emptiness in your team, exercises for practicing self-forgetfulness together, and frameworks that make this concrete rather than theoretical. It's free (because charging for the solution to glory-emptiness would be peak irony), and built specifically for leaders who need Monday morning resources, not more Sunday night philosophy. Grab this week's Humility Architecture implementation guide: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group But whether you join The GROUP or not, here's what you can implement immediately... THE APPLICATION: What To Do Monday Morning (Before Your Team Implodes) Here's what to do Monday morning (assuming your calendar isn't already booked with meetings about meetings): STEP 1: THE PRIDE DIAGNOSTIC AUDIT (20 minutes alone, possibly uncomfortable) You can't work on humility directly. Remember—humility is self-forgetfulness. The moment you start monitoring whether you're humble, you've lost it. But you CAN identify pride. And pride has four telltale manifestations. Pull out paper. Be brutally honest. Rate yourself 1-10 on each: DRIVENNESS : Do I need to win? Am I restless with my performance? Do others' successes diminish mine? Do I compare my impact to everyone else's constantly? (1 = content and joyful, 10 = constant need to prove myself) SCORNFULNESS : Do I use sarcasm as a weapon? Mock people whose positions threaten mine? Do my "jokes" make others smaller? (1 = treat everyone with courtesy, 10 = regular contempt for those who oppose or outperform me) WILLFULNESS : Can I admit I'm wrong? Am I teachable? Do I take advice? Can I change my mind when presented with better information? (1 = regularly admit mistakes and change course, 10 = never wrong, always certain) SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS : How much time do I spend thinking about how I'm coming across? Monitoring whether people respect me? Replaying conversations to analyze my performance? (1 = rarely think about myself, 10 = constantly monitoring my reputation) Add up your scores. If you're above 28, you have a pride problem that's costing your team more than your budget shortfall. Now the hard part: Ask 2-3 people who work closely with you to rate you on these same four dimensions. Don't explain what they mean—just give them the four words and the 1-10 scale. If their average rating is more than 5 points different from yours, that gap IS your leadership problem. Not your strategy. Not your resources. The gap between how you see yourself and how your team experiences you. STEP 2: THE REPUTATION RELEASE EXERCISE (15 minutes, possibly terrifying) This is adapted from one of the humblest leaders I ever worked with. He couldn't stand two things: underperforming and unfair criticism. Here's what he learned: He meditated on the idea that his reputation ultimately matters less than his contribution. Try this: Identify the thing that most threatens your sense of professional worth: Unfair criticism from your board? Being outperformed by a peer? Not getting credit for your ideas? Being forgotten after you leave? Someone discovering you don't know something you're supposed to know? Write it down. Be specific. Name the scenario that makes your stomach drop. Now write this sentence: "If [the scenario you fear] happened, and my reputation suffered, would my contribution still matter? Would the lives I've impacted still count? Would the systems I've built still serve people?" The answer, of course, is yes. Your reputation isn't your contribution. Your reputation is other people's current opinion of your contribution. Opinions are temporary. Actual impact is real. The practice : When you feel that reputation-threat fear rising (someone criticizes you, someone gets credit for your idea, someone outperforms you), pause and ask: "Am I protecting my reputation or serving my mission?" If you're protecting reputation, you're operating in pride. If you're serving mission, reputation becomes irrelevant. STEP 3: THE SELF-FORGETFULNESS CONVERSATION (30 minutes with your team, zero BS) At your next cabinet meeting, add this agenda item: "The thing we don't talk about." Say this (I'm giving you the exact script): "I've been thinking about something. I think our team operates with more self-consciousness than self-forgetfulness. Meaning: I think we all spend more mental energy monitoring how we're perceived than serving our mission. And I include myself—probably especially myself—in that assessment. So here's my question: What would have to be true for each of us to stop thinking about our reputation and start thinking only about our contribution? I'll go first. [Share your answer honestly. This ONLY works if you model vulnerability first.] Then I want to hear from each of you. Not performatively. Just honestly." Then shut up and let the silence do its work. Someone will break first. Usually the person you least expect. And they'll say something like: "I spend way too much time making sure people know what I'm contributing" "I can't celebrate other people's wins because I'm always comparing" "I'm exhausted from managing how I'm perceived" That's your opening. That's where humility begins—with people admitting they're glory-empty and tired of performing fullness. OBJECTION HANDLING "This sounds like therapy, not leadership development." Fair pushback. Except here's the data: Leadership teams in the top quartile for humility-based competencies outperform their peers by 43% on institutional objective achievement. Teams marked by drivenness, scornfulness, willfulness, and self-consciousness consistently underperform their talent level by 30-40%. You can call it therapy. I call it the foundation that determines whether strategy actually works. Also: You're currently spending approximately 12 hours per week managing your reputation (conservative estimate). That's 624 hours annually performing confidence you don't always feel. How's that working for your actual results? "My team will think I've lost it if I start talking about 'glory-emptiness'" Then don't use that language. Use this language: "I think we're spending more energy on perception management than problem-solving, and it's measurably costing us." That's concrete. Observable. And if one person has the courage to admit it, everyone else will recognize it immediately. Yes, this conversation will be uncomfortable. That discomfort is diagnostic. If you can't have this conversation, your team is operating at Level 1-2 trust, which means you absolutely cannot do Level 5 work (transformation, change leadership, conflict resolution). The math doesn't care about your comfort. THE MATURITY SHIFT ❌ Immature leaders think: "I need to project confidence to earn respect." ✅ Mature leaders think: "I need to demonstrate humility to build trust" ❌ Immature leaders measure success by how they're perceived. ✅ Mature leaders measure success by what they've contributed ❌ Immature leaders see vulnerability as career-limiting weakness. ✅ Mature leaders see vulnerability as the foundation of team cohesion ❌Immature leaders need to be the smartest person in the room. ✅ Mature leaders build the smartest room ❌ Immature leaders are terrified of being forgotten. ✅ Mature leaders focus on building something worth remembering ❌ Immature leaders collect accolades like Pokemon cards. ✅ Mature leaders give away credit like it's infinite (because it is) The difference is the difference between glory-seeking and mission-serving. One makes you exhausting to work with. One makes impossible inevitable. Here's the paradox nobody warns you about: The way up is down. The way to be truly great is to stop needing to be seen as great. The most powerful thing you can do is give away power for others' flourishing. Your cabinet doesn't need another strategic planning session about excellence. It needs a fundamental reorientation away from glory-seeking and toward mission-serving. Everything else is decoration on a foundation that doesn't exist. Your turn—which of the four pride patterns is your dominant struggle? Comment just one word: drivenness, scornfulness, willfulness, or self-consciousness. No explanation needed. Or screenshot the maturity shift section and text it to your CFO with: "This is the conversation we've been avoiding." Or tag a cabinet member who actually models self-forgetfulness and tell them specifically what you admire about their humility. (Naming it when you see it reinforces it.) CLOSING: You Just Read About Your Actual Problem You just invested 14 minutes learning why your team's performance problem is actually an orientation problem. Glory-emptiness masquerading as confidence. Self-consciousness disguised as strategic positioning. Competition wearing a collaboration costume. Here's how to make sure this insight compounds instead of evaporating by Tuesday morning: OPTION 1: JOIN THE GROUP (FREE) Turn every newsletter into ready-to-deploy team resources. What you get: Implementation guides that save you 3+ hours per week Facilitation scripts for vulnerability-based conversations Diagnostic tools for identifying pride patterns in your team Peer community of campus leaders practicing self-forgetfulness together Monthly live problem-solving sessions (zero PowerPoints about synergy) Your Natural Leadership Profile diagnostic This week's guide turns this exact newsletter into your next cabinet meeting agenda —including word-for-word scripts for the reputation release exercise and the self-forgetfulness conversation. JOIN THE GROUP : https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group OPTION 2: SUBSCRIBE TO LEADER INSIGHTS (ALSO FREE) Get these provocations delivered weekly to your inbox. Frameworks nobody else is teaching. Patterns nobody else is naming. Case studies about leaders who stopped performing and started building. SUBSCRIBE TO THE BLOG : https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/blog Pick one. Pick both. Just don't pick neither. Because your alternative is continuing to lead from glory-emptiness and hoping different results materialize through better strategic plans and more leadership books. (Spoiler: They won't.) YOUR MOVE Found this valuable? → Repost this with the one pride pattern you're committing to address → Tag a leader who models self-forgetfulness and tell them specifically why → Comment below : Which costs your team more—your drivenness, scornfulness, willfulness, or self-consciousness? The more leaders who shift from glory-seeking to mission-serving, the better our educational institutions become. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights. NEXT ISSUE: "Your Cabinet Is Performing Collaboration (But Practicing Competition)" We'll explore why your leadership team looks unified in meetings but operates like rival factions between them—complete with pre-meeting lobbying, post-meeting damage control, and enough political positioning to make the UN Security Council look efficient. Spoiler: You're not having a communication problem. You're having a glory-emptiness problem wearing a collaboration costume. And it's costing you more than your entire professional development budget combined.  P.S. If you're thinking "I don't have time to turn this into a facilitation plan for Tuesday's cabinet meeting"—I already did it for you. The GROUP implementation guide includes the exact 30-minute conversation script (word-for-word, including how to handle the awkward silence), the diagnostic audit template you can print and use tomorrow, and the reputation release exercise with real examples from campus leaders—everything formatted for copy-paste deployment into your Tuesday cabinet meeting. It's free. It saves you hours. And it might actually change your team's entire operating system. Join here: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group
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