Are Your People Line Items Or Someone's Precious Child? Do this math: 500 staff × 2,080 hours/year = 1,040,000 hours of someone's precious child's life you're stewarding annually. Not "FTEs." Not "human capital." Someone's daughter. Someone's son. 73% of superintendents and presidents in our 987-team study can't name ONE person whose actual life—marriage, parenting, mental health—improved because they work there. That silence? That's the question costing you everything that matters. Fair warning: This newsletter will take 8 minutes to read. That's 8 minutes you could spend on: Prepping for tomorrow's board presentation about declining enrollment Responding to the parent/trustee who emailed your personal cell (again) Explaining to your spouse why you missed another dinner Doom-scrolling LinkedIn wondering if other educational leaders feel this lonely But if you're a superintendent or campus president whose talented cabinet produces mediocre results while everyone's exhausted... If you've ever gone home wondering whether you're breaking people to hit state accountability metrics or enrollment targets... If you've ever felt the loneliness of being the only person who sees the pattern while your board asks, "Why can't we just do what that other district/institution does?"... This might be the most important 8 minutes of your week. Your call. [Still here? Let's go.] ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🧮 THE STEWARDSHIP CALCULATOR Calculate your responsibility right now: _____ (your staff count) × 2,080 hours/year = ________ hours That's how many hours you're responsible for someone's precious child each year. That's not a budget line. That's someone's daughter going through a divorce while trying to manage 45 teachers or 85 faculty members. That's someone's son missing his kid's baseball game—again—because you scheduled another "urgent alignment meeting." Screenshot this calculation, fill in your numbers, and post it with your biggest realization. Tag DR. JOE HILL so I can see what you're discovering. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS LIKE ADULTS WHO KNOW THE INDUSTRIAL MODEL BROKE PEOPLE BY DESIGN Here's the pattern nobody discusses at AASA or NASPA conferences (because dismantling 150 years of industrial-era thinking doesn't fit on a PowerPoint): Monday, 6:45 AM: You're in your car in the parking lot, finishing the "quick alignment call" with your Director of Curriculum or Dean of Liberal Arts before the day starts. You need their proposal ready for Thursday's board meeting because the trustees are asking questions about reading scores or retention rates. Again. You communicate urgency—not with hostility, just with that edge that says, "I need this yesterday because the board won't accept 'we're working on it.'" Monday, 5:45 PM: They walk through their door. Their spouse sees "the person I chose to build a life with." Their middle schooler or college-age kid needs help with homework or life advice. But the stress you created at 6:45 AM? It's sitting at their dinner table at 5:45 PM. Monday, 7:15 PM: Their kid asks for help. But your curriculum director is mentally still in that car, calculating how to defend her timeline while managing 8 principals who all interpret "district curriculum" differently. Your dean is mentally still in that parking lot, calculating how to explain to 85 faculty why their departments matter when majors are declining. They snap at their kid. Not because they're bad parents. Because you never realized that superintendent and presidential urgency doesn't stay in the parking lot—it goes home with everyone in your cabinet. Quick gut-check: Think about the last time you sent an urgent text to a direct report after 7 PM. What time did THEIR family eat dinner that night? And what version of that person showed up at the table? Comment with the honest time you sent your last after-hours "urgent" message. Let's examine this pattern honestly. (This is actually why I built The GROUP —a free community where we dismantle industrial-era leadership and rebuild around purpose and connection. Where these provocations become Leader CORE Lessons you can actually deploy Monday morning without the translation tax. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) Here's what the data screams: 74% of chronic illnesses are stress-related. The most significant cause of stress? Work. The biggest cause of work stress? Leaders who still think humans are interchangeable parts in a machine. You're not just failing to close achievement gaps or stabilize enrollment. You're literally—and I mean literally—affecting whether your principal's or dean's marriage survives. Whether their kids feel loved. Whether they can sleep at night. And that principal or dean? They're doing the same thing to 45 teachers or 85 faculty members. Who go home to their families carrying that stress. Who bring it into classrooms where 600 students or 1,200 undergraduates feel it. The industrial model didn't just break organizational charts. It broke families. And we're still running the same system, wondering why everyone's burned out. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎯 THE FRAMEWORK: Three Ways To See People (And Only One That Actually Works) Call this the Stewardship Equation. Or don't. It'll still explain why your talented cabinet produces mediocre results while everyone's working themselves to death. Most leaders think: Competence + Hard Work = Results But the actual equation is: How You Make People Feel × Their Competence × Their Effort = Results Miss that first variable? Everything multiplies by zero. Math doesn't care about your strategic plan. THE THREE LEADERSHIP APPROACHES (A 150-YEAR EVOLUTION) APPROACH 1: PEOPLE AS EXPENSES (Industrial Era - 1870s-1970s) This is where Frederick Taylor broke American work culture. People are interchangeable parts. Costs to be managed. When you don't need them, you eliminate them. When budgets tighten, you "right-size." The language is designed to dehumanize so you don't have to feel what you're actually doing. K-12 Observable Reality: A superintendent once told me he was proud of his district's innovative STEM initiative. I asked how many people worked there. "450," he said. "So you'll champion programs, but what are you investing in the 450 people who have to implement those programs? Do they feel they matter, or do they feel like mechanisms for your strategic plan?" Long pause. "I never thought about it that way." Higher Ed Observable Reality: A president contributed significantly to her institution's capital campaign—buildings, scholarships, endowed chairs. When I asked about her 800 employees, she said the same thing: "I never thought about them that way." That's not unusual. That's normal. We inherited a system that celebrates initiatives while ignoring the humans who make them possible. The multiplication effect: When you treat people as expenses, they give you expense-level performance. They show up. They comply. They collect paychecks. But their gifts? Their creativity? Their discretionary effort? You'll never see it. Because why would someone give their best to someone who sees them as a cost center? Your principals manage crises but don't lead transformation. Your deans meet targets but don't build cultures of excellence. Your teachers and faculty comply but don't innovate. Real talk: Think about your last major initiative. How much time did you spend planning the program vs. ensuring your people wouldn't take implementation stress home to their families? Comment "PROGRAM" or "PEOPLE" with your honest answer. APPROACH 2: PEOPLE AS HUMAN RESOURCES (Enlightened Management - 1980s-2010s) You've read the books. You know EQ matters. You talk about "culture" and "psychological safety." You took your cabinet on a retreat with trust falls and personality assessments. Progress! But you're still fundamentally transactional. You're nice to people because research says nice bosses get better performance. You care about retention because turnover is expensive. You invest in development because it improves outcomes. You're treating people better, but you're still treating them as mechanisms for your success. K-12 Observable Reality: A superintendent implemented comprehensive wellness programs—yoga classes, mental health days, stress management workshops. Great stuff. Then budget cuts came. Guess what got eliminated first? Higher Ed Observable Reality: A president launched an ambitious faculty wellbeing initiative—sabbatical support, mental health resources, work-life balance programs. The board loved it. Then enrollment dipped. Guess what got cut to "preserve core mission"? The wellness programs. Because they were never about caring for people as precious children. They were about managing turnover and reducing sick days. When programs became expensive, they revealed themselves as tools for managing human capital, not expressions of genuine care. The multiplication effect: This gets you to adequate. People perform. They might even be engaged. But you're leaving exponential potential on the table because people can sense when they're being managed versus when they're being cared for. Your principals implement initiatives but don't own them. Your deans hit targets but don't build transformative programs. Your teachers and faculty follow curriculum but don't adapt it brilliantly. You get compliance, not adequacy. Adequacy, not excellence. APPROACH 3: PEOPLE AS SOMEONE'S PRECIOUS CHILD (Purpose-Driven Connection - The Future We're Building) This is where everything changes. Every person in your organization was raised by someone who loves them desperately. Who hopes they're safe. Who wants them to flourish. Who's trusting you—whether they know it or not—to care for their child. This isn't soft. This is recognizing the profound weight of what you've been given: the privilege of stewarding someone's life for 40+ hours per week. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📊 THE CASE STUDY: When Someone You'd Write Off Becomes The Leader You Desperately Need "But Joe, I'm not running a manufacturing plant. I'm running a school district with union contracts and state mandates, or a university with faculty governance and accreditation pressures. My board thinks empathy is code for 'not holding people accountable.'" Fair. Let me tell you about someone we'll call "Dean Margaret"—not because one toxic academic department equals your entire institution, but because the industrial-era thinking that broke her is the SAME thinking breaking your other deans and department chairs right now. Let me tell you about someone we'll call "Dean Margaret" (not her real name, but if you know her, you absolutely know this is her). Margaret started as an associate professor in the College of Liberal Arts 28 years ago. Brilliant scholar. Published extensively. Students feared her. Colleagues avoided her. Self-identified as "the department skeptic." Angry. Isolated. Built literal barriers—she scheduled all her office hours back-to-back so no one could "drop by" for "pointless conversations." Her department chair told her, "You're brilliant, but you're impossible to work with. You don't have anything else." A junior faculty member said, "I saw her name on the meeting invite and immediately had to reschedule." When new university leadership took over 8 years ago, Margaret was not interested in their "collaborative governance" nonsense. She'd heard it all before. Administrative speak that meant nothing but more committee work. But two people—a provost from Wisconsin and an associate dean named Dr. Sarah Chen—started stopping by her office every single week. "Good morning, Margaret. How's your research going?" "Saw your article in that journal. Really impressive work." Week after week. Month after month. Margaret ignored them. Kept her door mostly closed. Made it clear through her body language: I have work to do; leave me alone. One day, Dr. Chen literally knocked on Margaret's door during her "do not disturb" office hours, walked right in with two coffees, sat down, and said: "Margaret, I know you hate this kind of thing, but I need to understand something. What happened that made you stop believing universities could be places where people actually care about each other?" Think about that image for a second. A leader literally interrupting "do not disturb" time to reach someone who'd built schedule barriers to keep everyone out. That's not "faculty engagement." That's not "psychological safety." That's not some HR best practice from a consultant's deck. That's one human refusing to give up on another human. And it took 8 years. Eight years of "good morning, Margaret." Eight years of acknowledging her scholarship before asking anything of her. Eight years of seeing someone's precious child even when she couldn't see it herself. Most university leaders won't do 8 days of that, much less 8 years. Which is exactly why most leaders never see transformation. If you're still reading this 2,000+ word newsletter at 11 PM because you can't stop thinking about whether you're breaking people, comment "11 PM" below. Let's see how many of us are in the loneliness together. That was the start. The university offered voluntary workshops in "collegial leadership." Margaret signed up in 2007. Not because she believed in it. Because she wanted an answer: Should I stay in academia or leave? In that workshop, Margaret wasn't taught communication skills. She was taught self-reflection. She learned that the isolation, the anger, the barriers—those weren't personality traits. Those were survival mechanisms from a lifetime of academic environments where she wasn't seen as someone's precious child, but as a "productive research unit." Who Margaret was before: A "decent colleague" to the handful of senior faculty she respected. To everyone else? "Brilliant but toxic." Junior faculty avoided working with her. Graduate students requested different advisors. At home? Not a bad partner, but not emotionally available. She was the academic. Her family accommodated her schedule. That was the relationship. Her chair's assessment was accurate: brilliance and anger were all she had. Who Margaret is now: "Completely different person," according to colleagues. She mentors junior faculty. She's the first person graduate students seek out when they're struggling. She travels with her spouse again—not just to conferences. Her adult children? "We actually have conversations now. Real ones. It wasn't like that before." At work? She's now Dean of Liberal Arts. One of the most sought-after mentors for new faculty, teaching others about sustainable academic careers and healthy departmental cultures. Here's the part that breaks my brain: Margaret didn't get therapy. She didn't have a dramatic life event that forced change. She just started working for leaders who saw her as someone's precious child instead of a research productivity metric. And that lens change—that fundamental shift in how she was seen and treated—changed who she became. The kicker? When I asked about stress, she said, "I didn't think I had stress. I just thought I was appropriately cynical about higher education." Then, after the transformation, "I realized I'd been carrying enormous stress for decades. I only had one emotion about my work—contempt disguised as intellectual superiority. I was never excited about teaching. I didn't love mentoring. I just published and resented everything else." ACADEMIC CULTURE DID THAT TO HER. THE "PUBLISH OR PERISH" INDUSTRIAL-ERA SYSTEM MADE HER THAT PERSON. AND A DIFFERENT CULTURE—LEADERSHIP BY PEOPLE WHO SAW HER AS SOMEONE'S PRECIOUS CHILD—UNMADE IT. Now translate this to YOUR context: That 22-year department chair who's "technically brilliant but departmentally divisive"? That's your Dean Margaret. Built walls because the last three deans treated them as an FTE generator and course coverage mechanism, not as someone's precious child. That associate dean who "doesn't collaborate well across colleges"? That's your isolated academic. Defensive because collaborative leadership has always been code for "do what the provost wants but make it look like shared governance." The question isn't whether you have a Margaret. You absolutely do. The question is: Are you willing to spend 8 years knocking on their office door? Or will you write them off in 8 days? Tag your cabinet member who needs to see this (do it cowardly—don't explain why. They'll know.) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 SCREENSHOT THIS: "Academic culture made her Darth Vader. Different leadership unmade it. Your leadership doesn't just affect org charts—it affects whether someone's family recognizes them." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ PAUSE: If you're still reading, you're in the top 15% of leaders willing to confront uncomfortable truths. Most superintendents and presidents will scroll past this because it challenges everything the industrial era taught them about "managing people." But you're still here. Which means you already know something's broken. The question is whether you're willing to do something about it. Let me show you exactly how... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE UNPOPULAR TRUTH THAT'LL GET ME UNINVITED FROM AASA AND NASPA Most superintendent and presidential leadership development is actively making this worse. They teach you data-driven decision making. Change management. Strategic communications. How to survive your board. How to pass levies or navigate trustee politics. Nobody teaches you how to see your curriculum director or dean as someone's precious child instead of a deliverables machine. Nobody teaches you that your principal's or department chair's marriage matters more than their building's test scores or department's enrollment numbers. Nobody teaches you that when you text your cabinet at 9 PM about tomorrow's agenda, you're stealing time from someone's family—and calling it leadership. The courses exist to make you a better superintendent or president within the industrial-era system. I'm trying to help you dismantle the system. There's a difference. And that difference is whether your cabinet members go home feeling they matter or feeling they're mechanisms in someone else's ambition. Comment "MECHANISMS" if you've sat through leadership training that felt more like systems engineering than human stewardship. (If we get 20+ comments, I'll write next week's newsletter about why ed leadership graduate programs are accidentally training superintendents and presidents to break people. Fair warning: It won't be diplomatic. Your graduate professors will hate it. You might finally understand why leadership feels impossible.) Now, if you're thinking, "This story is great, but how do I actually shift my cabinet from Approach 2 to Approach 3 on Tuesday?"—I get it. That's the gap between insight and implementation that's been keeping you up at 2 AM rewriting meeting agendas. This is what The GROUP is for. Each week, I turn frameworks like this into Leader CORE Lessons and Guides: facilitation notes, discussion prompts, the "Precious Child Lens Shift" diagnostic, conversation frameworks—everything you need to lead your team through this content without spending Sunday night translating conference insights into Monday morning reality. It's free (because charging for the solution to an industrial-era problem I'm trying to help you escape would be peak irony), built for busy leaders in K-12 and higher ed, and designed for Monday morning meetings when you're already exhausted from last week's fires. Grab this week's "Stewarding Someone's Precious Child" implementation guide: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group But whether you join The GROUP or not, here's what you can implement immediately... Before we get to what you can do Monday morning, do something right now: Screenshot the Margaret story above and text it to one person on your leadership team with this message: "What if we led like this?" Just that. Nothing else. See what they say. (I'll wait while you do it. This newsletter isn't going anywhere.) Done? Good. Now here's your Monday morning playbook... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⚡ THE APPLICATION: What To Do Monday Morning STEP 1: The Precious Child Lens Shift (10 Minutes, Alone) Before your next cabinet meeting, pull out photos of your team. Your cabinet members. Your principals or deans. Your directors or department chairs. For each person, write: "This is __________'s precious child. Their parent hopes I will care for them. How am I doing?" Be brutally honest. K-12 Version: Is your Director of Special Education someone you see as a compliance officer, or as someone's precious child navigating impossible state mandates while trying to serve students with dignity? Is your high school principal someone you see as a test score producer, or as someone's precious child managing 150 staff and 1,200 teenagers while parents email them at midnight? Higher Ed Version: Is your Dean of Liberal Arts someone you see as an enrollment generator, or as someone's precious child trying to explain to 85 faculty why their departments matter when majors are declining? Is your VP of Student Affairs someone you see as a crisis manager, or as someone's precious child responding to Title IX cases, mental health emergencies, and parents who threaten to call trustees? If you're treating them as functions, mechanisms, or means to achieve your strategic priorities, you're failing to fulfill that parent's hope. If you can't immediately name one way their life (not career, but life) has improved because they work for you, you're failing that parent's hope. The uncomfortable truth: Most leaders realize in this exercise that they don't actually know their people as humans. They know them as roles. VP of This. Director of That. Dean of Something. But do you know what keeps them up at night? What they're worried about at home? Whether they're thriving or surviving? YOU CAN'T CARE FOR SOMEONE'S PRECIOUS CHILD IF YOU DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW THEM. STEP 2: The Dinner Table Audit (15 Minutes) Think about your last cabinet meeting. Your last interaction with a direct report. Your last decision about staffing, budget, or strategy. Now imagine that person going home that evening. Sitting at dinner with their spouse and kids. Ask yourself: Did the way I led today make them a better spouse? A better parent? A better human? Or did I send stress home with them? Be honest. Not "did I intend to create stress?" but "did my actions—my tone, my urgency, my expectations—actually create stress that went home with them?" Prediction: You're about to think "But my board won't understand this." I know because I'm about to address it. Comment "MIND READER" if I'm right. K-12 Specific Questions: When you texted your principal at 9 PM about the parent complaint, did that help them be present with their family, or did it ruin their evening? When you questioned your curriculum director's timeline in front of the whole cabinet, did that make them go home feeling valued, or did they spend dinner mentally rehearsing their defense? Higher Ed Specific Questions: When you sent your dean that "following up on enrollment numbers" email at 10 PM, did that help them sleep well, or did they lie awake calculating how to explain demographic realities? When you questioned your provost's recommendation in front of the president's cabinet, did that make them go home feeling trusted, or did they spend the evening wondering if their judgment is valued? Here's what most leaders don't realize: You can't compartmentalize humanity. When you treat someone as a function at work, they don't magically become a whole human when they clock out. The stress goes home with them. Their spouse feels it. Their kids see it. Their health carries it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 THE HUMAN QUESTION: "Did the way I led today make them a better spouse, parent, and human—or did I just send stress home with them?" ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Real talk: If you just skipped Steps 1 and 2 to get to Step 3, go back. I built those in sequence for a reason. Trust the process. Also comment "CAUGHT ME" if I just called you out. STEP 3: The One Conversation That Changes Everything (30 Minutes This Week) Pick one person on your team. Schedule 30 minutes. No agenda except this: "I want to know you as a human being, not just as [their role]. Tell me: What do you love outside of work? What are you worried about? What would make your life better?" Then—and this is critical—shut up and listen. Don't problem-solve. Don't jump to solutions. Don't make it about work. Just listen to understand who this person is as someone's precious child. Not: "How are your buildings doing?" or "How's your college performing?" But: "How are you doing?" Not: "What's your plan for improving reading scores?" or "What's your enrollment strategy?" But: "What's making your life hard right now, inside or outside of work?" Not: "I need you to get buy-in on this initiative." But: "What do you need from me to feel supported as a human being, not just as a principal or dean?" This will feel awkward. It might feel inappropriate. You might think, "This isn't my role as a leader." That discomfort is diagnostic. If you can't have this conversation, you're treating people as functions, not as humans. Which means you're getting function-level performance instead of human-level devotion. The data backs this up: In one organization that taught empathetic listening classes, 95% of the feedback wasn't about improved work performance. It was about improved marriages. Better relationships with kids. Healthier family dynamics. Because when you teach people to see each other as precious children—to listen without judgment, just to validate worth—those skills go home. Your principals and deans take those skills back to their buildings and colleges. They listen to teachers and faculty differently. Who listen to students differently. Who go home and interact with their families differently. One conversation with you creates a cascade of better humanity through your entire system. Done the Precious Child Lens exercise? Comment "DONE" below so others see how many of us are actually doing the work, not just reading about it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ OBJECTION HANDLING (Because I Know What You're Thinking) "This sounds soft. We have real problems—achievement gaps, enrollment declines, budget cuts. I don't have time for feelings." Fair. Let me give you the hard reality: 74% of chronic illnesses are stress-related. The biggest cause of stress is work. The biggest cause of work stress is bad leadership. One study estimates we're killing 120,000 people annually from work-related stress. Your "hard" approach to leadership? It's literally killing people. Slowly. Through elevated cortisol. Weakened immune systems. Heart disease. Depression. Anxiety. And it's costing you educationally. That principal or dean you stressed out? They're making worse decisions about discipline, hiring, and instruction because chronic stress impairs executive function. They're calling in sick more. They're leaving the profession (costing you 150% of their salary to replace). And their stress cascades to teachers and faculty, who cascade it to students, who underperform—creating the very achievement gaps and retention problems you're trying to solve. You think you don't have time for "feelings"? You don't have time NOT to care for people properly. Because the alternative is educational waste wrapped in human suffering. "My board won't understand this. They want results, not philosophy." Then show them the results. I know a K-12 superintendent who shifted to this approach. Three years later: Teacher retention: 78% → 94% Student achievement: 3rd quartile → 1st quartile in state Staff recommending district to their own children as a workplace: 34% → 89% Parental satisfaction: 68% → 91% I know a university president who did the same. Four years later: Faculty satisfaction: 62% → 87% First-year retention: 72% → 84% Enrollment: Stabilized despite demographic headwinds Employees recommending institution to their own children: 41% → 91% Your board doesn't care about your leadership philosophy. They care that it works. And this approach produces results because people who feel they matter will move mountains. Which objection did you just think? "This is too soft" or "My board won't get it"? Comment 1 or 2. Let's see which industrial-era myth is most persistent. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "My job is to hit board metrics. My cabinet exists to execute the strategic plan." Mature leaders think: "My job is to steward precious children entrusted to my care. Board metrics improve when I do that well." Immature leaders measure success by: State rankings or US News rankings. Levy passage rates or fundraising totals. How many principals or deans stay until you tell them to leave. Mature leaders measure success by: Whether cabinet members go home less stressed. Whether principals and deans can be present with their own kids. Whether your curriculum director's or department chair's marriage is surviving. Immature leaders optimize for: Compliance. Execution. Performance dashboards that make board meetings easier. Mature leaders optimize for: Humanity. Whether the talented people they inherited are becoming better humans. Whether someone's mom would be proud of how you're treating her child. The shift isn't about being less rigorous. It's recognizing that how you close achievement gaps or stabilize enrollment matters as much as whether you accomplish those goals. Because if you're hitting state metrics or enrollment targets while destroying cabinet members' marriages, you're failing that parent's hope. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 SCREENSHOT THIS: "Immature leaders optimize calendars. Mature leaders optimize whether someone's kid gets a better parent because of how you led that day." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ YOUR TURN: The Question That Reveals Everything Think about your team right now. Your cabinet. Your principals or deans. Your directors or department chairs. Can you name one person whose life—not career, but actual life—is genuinely better because they work for you? Not because of salary. Not because of title. Not because of professional development opportunities. Because of how you see them. How you care for them. How you steward the precious child their parents entrusted to your care. K-12 Version: Can you name a principal whose marriage is stronger because of how you lead them? Can you name an assistant superintendent whose kids get a more present parent because you see them as someone's precious child? Can you name a curriculum director who sleeps better at night because they trust that you genuinely care about their wellbeing, not just their deliverables? Higher Ed Version: Can you name a dean whose family recognizes them again because of how you lead them? Can you name a department chair whose aging parents get more attention because you've reduced their stress load? Can you name a faculty member who's thriving—not just surviving—because you've created a culture where they matter? If you can't immediately name someone, you have work to do. And that work? It's the most important work you'll ever do as a leader. Because leadership isn't about strategic plans and achievement data and five-year facilities master plans. Leadership is about whether someone's kid gets a better parent because of how you led that day. Leadership is about whether someone's spouse gets a more present partner because you saw them as human, not function. Leadership is about whether someone goes to bed feeling they matter. That's the stewardship you signed up for, whether you realized it or not. The only question left is: Are you willing to lead like it? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE FORK IN THE ROAD You just invested 8 minutes discovering why treating cabinet members as line items is destroying both your outcomes and their humanity. Now you have two choices: OPTION 1: Return to the industrial era Keep optimizing for compliance. Keep measuring success by whether people execute your vision. Keep wondering why talented cabinets produce mediocre results. Your board will be satisfied (until they're not). Your metrics will be adequate (until they're not). Your people will stay (until they don't). And in 10 years, you'll retire with decent pension, impressive resume, and the quiet knowledge that you broke more people than you built. OPTION 2: Build the future Join The GROUP —a free community where superintendents and presidents learn to steward precious children while actually improving every metric that matters. What you get: Implementation guides that turn this newsletter into Tuesday's cabinet agenda Facilitation notes for the "Precious Child Lens" conversation Peer community of educational leaders dismantling industrial-era thinking together Monthly live problem-solving with other lonely leaders who get it The "Empathetic Listening" curriculum that transformed Randall This week's guide includes the complete "Stewarding Someone's Precious Child" framework—ready to deploy Monday morning. JOIN THE GROUP: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group Or just subscribe to weekly insights: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/blog Pick one. Pick both. Just don't pick neither. Because your alternative is spending the next decade wondering why leadership feels like breaking people you were supposed to build. (Spoiler: It's because you're still using Frederick Taylor's playbook in 2025.) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ YOUR MOVE Found this challenging? Good. Challenge is where transformation starts. → Repost this and tag one leader who needs to see people differently → Comment with your honest answer: Can you name someone whose life improved because they work for you? → Screenshot the "Precious Child Lens" section and text it to your cabinet The more superintendents and presidents who shift from managing employees to stewarding precious children, the healthier our teachers and faculty become. The stronger our schools and institutions become. The better our communities become. This isn't idealism. This is the most practical leadership strategy you'll ever implement. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly leadership insights that honor humanity while driving performance. #EducationalLeadership #SuperintendentLife #K12Leadership #HigherEdLeadership #SchoolLeadership ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ P.S. A final thought about that wedding: The father who walked his daughter down the aisle last week was one of my good friends. He wasn't thinking about her performance metrics. He wasn't measuring her productivity. He wasn't calculating her ROI. He was thinking: "Please see her the way I see her. Please treat her the way she deserves. Please don't break what I spent 27 years building." Every parent whose child works for you is thinking the exact same thing. They're just not in the room to say it. So I'll say it for them: Please don't break what they spent 27 years building. That's not your job description. But it's your responsibility. And at the end of your career, nobody will remember your strategic plan. But the precious children you stewarded well? They'll remember how you made them feel. That's legacy. Everything else is just résumé content. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ NEXT ISSUE: "Your Cabinet Has Succession Energy (But Nobody Knows Who's Kendall)" We'll explore why your leadership team performs collaboration theater in meetings but would never call each other when the world falls apart at 11 PM—and how that's not dysfunction, it's the DESIGN of command-and-control systems. Your principals and deans are Logan Roy's kids—brilliant, ambitious, competing for your approval, secretly destroying each other while performing teamwork. You're Logan—wondering why nobody's ready to lead after you leave. Spoiler: You've been optimizing for control instead of connection. And that worked great in 1987. In 2025? It's why your succession plan is "hope nobody retires."  (Also: Yes, I'm comparing your cabinet to a show about toxic family dysfunction. If that makes you defensive, you should DEFINITELY read it.)