Higher Performance Insights | THE HUMAN QUESTION

November 18, 2025

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.]

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🧮 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.

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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.

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🎯 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.

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📊 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.)

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💡 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."

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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...

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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...

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⚡ 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.

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💡 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?"

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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.

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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.

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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.

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💡 SCREENSHOT THIS:

"Immature leaders optimize calendars. Mature leaders optimize whether someone's kid gets a better parent because of how you led that day."

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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?

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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.)

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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

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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.

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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.)

Do you want more leadership topics and guides?

Join THE GROUP

An online community for higher education leaders, where we offer a library of lessons and guides that can be utilized during your leadership sessions and other resources.

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Higher Performance Insights | YOU BELIEVE IN YOUR PEOPLE. IT'S YOUR ORG CHART THAT DOESN'T

By HPG Info • May 18, 2026

You believe in your people. Your org chart doesn't. That's not a leadership philosophy problem. It's an architecture problem. And it's sitting in five questions. The gap between what your cabinet produces and what it's actually capable of isn't a hiring problem. It isn't a training problem. It isn't even a culture problem — though it wears culture's name in most post-mortem conversations. It's a deployment problem. And it has a name: The Deployment Gap — the distance between what your people are actually built to do and what your cabinet architecture is currently asking them to do. You don't have a talent problem. You have a deployment architecture problem. And unlike talent, architecture is completely within your control. The test below takes eight minutes. It will either confirm what you already sense — or surface a gap you've been too busy to name. Either way, you'll know something true by the end of it. THE DIAGNOSIS Why Brilliant People Produce Mediocre Cabinets Let's talk about this like adults who've survived enough strategic planning retreats to know the difference between a cabinet that's functioning and one that's performing. Functioning cabinets execute. They show up, manage their portfolios, hit compliance deadlines, and nod in the right places. (You know the nod. The one that means "I heard you" but not "I'm with you." The one that migrates to the parking lot conversation afterward.) Performing cabinets multiply. They think together. They cover each other's blind spots. They produce outcomes that none of them could have generated alone — not because they're smarter individually, but because the collective architecture actually matches who they are. Here's the uncomfortable truth most leadership development programs won't tell you: The gap between those two cabinets is almost never about talent. It's almost always about deployment. Research across 987 leadership teams tells us the same story in different fonts. High-IQ cabinets underperform not because of individual deficiency but because of structural misalignment — people operating outside their zone of genuine contribution, carrying responsibilities that drain rather than energize, filling roles designed for a generic leader rather than the specific, irreplaceable human being actually sitting in the seat. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. The PQ dimension — Perceptual Intelligence, the capacity to accurately see what's actually happening with the people in your system — is the one most cabinet leaders have optimized least. Not because they don't care. Because nobody gave them a diagnostic tool that cut beneath the org chart. Until now. (This is the exact gap THE TEAM INSTITUTE was built to close — not through individual development, but through collective architecture that deploys who your people actually are. More in a moment.) Before you run the test — one quick audit: when did you last ask a cabinet member what they do better than almost anyone? If you're reaching for a specific answer, note that. If you're not — note that too. THE 5-QUESTION CABINET STRESS TEST Run this on your current cabinet. Answer honestly — not as the leader you want to be, but as the one who was in last Tuesday's cabinet meeting. No scoring rubric. What follows each question is a consequence statement. The answer you give is less important than what it tells you about the system you've built. Question 1 If every cabinet member were asked to name their single greatest professional strength — the thing they do better than almost anyone — would their answers match what you're currently asking them to do? If the answer is mostly no — or if you're not certain what their answers would be — you have a Discovery Gap. Your cabinet architecture was designed around roles, not people. The result: capable individuals operating at a fraction of their actual ceiling, not because they're underperforming but because they're misaligned. The tragedy isn't that they're failing. It's that they're succeeding at the wrong things. Question 2 In your last five cabinet meetings, who spoke the most? Who spoke the least? And does that pattern reflect genuine contribution — or organizational hierarchy? Silence in a cabinet meeting is never neutral. It's either the silence of someone who feels safe enough to think before speaking — or the silence of someone who has learned that speaking costs more than it's worth. If the same two or three voices dominate every meeting regardless of topic, you don't have a quiet cabinet. You have a cabinet where PQ has been quietly trained out of most of the room. The ideas you need most are sitting behind the people who stopped offering them somewhere between year one and year two. Question 3 When did you last move someone in your cabinet — not out, sideways — because you discovered they'd be more valuable somewhere else? If the answer is "never" or "not recently," you're running a static architecture in a dynamic institution. The principle of comparative advantage — deploying people based on what makes the whole team better, not just what fills the org chart — requires ongoing recalibration. High-TQ cabinets aren't built once. They're continuously tuned. If your cabinet looks structurally identical to the one you inherited or designed three years ago, it's almost certainly operating below its ceiling — because the people in it have grown, and the structure hasn't followed. Question 4 If you removed yourself from the room, would the quality of your cabinet's thinking go up, go down, or stay the same? This one stops people cold. And it should. The honest answer for most leaders is: it would go down. Not because their cabinet is incapable — but because the cabinet has been architected around the leader's presence rather than the team's collective intelligence. When the leader is the room's primary thinker, the cabinet functions as a reporting structure rather than a thinking unit. High-TQ cabinets are built to think better when the leader steps back, not worse. If your absence creates a gap rather than an activation, the architecture needs attention. → Save this before you keep reading. Question 4 is the one you'll want to bring to your cabinet. Question 5 What is one thing someone on your cabinet is genuinely better at than you — and are you currently deploying that superiority or quietly managing it? This is the question that separates leaders who believe in their people from leaders who manage their people. Believing in people is not a sentiment. It's a structural act. It means building an architecture where someone else's excellence isn't a threat to your authority — it's the mechanism by which your institution actually moves. If the honest answer is that you're managing their superiority rather than deploying it, you're paying the full cost of their talent while capturing only a fraction of its value. The org chart proves it — or it doesn't. THE FRAMEWORK What High-TQ Cabinets Do Differently The leaders in our research who moved their cabinets from functioning to performing didn't do it through better hiring. They did it through better seeing. They stopped asking "Is this person good at their job?" and started asking "Is this person in the job they're actually built for — and is the team architecture drawing out what makes them irreplaceable?" Three specific moves separated them from the rest. Move 1: The Contribution Conversation 30 minutes. This week. Schedule a one-on-one with each cabinet member — not a performance check-in. A contribution conversation. One question: "If you could redesign your role to maximize what you do better than almost anyone, what would change?" Then listen without defending the org chart. You're not committing to restructuring. You're generating intelligence. What you learn in those conversations will tell you more about your cabinet's deployment gap than any assessment you've ever administered. (If you're thinking "I don't have time for five thirty-minute conversations" — you're currently spending far more than that managing the downstream effects of misalignment. The math is not close.) Move 2: The Silence Audit Your next cabinet meeting. At your next cabinet meeting, track — on paper, not mentally — who speaks, on what topics, and for how long. Don't change the meeting. Just observe it. What you'll find almost always surprises leaders: the pattern of voice has almost nothing to do with who has the most relevant expertise on a given topic. It has everything to do with who has learned that speaking in this room is safe. The silence audit isn't about demanding more participation. It's about diagnosing which voices your current architecture has quietly trained out of the room — and what those voices would be worth if the architecture changed. Move 3: The Comparative Advantage Question Standing agenda item. Add one question to your monthly cabinet agenda: "Given what each of us is genuinely best at — are we deployed against our comparative advantages right now, or against our job descriptions?" High-TQ cabinets ask this question continuously. They treat deployment as a living variable, not a fixed structure. The result isn't chaos — it's the opposite. When people operate inside their zone of genuine contribution, the collective architecture stabilizes because everyone is giving what they actually have rather than performing what was expected. THE MATURITY SHIFT IMMATURE LEADER THINKS: "I need to develop my people." MATURE LEADER THINKS: "I need to deploy my people — against what they're actually built for, not what the org chart assumed they'd be." IMMATURE LEADER THINKS: Fills roles with people. Hires for the job description. Evaluates against it. Develops people within it. MATURE LEADER THINKS: Builds architecture around people. Discovers what each person does better than almost anyone. Builds the structure that deploys it. IMMATURE LEADER THINKS: Believes in their people as a value statement. MATURE LEADER THINKS: Believes in their people as a structural act. The org chart proves it — or it doesn't. The gap between believing in your people and building for them is the most expensive gap in educational leadership. It doesn't show up on your balance sheet. It shows up in every cabinet meeting where the room produces less than the sum of the people in it. Your turn: Run Question 1 right now. Name one person on your cabinet whose greatest professional strength is not what you're currently asking them to do most. First name only. One sentence. What would change in your institution if you fixed that one misalignment? Drop it in the comments. The pattern in those answers will tell you something important about how many leaders are sitting on untapped architecture. THE TEAM INSTITUTE Most leadership development programs operate on a theory that is structurally backwards: develop people individually, and cabinet performance will follow. It won't. Not at the level you need. Not consistently. Not without the collective architecture that ensures individual development actually lands somewhere. Here's what the research across 987 leadership teams shows: the cabinets that moved from 60% to 90% capacity didn't get there by becoming individually sharper. They got there by building the collective conditions where each person's genuine contribution could actually be deployed — and protected. That's what THE TEAM INSTITUTE builds. Not better individual leaders. Better collective architecture — the shared language, structural clarity, and trust infrastructure that turns eight individually capable people into a cabinet that genuinely multiplies. 8 months. Full cabinet. Sequential development that builds from the foundations on which everything else depends. From our research: 3x performance improvement. 29% higher engagement. 27% better organizational outcomes. Zero burnout increase. One requirement: full cabinet participation. Partial collective architecture is not architecture. It's a majority position wearing the name of the whole. If you recognized your cabinet somewhere in those five questions, that recognition is data. Not a feeling. Data. The Team Intelligence Assessment is not a self-assessment. It's a whole-cabinet diagnostic — your full leadership team completes it together, and the output shows exactly where your cabinet lands on the spectrum from functioning to multiplying. Calibrated against 987 leadership teams across 43 states. The output pinpoints specifically whether the gap in your cabinet lives in IQ, EQ, or PQ. Most cabinets find the gap isn't where they assumed it was. That surprise is where the real work begins. If there were a way to build the collective architecture your cabinet is missing — without another retreat that returns seven brilliant individuals to the same broken system — would that be worth exploring? → Learn more and reserve your team's assessment window: higherperformancegroup.com/team-intelligence-assessment This is a conversation between people who are done accepting cabinets that function when they could be multiplying. FOUND VALUE IN THIS? Help other educational leaders find it: → Repost this with your answer to Question 4. "If I stepped out, my cabinet's thinking would _____." One word. The leaders who need to read this are in your network right now — and that one word will make them stop scrolling. → Tag a cabinet member who brings something genuinely irreplaceable to your team — and tell them you see it. Seven words. Highest-ROI leadership act you'll do this week. → Comment with your honest answer to Question 1. One name, one sentence. The pattern in those comments will tell you something important about how many leaders are sitting on untapped architecture. The more leaders who move from developing their people to deploying them, the better our institutions become. Follow DR. JOE HILL for the framework. Follow Higher Performance Group for the research behind it. Every week.

Higher Performance Insights | THE REASON YOUR STRATEGIC PLAN ISN'T WORKING HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLAN

By HPG Info • May 12, 2026

Your last strategic planning retreat cost somewhere between $8,000 and $40,000 — when you add up the time, the facilitation, the venue, and the two days your cabinet wasn’t doing anything else. Here’s the question nobody asked at the end of it: Was the room that built the plan the room the plan required? Not whether the right people were invited. Whether the right capacities were present. Whether the combination of people sitting around that table had everything the vision actually needed to become real — or whether the plan was quietly shaped by whoever happened to be in the seats. Most strategic plans aren’t built for the institution. They’re built for the cabinet that was available to build them. I’ve worked with enough leadership teams to know how this goes. The superintendent walks in with a vision. The cabinet is capable, committed, and shaped — over years of hiring and turnover and natural selection — to look a lot like the superintendent. They build a plan that reflects their collective strengths. They leave aligned. And then Q1 happens. The gap between where the plan said you’d be and where you actually are isn’t a project management failure. It’s a signal. It’s what happens when a strategy is built for the room that was available rather than the room the strategy required. Here’s the audit question. Answer it honestly before you keep reading: When you look at your current strategic priorities — the real ones, not the document ones — who in your cabinet is genuinely indispensable to achieving them? Not responsible for them. Indispensable. The person whose specific capacity, if it weren’t in the room, would make the outcome structurally impossible. Name them. Count them. Say a little prayer of thanks for them. Now: how many of your strategic priorities have an indispensable person attached to them? And how many are being carried by whoever was available? That ratio is your planning problem. And it’s older than the plan. What’s Actually Happening in Your Planning Room Let’s talk about this like adults who have sat through enough strategic planning retreats to know the difference between a plan the room believed in and a plan the room ratified. Here’s what the research from nearly 1,000 leadership teams shows, consistently: the single strongest predictor of strategic plan failure is not poor implementation. It’s misalignment between the plan’s requirements and the cabinet’s actual composition. Not skills. Composition. Three cabinet profiles. Each one builds a different kind of broken plan: The vision-heavy superintendent builds a cabinet of people who love ideas and move slowly toward execution. Their strategic plan is beautifully conceived and perpetually in progress. The Q3 update says ‘on track’ because nobody in the room has built enough accountability structure to know that it isn’t. The relationship-centered superintendent builds a cabinet of people who are warm, committed, and constitutionally unlikely to deliver hard news. Their strategic plan survives every board retreat and quietly erodes between them. The conversations about why don’t happen until the data makes them unavoidable. The data-driven superintendent builds a cabinet of analysts and evidence-gatherers. Their strategic plan is the best-documented plan in the district. It is also three decision cycles behind every significant change in the environment it was designed to navigate. The plan doesn’t fail in implementation. It fails the moment the room that built it lacked the capacity the plan required. This is measurable at the structural level. The TQ Assessment maps five lead measures across your entire leadership team: Communication, Connection, Alignment, Capacity, and Execution. What most planning rooms are missing isn’t an obvious dysfunction — it’s a quiet collapse in one or two of these dimensions that shapes everything the room produces. When Alignment collapses — when everyone around the table perceives priorities through roughly the same lens — you don’t get better strategy. You get more confidently built strategy with the same blind spots the superintendent had walking in. That blind spot has a cost. It’s in your Q1 results. It’s in the initiative that’s been ‘in implementation’ for eighteen months. It’s in the person four layers down your org chart who knows exactly why the plan isn’t working and hasn’t been asked. The TEAM INTELLIGENCE Assessment was built to diagnose this — not by evaluating individual performance, but by mapping whether your team has the collective composition the strategy actually requires. More on that below. The most expensive room in educational leadership isn’t the boardroom. It’s the planning room that looks complete but isn’t — where the critical capacity is sitting in a seat four levels down, answering to someone who was in the room but didn’t know to ask. The Framework: Talent Before Strategy — The Sequence That Changes Everything The highest-performing cabinets in our research share one structural habit that most leadership teams never develop: they build the room before they build the plan. Not ‘hire good people.’ That’s table stakes. The specific discipline of asking, before strategy work begins: what does this vision require — and who, specifically, needs to be in the room for this plan to have any real chance of becoming real? Call this the Talent-First Sequence. Three moves, in order. Miss the sequence and you’re back to building a plan for the room you have. Move 1: Name What the Vision Actually Requires Every institutional vision has a capacity profile. A set of specific strengths — not job functions, not titles, not competencies — that are structurally necessary for the vision to become real. A vision that requires institutional transformation needs someone in the room who has navigated genuine organizational upheaval before — not someone who has read about it. A vision that requires community trust-building needs someone whose actual relational capital exists in that community — not someone who is good at relationships in general. The exercise: write your three most important strategic priorities at the top of a blank page. Under each one, answer this question — “What specific human capacity, if it were absent from the people executing this, would make the outcome structurally impossible?” Not ‘communication skills.’ Not ‘strategic thinking.’ Specific. The CFO who has restructured a budget under enrollment pressure before. The instructional leader who has moved a school from Level 3 to Level 1 and knows, at a cellular level, what that transition actually costs. Name the capacity before you name the person. The sequence matters. Move 2: Audit the Gap Between What You Need and What You Have Now look at your cabinet. For each capacity you named: who has it? Not who is responsible for the domain it lives in — who actually has the specific capacity? This is where most leadership teams find the problem. The capacity is often present somewhere in the organization. It’s just not in the room where the plan gets built. The gap audit isn’t a performance review. It’s a structural question: between the capacity this vision requires and the capacity currently present in the room, what’s missing? Build the plan first and then try to staff for it and you’ve reversed the sequence — and you’ll spend the next eighteen months trying to execute a strategy designed around assumptions that the people executing it don’t actually share. Move 3: Build the Strategy Around the Strengths That Are Actually in the Room This is the move that separates the plans that work from the plans that get laminated. Once you know what the vision requires and who actually has those capacities — build the strategy around their specific strengths. Not a generic strategy that anyone could theoretically execute. A strategy designed around the actual humans who will execute it. Most strategic plans are built to be transferable — designed so that any reasonably capable cabinet could execute them. That’s not a feature. That’s the bug. A transferable plan is a plan that nobody owns deeply enough to fight for when it gets hard. The plans that survive Q3 are the ones built around the specific, irreplaceable strengths of the specific people responsible for them. The Case Study: What Dominic’s Cabinet Built — And What It Was Missing Let me tell you about a superintendent I’ll call Dominic. (Not his real name — but Dominic, if you’re reading this, you know exactly who you are, and so does the person who finally made it into the room in year three.) Dominic had spent four years building something real. A district that had moved from adequate to genuinely strong on most of the metrics that mattered. A cabinet he trusted completely. A strategic plan the board had approved enthusiastically. And a student outcomes gap — specifically in his highest-need schools — that wasn’t closing. When we ran the TQ Assessment with Dominic’s cabinet, the picture was clear in about forty minutes. His cabinet was exceptional at systems thinking, community relationships, and strategic communication. Every person in that room was strong in at least two of those three. They had built a plan that leveraged all three beautifully — and they had built it without the one capacity the outcome actually required. Nobody in the room had ever personally closed a demographic outcomes gap. Not led a team that had. They were designing a strategy for an outcome none of them had navigated from the inside. The TQ data pointed directly to it: the Execution and Alignment scores were strong. But the Connection and Capacity scores told a different story — the team was running hard in confident coordination, without the specific experiential knowledge the strategy required. The capacity wasn’t absent from the district. It was in two principals — neither of them cabinet-level — who had each moved a school through exactly this transition in prior districts. They had been consulted. They had not been in the room. Dominic didn’t have an achievement gap problem. He had a room problem. The plan was being built by people who had never closed what the plan was trying to close. Dominic made one structural change. He created a standing seat at the cabinet strategy table for those two principals during any planning conversation related to student outcomes. Fourteen months later: statistically significant movement on three outcome indicators in both schools. The plan that emerged from a complete room looked different from the plan a mirror room would have built. It was less elegant. It was more specific. It worked. Four Moves This Week Move 1: Run the Capacity Audit on Your Top Three Priorities (45 minutes) Take your three most important strategic priorities. For each one, write the answer to this question: “What specific human capacity — not job function, not title — is structurally necessary for this outcome to become real?” Then: who in your cabinet has it? Not who is responsible for the domain — who has the specific, experience-forged, I’ve-done-this-before capacity? If you can’t name someone for every priority, you’ve found your planning gap. Move 2: Identify Who’s Not in the Room (20 minutes) For each gap you named: is the capacity present somewhere in the organization — just not at the cabinet level? Name the person. Name their current role. Then ask the harder question: why aren’t they in the room when the plans that require their capacity are being built? The answer is almost always one of three things: hierarchy (the org chart says they don’t belong at that table), habit (we’ve never done it that way), or discomfort (having them in the room would complicate the conversation). None of those are good reasons. All of them are common ones. Move 3: Ask the Backwards Question at Your Next Planning Conversation (15 minutes) Before the next strategic agenda item — before you walk in with a framework or a recommendation — open with this: “Before we build toward this, I want to know: who in this room has personally navigated something close to what we’re trying to accomplish here? Not studied it. Done it.” Then listen. What you hear — and what you don’t — is the most accurate capacity audit you can run. The silence after that question is the gap. Move 4: Build One Initiative Around the People, Not the Other Way Around (This Quarter) Pick one upcoming initiative. Instead of starting with the strategy: start with the people who will execute it. What are they genuinely excellent at? What does a strategy look like that is built to leverage those specific strengths — rather than asking them to execute a strategy designed for someone else’s profile? The plan that emerges will be less universal. It will also be more executable. Two Objections, Handled “My cabinet is already set. I can’t restructure it around every new initiative.” You’re not restructuring the cabinet. You’re restructuring who’s in the room when strategy gets built. Those are different things. Dominic didn’t promote two principals to his cabinet. He created standing seats at the planning table for specific conversations. The org chart didn’t change. The plan did. The outcomes did. “We don’t have time to redesign how we plan. We’re already behind.” You’re behind because the last plan was built in a room that didn’t have everything the plan required. Running faster through the same process produces the same gap, faster. The Capacity Audit takes forty-five minutes. The Backwards Question takes fifteen. Neither requires a restructure or a retreat or a new framework. They require the willingness to ask who’s missing from the room before the room starts building. The Maturity Shift Immature leaders think: “My job is to build the best strategy for my cabinet.” Mature leaders think: “My job is to build the cabinet the strategy requires.” Immature leaders start with the plan. They build a strong strategy, gain buy-in, and ask whoever’s in the room to execute it. When it underperforms, they improve the plan. Mature leaders start with the vision’s requirements. They name what the outcome needs before they name who’s responsible for it. Then they check: is that capacity in the room? If it isn’t, they find it before the planning starts. Eight excellent people with the same profile is not a cabinet. It’s an echo chamber with a strategic plan. The plan that fails in Q3 was missing something in Q4 of the previous year — when the room that built it didn’t have the capacity the outcome required, and nobody asked. From 987 leadership teams across 43 states: the cabinets that moved from 60% to 90% collective capacity didn’t do it by getting smarter. They did it by getting more complete. By finding the gap between what the vision required and what the room contained — and closing it before the plan got built. Your turn: What’s the capacity that was missing from your last major planning conversation — the specific thing that, if it had been in the room, would have changed what you built? You don’t have to name a person. Name the capacity. Drop it in the comments. Tag a leader you’ve watched build the room before building the plan. TQ ASSESSMENT Here is the thing most leadership development programs will not tell you, because it implicates the model they’re selling: Individual development cannot close a composition gap. You can make every person in your cabinet sharper, more self-aware, and more skilled at their craft. If the room is still missing the capacity the vision requires, sharper individuals will execute the wrong plan with more precision. The TEAM INTELLIGENCE Assessment is the diagnostic this conversation has been pointing toward. Not an evaluation of individual performance — a map of your team’s collective composition. Here’s what it measures: Communication — whether information moves clearly up, down, and across the cabinet, or stalls in the places where you can’t see it stalling Connection — the depth of trust and psychological safety that determines whether hard conversations happen or get managed around Alignment — whether your cabinet’s top priorities actually match yours, or whether you’re running parallel tracks that look aligned at the retreat and diverge by Tuesday Capacity — whether the team has the structural sustainability to perform without burning out the people the strategy depends on most Execution — whether plans reliably become results, or whether your team is excellent at commitment and inconsistent at follow-through Leader Competency Index — a separate seven-item measure of how consistently leadership is building trust, distributing authority, managing conflict, and developing others. Not how your team sees outcomes — how they see you. 57 questions. Anonymous. Aggregated. A full PDF report and a 60-minute live debrief with me. Built specifically for K–12 and higher education leadership teams. If this article landed for you, the TEAM INTELLIGENCE Assessment is the logical next move. I’m running assessments with a select group of leadership teams this summer — timed specifically for June end-of-year retreats and August back-to-school kickoffs. If you’re reading this before your summer planning season, that timing is not an accident. If the Q1 conversation is getting harder to have — if the gap between the plan and the reality is starting to look less like a project management problem and more like a room problem — let’s talk about what your cabinet’s data actually says. Learn more about the assessment at higherperformancegroup.com/tq-assessment — then text me at 218-310-7857 or grab a time directly at calendly.com/higherperformance/30minutecoffee. Either works. This is a conversation between people who are done building excellent plans for incomplete rooms. Found Value in This? → Repost with your answer to the Capacity Audit: what’s the one capacity that was missing from your last major planning conversation? → Tag a superintendent or president who asks ‘who do we need in here’ before ‘what should we build.’ They’re doing something specific. Name it. → Comment with the gap. Not the person — the capacity. Vision. Challenge. Execution. Community knowledge. Operational reality. The pattern in those answers is more valuable than anything I could add. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights. Keep Your Dukes Up!