Higher Performance Insights | THE MEETING ABOUT THE MEETING ABOUT THE MEETING

October 28, 2025
higher performance insights

How (Well-Intended) Collaboration Becomes An Endless Rehearsal


Your CFO just scheduled another "alignment call" before Tuesday's cabinet meeting.


Your Chief Academic Officer wants to "preview concerns" over coffee.


Your VP of Enrollment has "quick questions" that definitely aren't quick.


This isn't collaboration. This is diplomatic relations between separate nations who happen to share a building.


Here's what's killing American education—and it's not enrollment cliffs, funding cuts, or your board's 90-minute AI debate (it's both a threat AND opportunity, you're welcome, moving on).


It's this:


THE MEETING TAX CALCULATOR


4.7 hours per week in pre-meetings × 8 cabinet members × 42 working weeks × $140K average salary = $1,127,520 per year


That's not a line item in your budget. That's a yacht. A medium-sized yacht you're sinking annually into talking ABOUT talking.

And here's the devastating part:


After all those meetings? You still don't have alignment. You have consensus cosplay.


Everyone nodding while mentally drafting the email they'll send AFTER this meeting, explaining why this meeting's decisions won't work for their division/building/department/reality.


Your turn: Calculate your Meeting Tax below. Weekly pre-meeting hours × team size × 42 weeks × average salary = ?


Drop your number in the comments. Let's see who's got the most expensive collaboration theater.


(Spoiler: 67% of educational leadership teams spend more time preparing FOR decisions than making them. That's not collaboration. That's endless preparation with no execution. And while you're stuck in meeting purgatory, enrollment is shifting, your board is asking questions you answered three meetings ago, and your teachers are wondering if leadership actually... leads.)


THE DIAGNOSIS: Why Smart Teams Build Stupid Processes


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


Here's what your last two weeks actually looked like:


Monday, 6:30 AM:


Cabinet member A messages you about "aligning before Tuesday's meeting."


Translation: Lobbying for their position before anyone else can.


You spend 45 minutes on a call that could have been handled in the actual meeting if your team trusted each other enough to think out loud together.


If you're K-12, this happened before school started, which means you arrived at 6:30 AM for a 7 AM "quick chat" that made you late to bus duty.


If you're higher ed, this happened over coffee that got cold while you listened to why the enrollment strategy conflicts with academic affairs priorities for the ninth time this semester.


Tuesday Morning:


Three separate people Slack you "quick questions" before the 10 AM cabinet meeting.


None of these questions are quick. All of them are positioning.


Your CFO wants to "preview budget concerns." Your chief academic officer wants to "discuss the implications." Your principal/dean wants to "clarify expectations."


You're now late to your own meeting because you've essentially held three mini-meetings in your office doorway while your actual calendar said you had 30 minutes to prep.


Tuesday 10 AM:


The actual cabinet meeting.


Where everyone performs the kabuki theater of collaborative decision-making while carefully avoiding any actual disagreement because—and here's the kicker—you haven't built the emotional infrastructure for productive conflict.


So instead of 90 minutes of real thinking, you get 2.5 hours of strategic ambiguity that technically sounds like agreement but practically means nothing.


Decisions get made with enough wiggle room that everyone can interpret them differently later.


Tuesday Afternoon Through Thursday:


The post-meeting meetings.


Your CFO "wants to clarify something." Your Provost/Chief Academic Officer "has concerns they didn't want to raise in front of everyone." Your VP of Enrollment/Director of Student Services "interprets the decision differently" than your VP of Student Affairs/Principal.


In K-12, you're now translating cabinet decisions to building leaders who weren't in the meeting but will definitely have opinions about implementation.


In higher ed, you're explaining to deans why what seemed clear in cabinet somehow needs three follow-up conversations before it reaches department chairs.


Friday:


You're exhausted. They're exhausted. Nothing is actually decided.


But everyone's calendar is full, so at least it LOOKS like leadership is happening.


And somewhere, a teacher is wondering why the new initiative lacks clarity, a faculty member is asking when leadership will actually lead, and a parent/student is experiencing the downstream consequences of decisions that took four meetings to not-quite-make.


I know the loneliness of being the only person who sees this pattern.


Of feeling like you're herding cats, except the cats all have advanced degrees, strong opinions about governance structures, and believe their version of reality is the correct one (because in their building/division/department, it actually is).


Of wondering if you're the problem because surely—SURELY—leadership teams at other districts/institutions don't operate like a group project where everyone's doing their part but nobody's read anyone else's sections.

But everyone's calendar is full, so at least it LOOKS like leadership is happening.

You're not crazy. Your team isn't incompetent. You've just been optimizing the wrong variable while the world outside your conference room keeps moving.


Comment "FRIDAY" if this was literally your week.


Here's What's Really Happening


Your team has high individual intelligence but catastrophically low collective intelligence.


They're brilliant people who've never learned to think together under pressure. So they compensate with preparation. Lots and lots of preparation.


Pre-meetings to feel safe. Post-meetings to repair damage. Side conversations to build coalitions.


It's not malicious. It's mathematical.


IQ × EQ × PQ = TQ | TEAM INTELLIGENCE


Your team has high IQ (obviously—you don't accidentally become a VP, Assistant Superintendent, Provost, or Principal).

But your collective EQ is basically a group chat where everyone's typing and nobody's reading.


And your PQ—the Perspective Intelligence (social awareness) about who should be thinking about what and how roles intersect—is a Venn diagram that's actually just eight separate circles pretending to overlap.


High individual scores. Zero multiplication happening.


You're adding when you should be multiplying. Math doesn't care about your org chart or your governance handbook.


When any variable equals zero, the entire equation equals zero.


That's not a metaphor. That's math.


THE FRAMEWORK: The Three-Meeting Cascade


Call this the Meeting Multiplication Dysfunction. Or don't. It'll still explain why your "agile leadership team" needs three attempts to make one decision while everyone else is asking why leadership can't just decide things.


1. THE PRE-MEETING MEETING: When Trust Goes to Die


Monday, 6:30 AM.


You're meeting your Assistant Superintendent for "quick alignment" before school starts. This happens in your car in the parking lot because your office isn't unlocked yet. You're late for bus duty. The "quick" chat takes 47 minutes.


Tuesday, 8:15 AM.


Your principal "just needs 5 minutes" before the 10 AM cabinet meeting. Those 5 minutes happen in your doorway while you're trying to review the agenda. It takes 23 minutes. You're now late to your own meeting.


Tuesday, 9:45 AM.


Three Slack messages. Two "quick questions." One "can we preview something real fast."


This is the one that happens before the real meeting because someone "wants to get aligned first."


Sounds reasonable. Feels professional. It's actually a symptom of terminal team dysfunction.


Here's what pre-meetings actually signal:


"I don't trust that my perspective will be heard/valued/understood in the group setting, so I need to lobby individually first."


If this were a romantic relationship, we'd call it triangulation and recommend therapy.


In leadership teams, we call it "stakeholder management" and put it on our calendars as if it were a virtue.


THE PRE-MEETING TRANSLATION GUIDE:


"Can we align before Tuesday?" = I'm lobbying before anyone else can. "Quick question before the meeting." = I'm positioning my stance early. "Want to preview this?" = I need your backing before the group. "Can we sync?" = I don't trust the team process


(This is why your 10 AM cabinet meeting has six shadow meetings happening between 8-9:45 AM. Everyone's preparing for collaboration like it's game day, except nobody's having fun, and the actual game somehow still disappoints. In K-12, these happen before the buses even arrive. In higher ed, they occur over coffee in offices while students walk past, wondering what administrators actually do all day.)


The pre-meeting exists because your team lacks shared language for productive disagreement.


So instead of effectively disagreeing in the meeting, they pre-negotiate positions outside it.


It's like UN diplomacy except you all work in the same building and could just... talk to each other.


But you won't.


Because someone might push back. In the actual meeting. Where productive conflict belongs.


Comment "TRIANGULATION" if you've scheduled a pre-meeting this week.


2. THE ACTUAL MEETING: Performance Art Masquerading as Decision-Making


Tuesday, 10:00 AM.


The meeting itself becomes theater. Everyone's performing "collaborative leader" while mentally composing the follow-up email that will walk back whatever gets decided.


You can spot this pattern when:


Someone says, "I think we're all saying the same thing." Reality: You are clearly NOT all saying the same thing


Someone volunteers to: "Take this offline." Translation: "I'll fix this later through a different process because this process is broken."


The VP/Principal/Dean, who was VERY CLEAR in your pre-meeting, becomes suddenly philosophical and abstract in the group setting.


Decisions get made but somehow lack the specificity needed for implementation, which is how you end up with "strategic priorities" that mean different things to different people and somehow create more work for teachers/faculty who definitely didn't ask for another initiative.


In K-12: Building principals leave with three different interpretations of the same directive, and by the time it reaches teachers, it's basically telephone.


In higher ed: Deans leave with enough ambiguity to interpret the decision in whatever way least disrupts their college, and by the time it reaches faculty, nobody's sure what was actually decided.


This isn't collaboration. This is collaborative fan fiction.


Everyone's writing their own ending and hoping it somehow aligns.


Meanwhile, your board is asking why implementation is slow, your community is wondering why nothing changes, and your front-line educators are experiencing leadership as a series of contradictory messages that all claim to be "strategic."


The actual meeting fails because you've optimized for harmony over clarity.


Your team has high individual EQ but low collective EQ. They can each read a room. They've never learned to build a room together where truth-telling doesn't feel dangerous.


Repost this if your last cabinet meeting made decisions that still need "clarification."


3. THE POST-MEETING MEETING: Where Decisions Go to Be Reinterpreted


This is my personal favorite because it's so predictable you could set your calendar by it.


Within 47 minutes of your cabinet meeting ending, someone will ping you to "clarify something."


That something is never a clarification. It's a renegotiation.


They're reopening what seemed closed because it was never actually closed—it was just ambiguous enough that everyone could leave the meeting believing their interpretation won.


THE POST-MEETING PATTERN:


Tuesday, 12:30 PM: CFO wants to "clarify budget implications." Tuesday, 2:15 PM: CAO has "concerns they didn't want to raise in front of everyone." Wednesday, 9:00 AM: VP "interprets the decision differently." Thursday, 3:30 PM: You're explaining to the next layer of leadership what was "decided."


The post-meeting meeting exists because your team lacks Perspective Intelligence.


Nobody's clear on who has decision rights about what. So everything feels like it needs consensus, which means nothing ever gets truly decided, which means the decision-making process becomes an infinite loop of meetings about meetings about meetings.


If your PQ were functioning, people would know:


"This is my decision domain. This is your decision domain. Here's where they intersect and how we coordinate."


Instead, everyone's domain is "strategic leadership," which practically means everyone has opinions about everything and decision rights about nothing.


In K-12, this creates a phenomenon in which superintendents make district-level decisions that principals then "adapt" for their buildings, resulting in teachers experiencing inconsistent leadership.


In higher ed: This creates the phenomenon where presidents make institutional decisions that provosts then "contextualize" for academic affairs, which deans then "interpret" for their colleges, which department chairs then... you get the idea. By the time it reaches the classroom, nobody's sure what the original decision was.


Tag your cabinet member who's best at "clarifying" decisions after meetings (do it cowardly—don't name what they're actually doing).


THE CASE STUDY: Marcus and the 14-Hour Miracle


Let me tell you about a leader I'll call Marcus (not his real name, but Marcus, your former CFO absolutely knows this story is about you two and is probably smirking right now).


Marcus led a mid-sized institution—a regional public university that could just as easily have been a suburban school district of 8,000 students dealing with declining enrollment, rising costs, and a board asking increasingly uncomfortable questions about efficiency.


His cabinet: 7 people with an average of 19 years in education. Combined credentials that could stock a small academic conference. Combined ability to make a decision without three meetings? Roughly equivalent to a committee asked to choose pizza toppings while honoring everyone's dietary restrictions and also addressing systemic inequity in pizza distribution.


Before we worked together, Marcus's calendar was a crime scene.


I'm talking 23 hours per week in cabinet-related meetings.


Not including the "quick syncs" that somehow always took 40 minutes. Not including the "can we talk about Tuesday" messages that turned into strategy sessions in the parking lot. Not including the time spent translating cabinet decisions to the next layer of leadership who would then need their own meetings to process what leadership decided.


His team wasn't lazy. They were meeting themselves to death.


They'd have the Monday cabinet meeting. Then, on Tuesday morning, his CFO would "want to clarify the budget implications." Tuesday afternoon, his Chief Academic Officer would "need to discuss how this affects instructional priorities / academic programs." Wednesday, his VP of Advancement would "have concerns about community perception" (in K-12, substitute "Director of Communications" worried about parent reaction). By Thursday, Marcus was re-meeting about Monday's meeting while preparing for the following Monday's meeting. By Friday, he was exhausted and wondering why leadership felt more like crisis management than strategic direction.


His team had an average TEAM INTELLIGENCE score of 4.2 out of 10.


For context, that's the score where teams are technically functioning but primarily through heroic individual effort and way too many meetings.


High IQ (9.1 average). Catastrophically low EQ (3.8 collective). And a PQ configuration that made about as much sense as their parking situation (which, coincidentally, also frustrated everyone daily).


Then Marcus did something radical: He killed the pre-meetings.


Not by policy. You can't policy your way out of a trust problem.


He did it by creating conditions in which pre-meetings became unnecessary.


His team took the TEAM INTELLIGENCE assessment (results were humbling—to quote his CFO: "Well, this explains why I schedule all those 'alignment conversations'").

His team wasn't lazy. They were meeting themselves to death.

They built a shared language for disagreement (turns out you can just... disagree in meetings if you've practiced how to do it productively first).


They clarified decision rights so people stopped feeling like everything needed consensus (spoiler: most things don't need consensus, they need a clear decision-maker and good communication after).


Six months later:


Same people. Same challenges. Same budget constraints and enrollment pressures. 61% fewer meetings.


They still had cabinet meetings. But those meetings became actual decision-making sessions instead of performance art.


They still had hard conversations. But those conversations happened IN the meeting, not in the shadow government of pre- and post-meetings surrounding it.


Decisions got made with clarity. Implementation happened faster. Teachers/faculty experienced leadership as more coherent. The board stopped asking, "Why does everything take so long?"


His calendar went from 23 hours of cabinet meetings per week to 9.


That's 14 hours back per week. That's 588 hours per year. That's 3.5 months of 40-hour workweeks. Marcus got back by teaching his team to think together instead of preparing to perform.


The difference?


They stopped optimizing for comfort and started optimizing for clarity.


Revolutionary? No. Obvious? Yes. Common? Based on the data from 987 leadership teams across K-12 and higher ed—absolutely not.


Now, if you're thinking, "this makes perfect sense, but how do I actually facilitate this conversation with my team next Tuesday without it turning into another meeting about meetings?"—I get it. That's the gap between insight and implementation.


This is what The GROUP is for.


Each week, I turn the newsletter topic into a Leader CORE Lesson and Guide: facilitation notes, discussion prompts, the Meeting Audit tool, team exercises for building disagreement infrastructure, diagnostic questions—everything you need to lead your team through this content without spending Sunday night building materials from scratch.


It's free (because I'm not going to charge you to solve a problem that's already costing you half a million dollars annually), built for busy leaders who need practical resources —not more theory —and designed for Monday morning meetings when you're already exhausted from last week's meeting cascade.


Grab this week's guide:


But if you join The GROUP or not, here's what you'll be able to implement immediately...


THE APPLICATION: What To Do Monday Morning


(Assuming you survived last week's meeting marathon and aren't currently hiding in your car eating lunch alone to avoid more "quick syncs")


Step 1: The Meeting Audit (20 minutes)


At your next cabinet meeting, put this on the agenda:


"Before we dive into today's topics, let's do a 10-minute mapping exercise. Everyone, take out your calendar. Count the hours you spent last week in: pre-meetings for cabinet decisions, the actual cabinet meeting, and post-meetings clarifying cabinet decisions. Include the 'quick chats' and 'alignment conversations.' Be honest—nobody's grading this except your own calendar."


Then go around the room. Say your numbers out loud. Add them up.


If the total is under 30 hours for your whole team, you're doing better than 73% of leadership teams (congrats, you can skip the rest of this newsletter and go actually lead something).


If it's 40-60 hours, you're average (which in this context means "acceptably dysfunctional").


If it's over 60 hours, you have a yacht-sized problem (see opening paragraph).


Now multiply that weekly total by 42 working weeks. Then multiply by your team's average fully-loaded compensation rate (salary + benefits, divided by 2,080 working hours per year).


That number you just calculated?


That's not your collaboration investment. That's your collaboration tax.


And unlike your actual taxes, this one is optional.


(If someone says, "But we NEED all these meetings to stay aligned," you've just identified who benefits most from the current system. Usually, it's the person with the lowest collective EQ who's compensating with individual relationship management. We love them. They're exhausting. We'll address this in Step 3.)


Step 2: The Trust Diagnostic (15 minutes, uncomfortable but worth it)


Still in that same meeting, ask this question:


"On a scale of 1-10, how comfortable are you disagreeing with someone in this room during our meetings—not in a pre-meeting, not in a post-meeting, but in the actual meeting when the whole team is present?"


Write down your own answer first. Then go around the room.


If everyone says 8+, somebody's lying (probably the person who scheduled three pre-meetings last week).


If answers differ by more than 4 points, you don't share a common understanding of your team's emotional infrastructure.


If anyone says below 5, you've just identified why the pre-meetings exist.


If your K-12 principals or higher ed deans are giving answers different from those of your central office/administrative team, you've identified a systemic problem—trust doesn't cascade; it has to be built at every level.


Here's the thing about trust in teams:


It's not built through retreats or trust falls or that time you did an escape room and technically escaped, but Susan will NEVER forgive Brad for not listening to the red herrings.


Trust is built through successfully navigating disagreement together.


Your team doesn't trust each other because they've never practiced disagreeing productively. So they've created an elaborate system of side conversations to avoid disagreement entirely.


You can't policy your way out of this. You have to practice your way through it.


Step 3: The Decision Rights Map (30 minutes in next meeting)


This is where you fix the PQ dysfunction that's causing half your post-meetings.


Create a simple chart with three columns:


MY DECISION (I decide, I inform you) OUR DECISION (We decide together, consensus required) YOUR DECISION (You decide, you inform me)


Then list your top 10 most common decision types.


In K-12: budget reallocation, curriculum adoption, staffing changes, facility use, discipline policies, community communication, and program modifications.


In higher ed: budget reallocation, academic program changes, enrollment strategy shifts, policy updates, resource distribution, faculty matters, student services changes.


Go through each one. Assign it to a column.


Watch the discomfort happen when people realize they've been treating "Your Decision" items like "Our Decision" items, which is why everything takes three meetings and someone's always unhappy.


If more than 40% of items land in "Our Decision," you have a consensus addiction problem.


Leadership teams that require consensus for everything make zero decisions quickly. They make elaborate compromises slowly. There's a difference.


And while you're compromising, your teachers are waiting for clarity, your faculty are wondering if anyone's actually in charge, and your students are experiencing the consequences of slow leadership.


The goal: Clarity about who decides what.


Not consensus about everything. Not dictatorships about anything. Clarity.


So people stop reopening decisions that weren't theirs to make and stop avoiding decisions that are.


OBJECTION HANDLING


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


You just spent 47 hours last week in meetings ABOUT meetings. You don't have time NOT to have this conversation.


Also, this isn't meta. This is the actual work.


The strategic planning you keep meeting about? That's the distraction. The real work is building a team that can think together efficiently enough to actually execute the strategy you keep strategizing about.


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


And while you're busy meeting, enrollment decisions are being made by families who won't wait for your cabinet to align, competitive institutions are moving faster, and your best teachers/faculty are wondering if leadership will ever actually lead.


"My team needs those pre-meetings to feel prepared."

Your team needs those pre-meetings because they don't feel safe being unprepared in front of each other.


That's not a preparation problem. That's a psychological safety problem disguised as professional courtesy.


Teams with high collective EQ think out loud together. They bring half-formed ideas to meetings and refine them collectively. They disagree productively and leave aligned.


Teams with low collective EQ think separately, prepare extensively, perform agreement publicly, then repair privately.


Your team is currently doing the second thing.


It's costing you 588 hours per year per leader.


The bar for "better" is underground.


And the opportunity cost? While you're meeting about meetings, other districts/institutions are outpacing you. Not because they're smarter. Because they're faster.


THE MATURITY SHIFT


Immature leaders think: "We need more meetings to stay aligned." Mature leaders think: "We need better TEAM INTELLIGENCE, so we need fewer meetings."


Immature leaders optimize calendar coverage—if it's not on the calendar, it's not important. Mature leaders optimize decision velocity—how fast can we move from question to clarity to action while everyone else is still scheduling pre-meetings?

Immature leaders treat pre-meetings as strategic stakeholder management. Mature leaders treat pre-meetings as symptoms of broken team infrastructure that need diagnosis, not optimization.


Immature leaders believe slow decision-making demonstrates thoughtfulness. Mature leaders know slow decision-making demonstrates dysfunction (and demonstrates it to everyone who's waiting for leadership to lead—teachers, faculty, students, families, boards, communities).


The difference is the difference between managing around your team's limitations and eliminating those limitations.


One makes you busy. One makes you effective.


One gives you a calendar that looks impressive in screenshots. One gives you time, actually, to lead while the world keeps changing around you.


The meeting about the meeting isn't a best practice. It's a red flag wrapped in Outlook invites.

And unlike your actual challenges (enrollment shifts, budget pressures, political polarization making every decision feel like navigating landmines, AI disrupting everything, including how you're supposed to lead), this one is 100% fixable.

Today. By you. With your team.


Your Turn


How many hours did YOU spend last week in pre-meetings, actual meetings, and post-meetings for cabinet decisions?


Bonus points if you can calculate what that costs in actual dollars using your fully-loaded compensation rate.


Double bonus points if you can calculate what that time could have been spent on instead—instructional leadership, strategic thinking, community building, literally anything that serves students instead of serving meeting culture.


Drop a comment. Tag the cabinet member who schedules the most pre-meetings (do it cowardly—tag them without naming what they do). Or screenshot this and text it to your entire cabinet with the subject line "Wednesday's agenda just changed."


Found value in this? Help other educational leaders discover it:


→ Repost this with your calculated meeting tax number → Tag a leader who lives in pre-meeting purgatory → Comment with your most absurd "quick sync" story—your story helps others feel less alone


The more leaders shift from meeting about meetings to actually making decisions, the better our educational systems become.


And given everything happening in education right now—political pressure, financial constraints, enrollment uncertainty, technology disruption—we need leaders who can actually lead, not leaders stuck in meeting purgatory while the world changes around them.


Follow @Dr. Joe Hill and @Higher Performance Group for weekly #TEAM INTELLIGENCE insights.


Next Issue: "Your Strategic Plan Has Group Project Energy (And Everyone's Doing Their Part Wrong)"


We'll explore why your five-year vision feels like that college group project where everyone submitted their section without reading anyone else's, the bibliography has three different citation formats, and somehow you still got a B- because the professor gave up grading it halfway through.


Spoiler: You're not having a strategic alignment problem. You're having a "nobody read the Google Doc instructions" problem, and someone keeps editing it without track changes while another person is still working in the old version they downloaded to their desktop three weeks ago.


P.S. If you're thinking "I don't have time to turn this newsletter into a facilitation plan for Tuesday's cabinet meeting"—I already did it for you.


The GROUP is a free community where every newsletter becomes a ready-to-deploy Leader CORE Lesson and Guide.

This week's implementation guide includes:


·      The Meeting Audit tool

·      The Trust Diagnostic script

·      The Decision Rights Map template

·      Facilitation notes for navigating the discomfort

·      Discussion prompts for the inevitable "but we're different" objections

·      Plus adaptations for both K-12 and higher ed contexts


Because a superintendent's cabinet operates differently from a university president's cabinet, and the guide honors both.


Join The GROUP here - it's free!

Think of it as the Costco version of team development. You buy in bulk (one membership, unlimited resources). You save money and time. And unlike Costco, you won't leave with a kayak you don't need and 47 pounds of muffins you'll never finish.


Plus, you get access to hundreds of educational leaders across K-12 and higher ed who are also trying to escape meeting hell and understand why their calendar looks like a game of Tetris designed by someone who hates them.



The implementation guides save you hours. The peer conversations? Those might save your sanity and possibly your marriage (because you'll stop working until 9 PM to "catch up" from all the meetings).


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.

JOIN THE GROUP

Help Spread the Word

If you found value in this post, we’d love your help spreading the word! Please consider sharing this on your favorite social media platform and tag Higher Performance Group and Dr. Joe Hill. Your support helps us reach and inspire more awesome people like you!

Like What You've Read?


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

More Blog Articles

By HPG Info January 14, 2026
DR. JOE HILL President @HPG | Author of The TQ ADVANTAGE When Your Board Metrics Say "Winning" But Your Gut Says "Failing" I had the same conversation 23 times last year. Not in conference keynotes, where everyone performs as a "strategic leader who has it figured out." In parking lots after workshops. On follow-up calls at 7 PM. In texts that started "Can I ask you something that's been eating at me?" A superintendent, after crushing every board metric: "Joe, why do I feel like I'm failing at everything that actually matters?" A university president with the most credentialed cabinet she's ever led: "We can't make a decision without three meetings. What am I missing?" A college president at 11 PM (via text): "I spend more time managing my cabinet's dysfunction than actually leading. How did I become this person?" Here's what's frustrating: I gave terrible answers. Not because I'm incompetent—because these questions revealed problems I hadn't solved for myself. So I spent Q4 doing what I should've done in Q1: figuring out what I should have said. Turns out, the questions superintendents and presidents struggled with most in 2025 weren't about strategy, enrollment, or board politics. They were about survival while everyone watches you succeed. Here are the three questions I botched—and the answers I wish I'd had ready. QUESTION 1: "When Does Being Driven Cross Into Being Obsessive?" The Moment I Realized I Had No Answer Community college president—let's call her Rachel—after a Team Institute session: "I'm in the office 6 AM to 7 PM. Weekends. My cabinet says I'm 'inspiring.' My spouse says I'm 'unavailable.' I thought this IS leadership. But am I driven or just addicted?" I gave her the standard consultant answer about balance and boundaries. It was garbage. Because I was answering emails during our Netflix date night. I was "inspiring" my people while my wife wondered if I remembered her name. Glass houses, meet stones. What I Figured Out By December There's actual research on this—the dualistic model of passion : Harmonious Passion: Flexible and energizing Fills you up When you can't do it, you're disappointed but okay Sustainable forever Obsessive Passion: Rigid persistence even when it's destroying you When you can't do it, you feel shame When you DO do it, you STILL feel inadequate Major contributor to burnout (and divorce, and health crises your board will call "unexpected") Campus leadership selects for obsessive passion and calls it "commitment." Your board rewards it. Your community celebrates it. Until someone has a breakdown, and everyone acts shocked. The diagnostic? The Vacation Test. Can you take a full day off without checking email? If yes—when did you last actually do it? If you can't remember, you're not driven. You're hyper-optimized. And hyper-optimization always precedes system failure. Ask any Formula One team that pushed too hard without pit stops. 💡 "The same drive that got you the presidency is the exact thing that will end it—unless you build recovery infrastructure around it before crisis forces the conversation." What To Do Tuesday Morning (Not "Someday") Pick ONE recovery ritual. Just one: The Phone Kennel: Tonight, plug your phone downstairs. Don't bring it to your bedroom. (Sounds simple. Most presidents can't do it for three consecutive nights. That's diagnostic, not judgmental.) The "This Area Is Clear" Ritual: When you leave your office, say out loud: "Work time is done." Creates a psychological boundary your brain actually respects. The 3-Hour Sacred Window: Block three consecutive hours this weekend for something non-work that requires full attention. Coffee roasting. Long bike ride. Fiction reading. Playing with grandkids without your phone nearby. If you take vacations and check email daily, that's work with a view, not recovery. Your body knows the difference even if your calendar doesn't. Objection Handling: "But I LIKE working—it's my passion!" Great. Harmonious or obsessive? Can you stop without shame? That's the test. "My board expects me to be available 24/7." Your board expects you to lead for a decade, not flame out spectacularly in year three. They just haven't said it yet because you keep performing invincibility. QUESTION 2: "My Cabinet Is Brilliant Individually But Collectively Incompetent. What's Broken?" The Moment I Had No Good Answer Superintendent in Texas—let's call him Marcus (Marcus, your CFO was laughing when we reviewed your Team Intelligence results, so you know this is you): "Joe, every person on my cabinet has 15+ years of experience. Advanced degrees. Strategic thinkers. But together we can't make a simple decision without three pre-meetings and four follow-ups. What's broken?" I said something generic about communication and trust. Consultant garbage. The real answer? I hadn't figured out the math yet. What I Figured Out By December It's literally a math problem : IQ × EQ × PQ = TQ Most leadership cabinets look like this: IQ (Individual Intelligence): 9.1/10 → You only hire brilliant people EQ (Collective Emotional Intelligence): 3.8/10 → They can't disagree productively PQ (Positional Intelligence—role clarity): 2.5/10 → Nobody knows who decides what Result = TQ (Team Intelligence): 4.2/10 → Permanent impossibility despite impressive resumes That's not a communication problem. That's a multiplication problem. When any variable approaches zero, the whole equation collapses. You keep investing in the variable that's already maxed out (IQ—hiring smart people) while ignoring the two that determine whether smart people can think together under pressure (EQ and PQ). It's like installing a Ferrari engine with bicycle wheels and wondering why you're losing races to Honda Civics. The pattern I've now seen 47 times: Monday 6:30 AM: Your CFO wants to "align before Tuesday's meeting" (translation: lobby before anyone else can) Tuesday 10 AM: Cabinet meeting where everyone performs collaboration while avoiding actual disagreement Tuesday afternoon: Three separate "clarification" requests (translation: renegotiations of what seemed decided) Friday: Everyone's exhausted, nothing's actually resolved, but calendars are impressively full, so at least it LOOKS like leadership is happening That's a Team Intelligence deficit costing your district or institution roughly $1.1M annually in wasted meetings, duplicated effort, and opportunities missed while you're stuck in alignment purgatory. Meanwhile, enrollment is shifting, your best teachers are wondering if leadership will ever actually lead, and your board is asking increasingly pointed questions about execution velocity. 💡 "Individual brilliance without Team Intelligence produces impressive LinkedIn profiles and permanent impossibility. The math doesn't care about your credentials." What To Do Tuesday Morning The Cabinet Intelligence Audit (15 minutes) At your next cabinet meeting: "Quick exercise. Everyone rate our team's ability to think together under pressure, 1-10. Write it privately first." Go around the room. Read answers aloud. If everyone says 8+: Somebody's lying (or everyone has wildly different definitions of "thinking together") If answers vary by 3+ points: You don't share reality about your own team dynamics If anyone says below 5: You've just identified why pre-meetings exist—people don't feel safe thinking out loud together Then ask the question that changes everything: "What would need to be true for everyone to feel comfortable disagreeing in THIS meeting instead of lobbying outside it?" The silence will be uncomfortable. Someone will deflect with process talk. Someone else will say "I've been thinking the same thing." That second person is your ally. Start there. Objection Handling: "We don't have time for this meta-conversation about meetings." You spent 47 hours last month in meetings ABOUT meetings. You don't have time NOT to fix this. Your problem isn't time—it's Team Intelligence producing a 47-hour Meeting Tax. "My team won't go for it—they'll think I'm criticizing them." Your team is currently "going for" a system producing permanent friction despite everyone working 60-hour weeks. They already know something's broken. You're not revealing a problem—you're naming what everyone already feels. QUESTION 3: "Why Do I Keep Neglecting What I Literally Teach Others?" The Moment I Realized I'm A Hypocrite This one's personal. I teach Team Intelligence to superintendents and presidents. Sustainable systems. Recovery architecture. "You can't pour from an empty cup." Then I worked through Thanksgiving. Answered emails Christmas morning. Ran on 5 hours of sleep and spite. The question a superintendent asked me in October haunted me all through December: "Joe, you teach this stuff. How do YOU avoid burning out?" Honest answer? I wasn't. I was just better at hiding it. What I Figured Out By December I interviewed Dr. James Hewitt , a human performance scientist who works with Formula One teams. He said something that gutted me: "I taught recovery to Fortune 500 companies while being 'always on' myself. 100+ flights a year. Missing family dinners. I genuinely believed I was the exception to the rule—until one morning in the shower, I found a lump." Cancer forced him to confront the truth: You're not superhuman. You're just a human who hasn't rested. The most dangerous leadership belief isn't "I need to work harder." It's "The rules don't apply to me." They do. Physics doesn't care about your board's expectations, your strategic plan, or how many people are counting on you. Your body will force the conversation your calendar keeps postponing. 💡 "You're not too busy to build recovery systems. You're too busy BECAUSE you haven't built recovery systems. There's a difference." What To Do Tuesday Morning Design Your Weekly Recovery Day Block ONE full day this week. Not "I'll try" or "maybe next week"—this week. Then: Morning: Something requiring full attention but not work (bike ride, elaborate coffee ritual, whatever makes you feel human) Afternoon: Something actively decreasing cognitive load (fiction, show-watching, napping—NOT business books or "personal development") Evening: Time with people who don't need you to perform leadership Critical Rules (Non-Negotiable): Phone stays in another room (not "on silent"—physically elsewhere) No "just checking email real quick" (that's work, which means you failed) If you work at all, even "just for a minute," you failed the assignment Objection Handling: "But I have too much to do." Then you've built an unsustainable system that will fail spectacularly—either next month or next year, but it WILL fail. Taking one day off either proves your cabinet can function without you (healthy) or reveals they can't (critical diagnostic you desperately need). "What about emergencies?" Define "emergency" as "can't wait 24 hours without significant harm to students, staff, or institution." Watch how shockingly few things meet that standard. Most "emergencies" are just someone else's poor planning becoming your crisis. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature presidents think: "I just need more willpower, more passion, more drive. If I push harder, I'll break through." Mature presidents think: "I need better systems, clearer boundaries, sustainable practices that multiply capacity without multiplying hours." Immature superintendents optimize themselves to death while their cabinets watch and learn that sustainable leadership is performance art. Mature superintendents build infrastructure that multiplies cabinet capacity without heroic individual effort. The difference isn't motivation. It's systems. One makes you busy. One makes you effective. One gives you an impressive calendar screenshot. One gives you a decade. One makes you a cautionary tale. One makes you a model worth following. Your turn: Which question hit hardest? What are you specifically changing Tuesday morning? Not "I need better balance"—that's consultant-speak performance art. Be specific: "I'm blocking Sunday completely. Phone stays downstairs." "I'm running the Cabinet Intelligence Audit this week." "I'm designing my first full recovery day for Saturday." Drop a comment. Tag another superintendent or president who's crushing metrics while quietly drowning. Repost with your one specific action. Because insight without implementation is just expensive entertainment that changes nothing. STOP LEAVING PERFORMANCE ON THE TABLE Here's what I've learned after working with 987 leadership teams: Your team isn't broken. Your team model is. You've invested millions in hiring brilliant individuals. But individual brilliance without Team Intelligence produces impressive resumes and permanent friction. The superintendents and presidents who've cracked this code aren't working harder. They're working human—with recovery systems, Team Intelligence architecture, and the courage to admit that sustainable leadership requires more than inspiration and long hours. If your talented team is performing at 60% capacity despite everyone's best efforts , the problem isn't motivation or competence. It's multiplication : IQ × EQ × PQ = TQ And when any variable approaches zero, your entire equation collapses—no matter how impressive your board reports look. The TQ Keynote: Transform Your Team From Friction to Acceleration This isn't another motivational talk about working together better. This is the math, the research, and the practical protocols that help leadership teams move from 60% to 90%+ capacity—not by working harder, but by thinking together. What You'll Discover: The TQ equation that reveals exactly where your team is stuck (and why traditional development hasn't fixed it) Five cognitive "BEST FIT" types every high-performing team needs (and which ones you're missing) Practical protocols for transforming cabinet friction into execution acceleration How to navigate complexity 40% faster than average teams (verified across 1,000+ leadership teams) Live team mapping exercises using actual TQ types from your cabinet This keynote is grounded in: Analysis of nearly 1,000 leadership teams across K-12 and higher education Research-backed insights showing 2:1 performance advantage for high-TQ teams A practical framework that creates measurable results within 90 days, not "someday" Duration: 2 hours Format: On-site with your full leadership team Investment: Book a conversation to discuss Why This Is Different 94% of executives believe collaboration is critical. Only 8% see results from traditional team development programs. TQ bridges that gap—because it treats team development as a math problem with a systems solution , not a motivation problem with an inspiration band-aid. Teams working with HPG consistently move from 60% to 90%+ capacity. We protect that standard by choosing partners carefully. If your team is talented but stuck, if you're crushing board metrics while quietly drowning, if you've tried everything except addressing the actual multiplication problem—let's talk. Book a TQ Keynote Conversation →Your community deserves leaders who multiply each other's strengths instead of working around each other's weaknesses. Your talented individuals can become an unstoppable team. But not with the same model that got you here. Book Your TQ Keynote Today! - https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/team-intelligence-keynote P.S. Stop Performing Sustainability. Start Practicing It. The questions I couldn't answer in 2025 revealed my own gaps—in recovery systems, in Team Intelligence, in sustainable leadership architecture. The answers I found by December might close yours— if you actually implement them instead of just nodding along. Your cabinet is watching how you lead yourself. Your family is waiting for the version of you that comes home fully present. Your future self is begging you to build better systems before crisis forces the conversation.  Whether you book the keynote or not: Stop leaving 40% of your team's capacity on the table while everyone works 60-hour weeks. The math is solvable. The systems are buildable. The question is whether you'll address it Tuesday or wait until Friday's crisis forces your hand. Next Issue: "Your Cabinet Doesn't Need Another Retreat—They Need Recovery Architecture" How one superintendent cut meetings 61% and increased results 3x. Not by working harder. By working human. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for insights that close the knowing-doing gap.
By HPG Info January 8, 2026
How To Avoid Your "Fresh Start" Next Week As Just July's Underperformance Wearing A Turtleneck DR. JOE HILL Founder Higher Performance Group December 31, 2025 The Most Expensive Lie You'll Tell Yourself Next Tuesday It's December 31st. Your first cabinet meeting is Tuesday, January 6th. And you already know what's going to happen. You're going to walk in and do what you've done every January for four years: Pretend the last six months didn't just prove exactly why your next six months will fail. Here's the math that hurts: That retention initiative from August? Dead by October ($73K wasted). Academic program revision from convocation? Tabled in September ($127K in committee time and consultant fees—poof). "Culture of collaboration" you promised the board? Your cabinet still can't coordinate lunch without territorial violations. Add it up: $200K+ in failed initiatives from this semester alone. Not because your team lacks talent. Because you keep building skyscrapers on foundations designed for tool sheds. Here's the lie you'll tell yourself Tuesday: "This time will be different. We just need to refocus. Renewed energy. Fresh priorities." And here's the truth you already know but won't say out loud: Your July priorities didn't fail because they were wrong. They failed because your foundation can't support them. You have four days before that cabinet meeting. Four days to ask yourself one question that could change everything: What if the problem isn't your priorities? What if you keep attempting Level 5 work on Level 1 infrastructure? Comment "FOUNDATION" if you're dreading next Tuesday's cabinet meeting and wondering whether anyone else sees what you see. THE DIAGNOSIS: YOU'RE COSPLAYING STRATEGIC PLANNING Let's talk about what's really happening. You're six months in. Enrollment is 6% below projection. (It's always 6%. Why is it always 6%?) Three of your July priorities are effectively dead, but no one has said it out loud yet. And next Tuesday, you'll gather that same cabinet and ask: "What should our priorities be for semester II?" As if the answer exists anywhere other than in the data you're about to ignore from the six months you just lived. Here's what actually happens: Your CFO will suggest: The budget transparency initiative you launched in August and stopped discussing in October when it became clear nobody actually wanted transparency—just protected territory. Your CAO will propose: Academic program restructuring that died in September, when it required actual decisions about resource allocation. (Easier to blame "resistance to change" than admit nobody had the courage to make cuts.) Your VP of Enrollment will float: A "reimagined" recruitment strategy that's basically the August strategy with different adjectives and a Canva template. (Because what failed in fall will definitely work in spring if we just believe harder.) Someone will say: "What if we focused on just a few key priorities?" (Everyone nods. You'll still end with 14. This is the way.) By lunch, you'll have a polished document. Strategic priorities in pillars. Impressive-sounding metrics. A timeline requiring 40% more capacity than your team demonstrated having for six months. Nobody will ask: "Why didn't our July priorities work? What does that gap teach us? What foundation are we missing?" Asking implies admitting something went wrong. And if someone's responsible, this whole "fresh start" vibe gets uncomfortable. So instead, you'll create new priorities that will fail for the exact same reasons. This isn't strategic planning. This is institutional amnesia with better fonts. Your turn: What's one priority from July that died by Thanksgiving? One word only. Let's see how many of us are living the same pattern. THE LIE WE KEEP TELLING OURSELVES Here's the story we'll tell Tuesday: "We just need to refocus. Get back to basics. Prioritize what matters." Here's the story we know but won't say: Our priorities aren't the problem. Our foundation is. You launched a retention initiative in August. Required Academic Affairs and Student Services to coordinate. Both divisions nodded enthusiastically at convocation. You felt hopeful. By October, Academic Affairs was sending students to advisors with schedules that Student Services was unaware of. Student Services was creating support plans that Academic Affairs wasn't tracking. Students got contradictory guidance. Faculty were frustrated. Staff were exhausted from manually bridging the gap. The initiative didn't fail because people didn't care. It failed because you have zero infrastructure for cross-divisional coordination. No clear decision rights. ("Who actually decides when we intervene with a struggling student?") No escalation pathway when priorities compete. ("Academic Affairs needs faculty time for curriculum revision. Student Services needs faculty time for intervention meetings. Who decides?") No shared language for resolving conflicts. ("Academic rigor" means different things to Academic Affairs and Student Services, and you've never aligned on it.) No accountability system that doesn't rely on someone working nights and weekends to manually coordinate. You tried to run a Level 5 initiative on Level 1 infrastructure. That's not a priority problem. That's a foundation problem. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 "You can't strategize your way out of a foundation problem. If your infrastructure can't support what you're building, no amount of renewed focus will matter." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ And next Tuesday, when you propose a "refined" retention strategy—maybe with better communication protocols, definitely with more frequent check-ins—it will fail again. Not because your team won't try. Because your foundation can't support what you're asking it to carry. 60% capacity. 100% workload. Zero infrastructure. You can't strategize your way out of that math. WHAT WE'VE BEEN BUILDING WHILE YOU'VE BEEN STUCK While your cabinet was trapped in the July→December cycle, we spent 18 months building the systematic solution. THE TEAM INSTITUTE officially launches in January 2026. It's not another leadership development program. It's the infrastructure underneath strategy —the 8-session sequential system that transforms 60% capacity cabinets into multiplication engines. We've piloted this with 47 leadership teams across K-12 and higher ed: 3X performance improvement 29% higher engagement scores 27% better organizational outcomes Zero burnout increase despite performance multiplication The framework addresses what every leadership program ignores: You can't skip foundational stages. You can't attempt Level 5 work (managing change, resolving conflicts, developing others) on Level 1-2 infrastructure (inconsistent trust, basic reliability). The Team Institute builds sequentially: 01 - Base Camp → Understanding your team's {BEST FIT} profile 02 - Building Trust → The foundation for everything else 03 - Empowerment → Authority + clarity + confidence 04 - Collaboration → Creating something better together 05 - Broadening Influence → Leading beyond your position 06 - Managing Change → Leading transformation without casualties 07 - Managing Conflict → Using friction as refinement 08 - Developing Others → Multiplying the talent within Each session builds on the previous foundation. You can't skip trust and go straight to empowerment—that's abandonment, not leadership. Early bird enrollment opens January 6th. All consultations booked before January 12th receive early adopter pricing. But whether you join or not, you can use the next four days to break your cycle... [SCHEDULE A TEAM INSTITUTE DISCOVERY CALL TODAY] THE FRAMEWORK: Three Questions To Ask Before Tuesday You have four days. Use them. Pull out last July's strategic priorities right now. Ask yourself these three questions. Alone. Honestly. Question 1: What Did We Actually Attempt July-December? Not what's in the strategic plan document. What did you ACTUALLY attempt? Which priorities did you really try to execute? Include the quiet ones that never made it into official documents: "We tried to get the cabinet to communicate honestly instead of performing collaboration in meetings and having real conversations in the parking lot." "We hoped department chairs would step up so we could stop being the bottleneck." "We wanted to feel less reactive and more strategic." (You spent November in crisis mode. Again.) Write them down. All of them. No judgment. Just data. Question 2: Where Did Things Actually Stall? Without blame. Without immediately jumping to fixes. Just notice: Where did things not work? The retention initiative requiring coordination you don't have infrastructure for? The "data-driven decision making" you abandoned in September when enrollment dropped, and you made cuts based on politics instead of data? The "empowering middle leadership" until they made a hiring decision, and your cabinet overruled them because "we need to be strategic" (translation: "we don't trust you")? Just see the pattern. Question 3: What Is This Revealing About Our Foundation? What foundation are we missing that would make these initiatives actually possible? Not "what's wrong with us." Not "who's to blame." What infrastructure gaps do these failures reveal? Old story: Our retention initiative failed because people won't coordinate. New story: Our retention initiative revealed we have no system for cross-divisional coordination. We expected collaboration through wishful thinking. We can't fix retention until we build coordination infrastructure. Old story: We're not really data-driven. New story: Under pressure, we default to politics because we've never practiced data-driven decisions when stakes are low. We need to build that muscle before the next crisis. Old story: Our middle leaders can't handle responsibility. New story: When we tried to empower them, our cabinet took control back. That's not a middle leadership problem. That's a cabinet trust problem. See the difference? If you're seeing foundation gaps everywhere—trust issues, coordination breakdowns, decision paralysis—you're not alone. 73% of leadership teams in our research operate at Level 1-2 foundation while attempting Level 5 work. This is exactly what The Team Institute was designed to solve. Not through weekend retreats. Through 8 months of sequential, collective capability building with sustained accountability. Early bird discovery calls open January 6th. All consultations booked before January 12th receive early adopter pricing. [GET THE TEAM INSTITUTE DETAILS HERE] THE CASE STUDY: The President Who Stopped Pretending Let me tell you about Eric (not his real name, but Eric, you know who you are). December 2023. Four days before his first cabinet meeting. Absolutely dreading it. For three years, he'd done the same thing every January: Project optimism. Create "renewed priorities." Watch them die by March. Wonder what was wrong. This time, he did something different. He pulled out his July 2023 priorities. All twelve. He asked: "What did this teach me about my foundation?" The answer was brutal: His cabinet couldn't coordinate across divisions. Not because they were incompetent. Because he'd never built the infrastructure that makes coordination possible. So in January 2024, Eric said something nobody expected: "We're not creating new priorities for January-June. We're building the foundation that makes priorities possible." His CFO looked confused. "What does that mean?" Eric: "It means I've spent three years watching initiatives fail because we have no system for cross-divisional work. No clear decision rights. No escalation pathways. No way to resolve conflicts without making me the bottleneck. January through June, we're building that infrastructure. Then in July, we'll launch priorities our foundation can actually support." His board pushed back: "What will we tell stakeholders?" Eric: "We're going to tell them we're building the capacity to actually accomplish what we commit to—which is more honest than launching priorities we can't execute and explaining next December why they didn't work. Again." They spent January-June 2024 on foundation work: Clarifying decision rights Building coordination protocols Practicing difficult conversations when stakes were low Creating accountability that didn't rely on heroic effort July 2024, they launched five priorities. Not twelve. Five. By December 2024: All five were complete or on track. Zero quiet deaths. Zero "we need to realign." Student retention up 11%. Faculty satisfaction up 18%. Staff turnover dropped by a third. Not because Eric became a better strategic planner. Because they built the foundation that makes plans possible. Eric told me, "I spent three years trying to strategize my way out of a foundation problem. The moment I admitted we needed to build differently—not plan better, but actually build the infrastructure—everything changed." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💡 "The question isn't whether your cabinet has talent. The question is whether they've built the collective infrastructure to multiply that talent before communities stop tolerating 60% results." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ YOUR MOVE: Four Days To Break The Cycle You have four days. Option 1: Do what you've always done. Walk into Tuesday's meeting. Create 10-14 "renewed priorities." Watch them stall by March. Call it a "strategic pivot" in June. Repeat next January. Option 2: Use these four days to get honest. Pull out July's priorities. Ask the three questions. Walk into Tuesday and say: "Before we create new priorities, let's examine what the last six months tried to teach us about our foundation." Option 1 is easier. Familiar. Expected. Option 2 is terrifying. It means admitting something fundamental isn't working. But here's what I know after 25 years with 987 leadership teams: Five years from now, you'll either still be in this cycle—or you'll have built different. 60% capacity. 100% workload. Zero sustainability. The industrial model gave you that math. Then told you to fix it with better planning. BUILD DIFFERENT means stopping the cycle. WHAT TO DO RIGHT NOW Poll: Where does your cabinet actually operate? 👍 = Level 1-2 (Unreliable/basic trust, hero-dependent) ❤️ = Level 3-4 (Consistent integrity, functional systems) 💡 = Level 5 (Institutional trust culture, multiplication engines) Then: → Repost this with your honest answer: "What's one priority from July that died by Thanksgiving?" (One word only.) Tag me. → Tag a cabinet member who's ready for the foundation conversation → Screenshot the Three Questions and text to your CFO: "Read this before Tuesday." → Download The Team Institute framework: [Get the PDF] → Schedule a discovery call if you're ready to build differently: [Book Your Consultation] — All calls before January 12th receive early adopter pricing. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights. P.S. — THE TEAM INSTITUTE: Early Bird Opens January 2nd If your January-June priorities require foundation you don't have—and you're ready to build it systematically—let's talk. The TEAM INSTITUTE isn't another strategic planning framework. It's the 8-month infrastructure system that determines whether your team can execute what it commits to. What's included: Comprehensive discovery & Team {BEST FIT} mapping Team 360 baseline and follow-up Eight monthly 2-hour facilitated sessions Between-session practice with accountability Executive coaching for senior leaders The commitment: Full leadership team participation—no exceptions. Early bird opportunity: All discovery consultations before January 12th receive early adopter pricing + priority cohort placement. [SCHEDULE YOUR 30-MINUTE CALL] You can't plan your way out of foundation problems. You have to BUILD DIFFERENT. Book your call: [SCHEDULE HERE] Download framework: Learn more: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/team-institute NEXT ISSUE (January 7th): "Your Cabinet Treats Coordination Like Telepathy (And Wonders Why Nothing Works)"  Why educational leaders keep launching cross-divisional initiatives without building coordination infrastructure, then blame "resistance to change" when nothing aligns. Spoiler: You're not having a people problem. You're having a physics problem. And physics doesn't care about your strategic plan. —Joe P.P.S. — If this helped you see something differently, repost it with your biggest takeaway. Your network needs this too. We're building a movement of campus leaders who refuse to accept that 60% capacity is sustainable. #HigherEdLeadership #K12Leadership #TeamIntelligence #BuildDifferent #EducationalLeadership #TheTeamInstitute
Show More