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

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.

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Higher Performance Insights | THE ALL-STAR PROBLEM

By HPG Info • November 2, 2026

Why a leadership team full of great hires still drops the ball The Brewers won the World Series Wednesday night, 4–1 over the Rays in Game 5. It’s the first title in the franchise’s 57 years. Ms. Becky and I are building our shack in Wisconsin, so we’re officially on the bandwagon. Baseball is the sport where stacking stars most reliably buys wins. Each hitter stands alone at the plate. Add a great one and the win column moves. Basketball works differently. The NBA teams with the most stars on the roster win less than their talent says they should. Ten seasons of data say so, and so does anyone who has watched a superteam forget how to pass in the fourth quarter. Your leadership team plays basketball. Most of us hired it like a baseball roster. Every superintendent and president I talk to has hired at least one person they'd call the best they've ever worked with. A finance chief who reads a budget like a novel. A chief academic officer the faculty actually trust, which is rarer than a balanced budget. An HR lead who knows every contract clause by heart. Then a hard season shows up. A budget gap, a referendum, a bargaining year, an enrollment dip. The room full of all-stars starts pulling in different directions, each one excellent, each one alone. Everybody is playing hard. Nobody is playing together. So here's a question to sit with before your next leadership team meeting: when did you last hire someone for how well they pass? THE DIAGNOSIS · A ROOM FULL OF FINISHED REPORTS Picture a Tuesday morning leadership meeting in November. Finance brings a projection. HR brings a staffing plan built on last spring's numbers. Teaching and learning brings a new intervention model that needs four positions nobody budgeted. Each report is sharp and finished, and none of them were built with the others in the room. The real meeting happens in the parking lot at 11:40, two people at a time, engines running. Nobody at that table is underperforming. That's what makes the problem so hard to name. Your evaluations say everyone is excellent, and they're right. We built it this way. Job postings, interviews and annual reviews all measure the individual, and nobody's contract lists assists. We hire for points, pay for points, and then act surprised when nobody passes. Three questions worth answering honestly: How many of your top five priorities can one person on your team deliver alone? When a hand-off between two of your leaders drops, who finds out first, you or your board? When the next three months get harder, does your team pass faster, or does everyone retreat to their own lane? I know the loneliness of being the one person at the table who sees how all the pieces connect. I've sat in that chair. For a long stretch, my teams underperformed despite being full of talented people, and I kept trying to close the gap with my own effort. That works about as well as a point guard deciding to also play center. In The TQ Advantage, I call the result the Individual Brilliance Ceiling: talented people in the wrong positions, with no shared way of working, producing average team results. 📊 60% of collective capacity: where most leadership teams run, across nearly 1,000 TQ assessments . The talent is there. The passing is missing. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. IQ is the talent you hired. EQ is the shared language that lets that talent coordinate under pressure. PQ is each leader's accurate read of where they play best and where they're covering. It's multiplication, so a zero anywhere wins. Stack the IQ, let the other two sit near zero, and the product stays small no matter how many stars you sign. A quick timeout before the research. If one of those three questions made you wince, that wince is data. Most leadership teams I work with can name their best individual performer in two seconds and can't produce a single written hand-off. Closing that gap is what our TQ Advantage workshop is built for, and I'll say more about it at the end. First, the sports science. THE RESEARCH · THE TOO-MUCH-TALENT EFFECT In 2014, researchers from INSEAD, Columbia and VU University Amsterdam published a study in Psychological Science that tested something most hiring committees treat as settled: does adding top talent always make a team better? Before they ran the numbers, they asked ordinary people to predict the answer. Most said yes. More stars, more wins, no ceiling. Then the researchers checked. They looked at three sports: two World Cup qualifying cycles in soccer (2010 and 2014), ten NBA seasons (2002 to 2012), and ten Major League Baseball seasons over the same stretch. In baseball, more talent kept paying off. Each added star moved the win column. In soccer and basketball, talent helped up to a point. Past that point the gains flattened, and at the very top the curve bent down. The most star-heavy teams won less than their talent predicted. The NBA data showed where the wins leaked out. The most star-heavy teams coordinated worse: fewer assists, lower shooting percentages, fewer defensive rebounds. Anyone who has guarded a ball hog in a rec-league game knew this already. Now there's a regression line. The deciding variable was interdependence. A baseball hitter stands alone at the plate. (Baseball is a team sport roughly the way a spelling bee is.) A point guard needs four other people for the play to work. When winning depends on coordination, stacking individual brilliance without building the coordination stops paying. One caveat, because a sharp board member will ask: the downturn at the very top comes from a fitted curve, and the coordination link is a correlation. Treat it as a strong signal about where to look. Most of us hire leaders as if we're building a baseball roster. Then we ask them to play basketball. THE FRAMEWORK · SORT, PASS, POSITION Three moves. You can teach all of them to your team in sixty seconds. Sort the game you're actually playing. Some work really is baseball. A great grant writer or recruiter can win alone at the plate, so let them. The leadership team plays a different sport. The budget, the master schedule, enrollment, the board and the bargaining table all run through each other. When one leader guards her lane, somebody else's work stalls. Build the passes on purpose. In the NBA data, the damage ran through coordination. Coordination is a skill, so a team can practice it. Most leadership teams have never written down a single hand-off: who gives what to whom, by when. They run on goodwill and email. Goodwill holds up fine until February. Email holds up fine until someone hits reply-all. Put people where they play best. I was recruited to play catcher in college and spent four years calling pitches and talking with my pitcher between nearly every one. Now and then my coach moved me to right field to rest my legs. I could play it. I was never brilliant out there. Plenty of leadership teams have catchers playing right field, and nobody has said so out loud. The TQ framework maps five types of thinkers: HEART, SOUL, STRENGTH, VOICE and MIND. Every team leans hard toward a few. Among the leaders we've assessed, HEART shows up 43% of the time and MIND just 7% . If nobody on your team naturally plays the MIND position, someone is covering it, and they're probably tired. WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE · ONE DROPPED PASS Here's the pattern I see most often. Finance flags a deficit in October. HR waits on enrollment projections before starting the staffing plan. Finance assumes teaching and learning is producing those projections. Teaching and learning assumes HR has them. Nobody dropped the ball on purpose. Everybody assumed someone else was holding it. Three excellent leaders, one dropped pass, and the reduction conversation slides to April, when every option is worse. Map that team's thinking and the reason usually takes about ten minutes to see. Nobody naturally plays the long-range, systems-checking position, so the superintendent has been covering it herself, at 10 p.m., for years. The fix is two moves. Write the six most important hand-offs as one-sentence agreements with names and dates. Then give the systems check to the leader whose profile leans that way, with permission to slow a decision down when the numbers don't connect. Same people. Different sport. TQ IMPLICATION → If most of your priorities need two or more leaders moving together, your development plans can't all be batting practice. THE DRILL · 20 MINUTES AT YOUR NEXT MEETING Sort the work (5 minutes). List your team's top five priorities for the year. Mark each one B for baseball, if one person can win it alone, or H for hoops, if it takes two or more of you moving together. Count the H's. If most are H's and every development plan on your team is individual, you've found the gap. Find the passes (5 minutes). For each H, write the hand-off as one sentence: who gives what to whom, by when. "Finance gets the enrollment projection to HR by February 1 so staffing can start." Name your positions (5 minutes). Go around the table once. Each leader answers: "Where on this team do I play catcher? Where am I playing right field?" No rebuttals on the first lap. Fix one pass (5 minutes). Pick the hand-off that dropped most often this fall. Agree on one change and one owner. Open your next meeting by checking it. "We don't have time for this." Count the decisions this fall that came back to the table a second time because someone wasn't looped in. Multiply by the people in the room and the minutes each one took. You're already paying for the drill, in rework. "My people are too senior for this." So were the NBA's most stacked rosters, and coordination was still where they lost games. Twenty minutes usually surfaces one hand-off everyone quietly knew was broken. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "We need to hire another star." Mature leaders think: "We need the stars we have to pass." Immature leaders think: "Everyone on my team is excellent, so my team is excellent." Mature leaders think: "Everyone on my team is excellent. Now we build the team." Immature leaders think: "Put the best person on the biggest problem." Mature leaders think: "Put the right position on the problem, and protect the hand-offs around it." YOUR TURN Finish this sentence in the comments: "The pass that keeps dropping on our team is ______." One line is plenty. Then read a few of the others. You'll see fast that you're not the only one, which is either comforting or alarming, depending on your board. THE NEXT MOVE Quick gut check. If you ran the drill tomorrow, how many of your top five priorities would come back marked H? And how many of those have a hand-off anyone has written down? If the honest answers are "most" and "none," you're in good company. It's the most common pattern in our data. It's also the one that costs the most in a hard season, because dropped passes show up right when the margin for error disappears: the budget gap, the bargaining year, the board meeting where three of your leaders describe three versions of the same plan. If the drill surfaced more dropped passes than you expected, let's talk it through. Thirty minutes, your team's real hand-offs, no slides and no pitch. Start with a 30-minute conversation: BOOK IT HERE When you're ready to go further, the TQ Advantage workshop puts your whole leadership team in one room for two and a half hours. Everyone completes the TQ assessment first. In the room you see your team's map side by side: who plays catcher, who's covering right field, and which positions nobody holds. You leave with the hand-off and decision protocols you'll use the next morning. Workshop details: higherperformancegroup.com/team-intelligence Know a colleague whose leadership team is in a hard season? Send this their way. And if you're new here, hit subscribe so next week's issue finds you. SOURCES & FURTHER READING Swaab, R. I., Schaerer, M., Anicich, E. M., Ronay, R., & Galinsky, A. D. (2014). The too-much-talent effect: Team interdependence determines when more talent is too much or not enough. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1581–1591. Read the study Plain-language summary: Association for Psychological Science The book: The TQ Advantage by Dr. Joe Hill Behind the 60% figure: HPG research on nearly 1,000 TQ assessments

Higher Performance Insights | WHO'S THE HERO ON YOUR HOMEPAGE?

By HPG Info • October 28, 2026

For college presidents, superintendents, and their leadership teams: a 25-minute exercise for your next meeting. Open your website and read the first five sentences out loud. Count how many start with “we” or “our.” Then count how many start with a student’s problem. Write both numbers down. We’ll come back to them. The committee story Here’s how the “we” sentences win. They shout what they're proudest of: the founding year, the ranking, the new residence hall, the one-to-one devices. Every fact is true. Put together, they tell a 17-year-old on a campus tour, or a parent at kindergarten roundup, that the institution is the hero and they’re the audience. The hero and the guide Every story people remember has two roles. The hero has a problem and wants something. The guide shows up with empathy because they understand the problem and authority because they’ve helped others through it. Then the guide gives the hero a plan and steps out of the spotlight. In your story, the student is the hero, and so is the family standing beside them. Every adult is a guide: the president, the advisor who walks a nervous sophomore to her first job shadow, the bus driver who knows every kid’s name by October. Get those roles right, and your messaging and your service both start from the same place: the student’s problem. Why this matters now WICHE projects that the number of U.S. high school graduates will peak in 2025 and fall 13% by 2041. Fewer students and families will be choosing among more options, and they’ll trust the campus or district that sounds like it understands them. Students also tell us what they remember. In 2014, Gallup and Purdue surveyed more than 30,000 college graduates. For those who had a professor who cared about them as a person, one who made them excited to learn, and a mentor who encouraged their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled. Only 14% had all three. What students remember is being known. That’s guide work, and it starts long before college. Three guide moves Start with their problem. Lead with the questions families are really asking: Will I belong? Will someone know my name? Can we afford this? Is my kid safe here? In service, start the first advising meeting or parent-teacher conference with “What’s hardest for you right now?” Show empathy, then authority. Say you understand, then prove you’ve helped someone like them. One real student story, told with permission, does more than a page of rankings. Give a plan and a picture of success. Three clear steps, and what life looks like a year from now. Every student should be able to name their next step and the adult who has their back. One guardrail: say only what’s true in every building. When Clinton-Massie Local Schools in Ohio had to make cuts after a failed levy, the Superintendent David Moss wrote to families, “The unfortunate reality is that this is a reduction in service.” Families follow a guide who tells them the truth. Take this into your next leadership team meeting (25 minutes) The card (5 minutes). Give everyone an index card with one question: “A student or family asks why they should choose us. What do you tell them?” Sixty seconds, no talking. The sort (5 minutes). Read the cards out loud. Make two piles: cards that start with the student, and cards that start with us. The conversation (10 minutes). Which card would a student or parent actually remember? Where do our website, our tours and our first weeks put us in the spotlight? What do we promise that we can’t yet deliver everywhere? Who on our team already acts like a guide, and what could the rest of us copy? The commitment (5 minutes). Pick one message (a homepage line, a tour script or a welcome letter) and one service moment (orientation, the first week or the first conference). Rewrite both before your next meeting, and assign an owner to each. Then run the five-sentence test again and see if your numbers moved. Where this goes next If your cards came back with eight different answers, you’ve found your team’s real work. The average team performs at less than 60% of its potential (MIT and HPG research), and most of that gap lives in how talented leaders think, decide, and act together. The Team Accelerator is a monthly development experience built to close that gap for a president’s or superintendent’s whole leadership team. It starts where your index cards left off, with the Team Intelligence (TQ) Assessment , so your team can see how it works today. From there: The TQ Advantage Workshop gives your leaders one shared language. Each leader gets a Natural Leadership Profile and a 1:1 with me. Three workshops build Trust, Empowerment, and Collaboration , in the order they grow. Dr. Amy Diaz, EdD , president of GateWay Community College , put it this way: “GateWay’s breakthrough came from intentional work on team cohesion.” If the card exercise showed you a gap, let’s talk about it. Book 30 minutes with me. Know someone who runs a leadership team meeting? Forward this to them. Turn high-performing leaders into a HIGHER-PERFORMING TEAM Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group