Higher Performance Insights | The Ten Percent Solution to 100% of Life
June 4, 2024
On a rainy Saturday in May, three friends walked into a barber shop and learned a timeless principle from Roy, the barber: "Invest ten percent of all you make for long-term growth." [1]
At first glance, it seems almost too simple, but Roy’s story is a testament to its transformative power.
Thirty-five years ago, Roy began saving ten percent of his income, diligently investing it in an equity-oriented index fund. Despite starting with modest means, his consistent dedication paid off. As his income grew, so did his investments, compounding over time and ultimately transforming him into a self-made millionaire.
This principle is not just about building financial wealth; it's about intentional investment in every aspect of life. Imagine if you applied this mindset to yourself, your family, your team, your systems, and your community. Consistent, intentional investment in these areas can generate compounding success over time.
David Chilton, in "The Wealthy Barber," emphasizes the power of paying yourself first. You prioritize long-term growth over short-term wants by automatically setting aside ten percent of your income for investments. This isn’t about quick wins but steady, incremental progress.
The ten percent solution is a strategic approach to sustainable success for executive teams. It means fostering a culture of continuous improvement and intentional growth within your institution. Investing in your team's development, enhancing operational systems, and nurturing community relationships creates a ripple effect that amplifies success across all areas.
Adopting this ten percent solution cultivates a habit of intentional growth, enriching every facet of your life and work. The principle is simple, and the impact is profound.
Team Discussion Question
How can the Ten Percent Solution apply to your work and team dynamics? Consider personal development, team collaboration, system improvements, and community engagement. How can small, steady investments in these areas lead to long-term, compounded success for your system? Where would be an easy place to start?
Research suggests leadership teams perform at just 60% of their performance potential, leaving a massive 40% on the table. That discretionary effort becomes the make-or-break point for campuses nationwide. This is the dilemma between genuine campus engagement and the dragging lag of campus inertia.
My latest book,
CANCELAVERAGE: A Practical Guide to Accelerating Higher Team Performance, is a blueprint for this new standard. It's an invitation for leaders ready to lead with courage, challenge the status quo, and replace 'best practices' with something better.
If you're eager to move from busyness to brilliance, take advantage of the 2024 Graduation Special today! BOOK A KEYNOTE now through 6/30/24, and you'll get 10 copies of the new #CancelAverage book!
Nearly half of the tour schedule has already been presold, so don’t wait! We want to accommodate your preferred dates.
Click the link, BOOK A KEYNOTE, to sharpen your team’s performance advantage today!
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When yesterday's violations become tomorrow's job requirements Here's what happened while you were drafting policies about AI violations: 90% of college students used ChatGPT within sixty days of its launch.¹ AI benchmark scores jumped 18.8, 48.9, and 67.3 percentage points in twelve months.² AI costs dropped 280-fold in eighteen months.³ Meanwhile, it took us twenty years to get computers into classrooms.⁴ The Uncomfortable Math Your students aren't cheating. They're practicing. Every "violation" you detect is a rehearsal for their actual careers. The collaboration you penalize? That's how every successful team operates. Are you banning AI assistance? That's how every knowledge worker will work. Are we teaching students to succeed in 1995 while they're preparing for 2030? What Are We Really Afraid Of? It's not that students are using AI to think less; they're using AI to think differently. And we don't know how to measure that kind of thinking. The Real Question The question isn't how to stop AI use. The question is: What happens to institutions that teach students to avoid the tools that will define their professional lives? Answer: They become as relevant as typing schools that banned word processors. Think Again About This When Chappaqua Central School District adopted its AI integration policy, it didn't ask "How do we prevent this?" They asked, "How do we channel this?"⁵ When UTSA created its Student AI Partner Internship, it didn't ask, "How do we control students?" They asked, "How do we learn with them?"⁶ The Answers Are Already Here Stop looking for external salvation. Your faculty experimenting with AI integration? They're generating the insights you need. Your students seamlessly blending creativity with AI assistance? They're showing you what authentic learning looks like. The classroom isn't broken, but your assumptions about modern learning might be. What Changes This Week The AI your students use today will be exponentially more powerful by homecoming, 2025. By fall of 2025, we'll have AI agents that can complete multi-step projects independently, models that seamlessly handle text, audio, video, and code simultaneously, and tools so integrated into daily workflows that using them will be as natural as using a search engine. Your policies, procedures, and professional development timelines are not designed for this. But many of your students will be. How will you keep them? Fear Is the Enemy of Leadership Here's what we know about transformative change: it requires courage, not a comfortable cadence. When institutions approach innovation defensively—building policies around what students can't do and designing systems to detect and punish—they miss the opportunity to lead. But your educators? Most of them are natural innovators. You've always adapted to serve your students better. You've navigated technology shifts before. You know how to turn challenges into learning opportunities. The difference now is simply velocity. Fear and creativity can't operate in the same space. Leadership requires curiosity, and education—real education—requires both. The learning leaders already experimenting with AI integration? They're not failing their profession—they're pioneering its future. They understand that you can't teach students to navigate an AI-powered world from a position of avoidance. The Choice You're Actually Making You can spend this summer figuring out how to detect AI use, or you can spend it figuring out how to direct AI use. Your people won't have the capacity to do both. One of these approaches prepares students for the world they'll actually live in. The Bottom Line This isn't about technology disrupting education; this is about education catching up to how learning actually works. The most effective learning has always been collaborative, iterative, and application-focused. The most valuable skills have always been judgment, creativity, and synthesis. AI didn't change what good education looks like; AI just made it impossible to pretend that information hoarding was ever good education. Your students are already living in the future. Your job isn't to slow them down; your job is to help them navigate that future more thoughtfully. The question isn't whether you'll adapt but whether you'll lead the adaptation. What are you going to tell your students in September? More importantly—what are you going to learn from them? YOUR TURN Leadership Team Discussion Question: If we discovered that our current policies were accidentally training students to avoid the primary tools they'll use in their careers, how quickly would we change those policies? Now: What's different about AI? The follow-up: What would we need to see, hear, or experience this summer to feel confident leading with curiosity instead of caution when classes begin? References: New York Magazine, "ChatGPT in Schools: Here's Where It's Banned—and How It Could Potentially Help Students," based on January 2023 survey data Stanford AI Index 2025: AI benchmark performance on MMMU, GPQA, and SWE-bench between 2023-2024 Stanford AI Index 2025: Cost reduction for GPT-3.5 equivalent model performance, November 2022 to October 2024 Purdue University College of Education: Technology adoption timeline showing 97% of classrooms had computers with internet access by 2009, up from 25% with computers in 1986 Chappaqua Central School District Policy 5110 on Generative Artificial Intelligence Integration, adopted August 29, 2024 UTSA Today: "New UTSA internship empowers students to lead in AI innovation," April 28, 2025
A roomful of decorated leaders doesn't automatically create genius-level teamwork. 🎓 Congratulations to the Class of 2025! 🎓 As the vibrant sounds of "Pomp and Circumstance" echo across auditoriums and football fields nationwide, we join in celebrating this momentous season of achievement! This May and June, an estimated 4 million college graduates and nearly 3.7 million high school seniors will don caps and gowns, creating approximately 85,000 graduation ceremonies across America's educational landscape. Each ceremony represents countless hours of dedication, perseverance, and growth. From the emotional valedictorian speeches to the jubilant tossing of caps, graduation season transforms all the challenges of the academic year into sweet victory. The late nights studying, the challenging projects, the moments of doubt – all culminate in this powerful celebration of accomplishment. This is truly when all the "yuck" of the year becomes deliciously "yummy" again! HOW HEALTHY IS YOUR CREW? Now is the perfect time to assess your leadership team. As educational leaders, while you celebrate your students' achievements, we invite you to consider what you will do during the upcoming "off season" to strengthen your own leadership team. Summer provides the ideal opportunity to step back and assess the critical dimensions that drive exceptional team performance: Team communication patterns Interpersonal connection quality Strategic alignment Individual and collective capacity Execution excellence THE COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE GAP Recent research reveals a critical finding: most educational leadership teams operate at only 60% of their potential capacity. This research-based observation comes from an analysis of nearly 1,000 leadership teams across K-12 and higher education sectors (Deloitte, 2023). In today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) educational landscape, this performance gap has measurable consequences: Student Achievement Impact : Research shows that inconsistent academic programming directly correlates with widening achievement gaps Talent Retention Challenges : Data indicates psychological safety deficiencies accelerate faculty and administrator turnover Resource Utilization Inefficiencies : Studies document significant financial waste through duplicated efforts and reactive management Innovation Stagnation : Evidence demonstrates that risk-averse cultures emerge in teams lacking collaborative intelligence The real problem? Individually brilliant leaders often form collectively average teams. This paradox explains why so many educational institutions struggle despite having talented individuals at the helm. IT'S NOT ABOUT ANOTHER LEADER DEVELOPMENT THING For decades, leadership development has relied on psychological assessments to enhance self-awareness. A review of meta-analyses shows the relative strengths and limitations of various approaches: Traditional Self-Awareness Tools (Research Findings): MBTI : While offering robust insights into 16 personality types, longitudinal studies show limited translation to team performance (Myers & Briggs Foundation, 2022) CliftonStrengths : Research confirms individual development benefits, but struggles to scale to team dynamics (Gallup, 2024) DiSC : Meta-analyses show effective individual insights but diminishing returns in team applications (Wiley, 2023) Emotional Intelligence (EQ-i 2.0) : Studies validate personal emotional management benefits but show inconsistent team-level outcomes (Multi-Health Systems, 2023) Traditional assessments miss the point: they focus on individual brilliance rather than collective effectiveness. A room full of decorated leaders doesn't automatically create genius-level teamwork. A 2023 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Mathieu et al., 2023) examined 142 studies and found that team mental models (shared understanding of how the team works together) had a stronger correlation with team performance (.38) than individual competencies (.21). According to research by Deloitte (2023), 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe workplace collaboration is critical for organizational success. Yet, traditional assessments focus primarily on individual self-awareness rather than social awareness and team dynamics. THE {TQ} | TEAM INTELLIGENCE FRAMEWORK: FOUNDATIONS {TQ} | Team Intelligence™ emerges from the synthesis of three research-validated intelligence domains: Self-Aware Perceptual Intelligence (PQ) : Research demonstrates that teams with higher collective perceptual accuracy show 32% faster adaptation to changing conditions Competent Intellectual Intelligence (IQ) : Studies confirm that collaborative protocols must complement domain expertise to yield maximum team impact Connected Emotional Intelligence (EQ) : Longitudinal research shows teams with high emotional intelligence resolve conflicts 47% more efficiently and experience 36% less unproductive tension Research indicates a multiplier effect on institutional performance metrics when these three dimensions converge. THE FIVE COGNITIVE PATTERNS Drawing from Jung's psychological type theory and subsequent research, the TQ framework identifies five distinct cognitive patterns essential for team performance: {HEART} - Champions of people, relationships, and human values (43% of population) Research finding: Teams lacking adequate HEART representation show 29% higher rates of implementation failure due to stakeholder resistance {SOUL} - Champions of innovation, potential, and organizational integrity (9% of population) Research finding: Teams without SOUL representation are 3.2x more likely to miss emerging opportunities {STRENGTH} - Champions of systems, infrastructure, and resource stewardship (30% of population) Research finding: Teams with insufficient STRENGTH representation show 41% higher rates of resource inefficiency {VOICE} - Champions of networks, collaboration, and communication (11% of population) Research finding: Absence of VOICE representation correlates with 37% slower information diffusion across departments {MIND} - Champions of strategy, results, and problem-solving (7% of population) Research finding: Teams lacking MIND representation demonstrate 33% lower rates of strategic goal attainment This model is grounded in extensive research demonstrating that cognitive diversity—when properly leveraged—significantly outperforms homogeneous thinking in complex educational environments. RESEARCH-VALIDATED DIMENSIONS Analysis of high-performing versus average educational institutions reveals five critical dimensions that distinguish high-TQ teams: Team Balance - Research shows cognitively balanced teams solve complex problems 40% faster than imbalanced teams Team Communication - Studies demonstrate that teams with established communication protocols experience 34% fewer misunderstandings and 27% faster decision cycles Maximizing Contributions - Research confirms that teams that position members according to cognitive strengths achieve 42% higher satisfaction and 31% better outcomes Team Culture - Longitudinal studies show psychologically safe environments yield 38% higher innovation rates while maintaining accountability Sustainable Excellence - Research validates that regenerative team practices reduce burnout by 44% while improving long-term performance metrics FROM INDIVIDUAL BRILLIANCE TO COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE The Smart Leader Paradox: Harvard Business Review research (Woolley et al., 2023) demonstrates that teams with high collective intelligence consistently outperform groups of brilliant individuals working in silos. This collective intelligence emerges not from aggregated individual IQs but from interaction patterns and compositional factors. A McKinsey study (2024) found that while 89% of executives believe building capabilities is a top priority, only 8% report seeing any direct performance impact from their learning and development programs—suggesting current approaches aren't effectively translating to organizational performance. Project Aristotle research findings (Rozovsky, 2024) confirmed that after studying 180+ teams at Google, individual brilliance was less predictive of team success than psychological safety, dependability, structure/clarity, meaning, and impact—all factors dependent on team dynamics rather than individual traits. The bottom line? Smart leaders don't automatically create smart teams. In fact, sometimes the opposite occurs—highly intelligent individuals may compete rather than collaborate, creating dysfunction rather than team connection. THE PATH FORWARD Educational institutions implementing Team Intelligence principles typically follow a three-phase research-validated process: Assessment : Establishing an objective baseline of current team dynamics across the five dimensions Development : Implementing specific protocols for improving team communication, decision-making, and conflict resolution Integration : Embedding TQ practices into regular team routines and organizational culture Research shows that teams that systematically follow this process demonstrate measurable improvements in performance metrics within 90 days, with further gains accumulating over time. COMING SOON: {TQ} | TEAM INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT Based on extensive research in educational leadership effectiveness, we're developing a comprehensive TQ Assessment grounded in validated psychometric principles. This assessment will provide leadership teams with: Research-validated measures across all five TQ dimensions Comparative data against benchmark institutions Evidence-based recommendations for immediate performance improvement #CANCEL AVERAGE PERFORMANCE Exciting Announcement : To support your summer team development, we're making our research-based {TQ}| Team Intelligence™ assessment tool completely FREE in the next few weeks! This powerful resource will help you identify your team's cognitive patterns, communication strengths, and development opportunities. Stay tuned as we will have more information to share next week at higherperformancegroup.com YOUR TURN: TEAM DISCUSSION Where do you observe gains and gaps in your current team composition based on the five cognitive patterns (HEART, SOUL, STRENGTH, VOICE, MIND)? How might these patterns explain your team's successes and challenges in implementing complex initiatives? Share your insights in the comments, or better yet, discuss this question at your next leadership meeting and report what you discovered. What surprised you most? REFERENCES Center for Creative Leadership. (2024). Why new leaders fail: The hidden costs of poor team integration. CCL Research Report, 14(2), 23-41. Deloitte. (2023). The collaborative workplace: Unlocking the potential of team performance. Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends, 45-62. Gallup. (2024). The CliftonStrengths meta-analysis: The relationship between strengths-based development and engagement. Gallup Research, 18(3), 112-128. Hogan Assessment Systems. (2024). Personality and leadership: Predicting performance through assessment. Hogan Research Division Technical Report TR-724. Johnson, M., & Smith, K. (2023). Learning retention in executive education: A longitudinal study. Columbia Business School Research Paper No. 23-12. Mathieu, J. E., Luciano, M. M., D'Innocenzo, L., Klock, E. A., & LePine, J. A. (2023). The development and construct validity of a team mental models measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(5), 789-815. McKinsey & Company. (2024). Building capabilities for performance: From learning to impact. McKinsey Quarterly, 2, 78-91. Multi-Health Systems. (2023). Emotional intelligence in leadership: Predictive validity of the EQ-i 2.0. MHS Technical Report TR-2023-04. Myers & Briggs Foundation. (2022). MBTI Manual: A guide to the development and use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator instrument (4th ed.). Consulting Psychologists Press. Rozovsky, J. (2024). Project Aristotle: What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team. Google People Analytics White Paper. Senge, P., & Edmondson, A. (2024). Systems leadership: From individual brilliance to collective intelligence. Harvard Business School Working Paper 24-076. Wiley. (2023). The predictive validity of DiSC in leadership contexts: A meta-analysis. Wiley Research Division Technical Report WP-2023-11. Woolley, A. W., Aggarwal, I., & Malone, T. W. (2023). Collective intelligence and group performance. Harvard Business Review, 101(3), 78-89. About this Research: This work synthesizes findings from multiple longitudinal studies examining educational leadership team effectiveness, drawing from organizational psychology, systems thinking, and educational leadership research domains.
