Higher Performance Insights | THE WEIGHT IS REAL. SO IS THE WAY THROUGH

October 13, 2026

Eight principles from superintendents and college presidents across eight states on leading through hard seasons, choosing the right seat, and staying grounded as pressure builds.

On October 7, superintendents and college presidents from Alabama, Arizona, California, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Washington gave an hour of the busiest month of the fall to a question most leaders carry alone: What do builders do when the season gets hard?

The session was planned around a framework. The room turned it into something closer to group counsel. Leaders in strong seasons stayed to hear from leaders in harder ones, and leaders who had come through a hard stretch explained how they did it. The hour produced eight practical principles worth sharing with others in the same good fight.

This paper records what they built: eight principles, the evidence behind each one, and a question for every cabinet in the country to take into its next meeting.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The superintendency and the college presidency are carrying more weight than at any point in a generation. Superintendent turnover sits well above pre-pandemic norms. The average presidency is nearly three years shorter than it was in 2006. More than one in three superintendents report recent threats.

Under that weight, the biggest decisions of a career (stay, step, or leave) usually get made alone, inside the hardest weeks, with nobody checking the read. HPG calls this the Lonely Leader Loop. It's a flaw in how the seat is built, and the roundtable exists to break it.

The room produced eight principles: See below.

THE CONTEXT · A PROFESSION CARRYING MORE WEIGHT

23% of the nation's 500 largest districts changed superintendents in a single recent year, against a pre-pandemic norm of 14 to 16%
5.9 years is the average college presidency, down from 8.5 in 2006
1 in 3+ superintendents in a national survey said they had recently been threatened or felt threatened
63% said they or people close to them were increasingly worried about superintendents' well-being

Resignation is now the largest single category of superintendent departure. Some of those exits are the right call. What concerns me is how the call gets made: at 11:40 on a Sunday night, alone, with the board packet open.

From the inside, a hard season and a wrong seat feel identical. You're tired, your patience runs short, and Sunday night starts around 2 p.m. on Saturday. They call for opposite responses. A hard season asks for patience and support. A wrong seat asks for redesign.

I know that night from the inside. In 2013, a year after my own superintendency was running at a five, a new board majority and a pulmonary embolism arrived in the same season. My doctor told me I should not have survived.

When I recovered, I rode a bicycle around Lake Superior, against medical advice, stopping at every campus and district office along the way to ask what they were proud of. I called it the Persuade Me Tour. I needed someone to persuade me the work was still worth my life.

They did. The conversations that started on that ride became THE PROOF, a keynote built on nearly 200 on-camera interviews with K-12 and higher education leaders. It names ten traits of a Builder. The October roundtable worked the first one: telling a hard season from the wrong seat.

We opened with a pulse check. On a fist-to-five scale, from a fist for a season knocking the floorboards out to five for never better, most hands showed a mix of responses.

That detail matters. Groups of educators tend to gather around the ones and twos, and that empathy, useful for a moment, can keep a colleague in the hole longer. So the room named its good seasons without apology. Then the leaders in strong seasons spent the hour making the path clearer for everyone else. (That is a fair description of what a Builder does.)

TQ IMPLICATION → When the season gets hard, most leaders reach for IQ: one more plan, one more credential. The room reached for the other two factors. EQ is the grace to sit with a shortfall without turning it into blame. PQ is the perceptual accuracy to tell a season from a seat, which almost nobody can do alone from inside one. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. Let perception drift toward zero and all the intelligence in the building multiplies into a confident wrong answer.

(A quick word before the principles. How much of what makes a seat feel wrong comes from a cabinet that passes the weight upward? Across 987 leadership teams, I've watched that pattern make a good leader in the right seat feel like they're in the wrong one. THE TEAM INSTITUTE spends eight months building the other kind of cabinet, one that sees the whole board together. Plenty of seats that feel wrong are simply lonely, and a team can fix lonely.)

THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES

The roundtable runs on one rule: ideas leave the room, stories stay in it. The principles below are reported without attribution. Leaders quoted by name are speaking from on-camera interviews they recorded for THE PROOF.

01 · A Bad Season Is Not a Bad Calling

The first principle came straight from the session question. A hard season and a wrong fit produce the same symptoms: exhausted, discouraged, done. Leaders described how hard it is to tell the two apart from inside the worst week, and how much it helps to say it out loud to someone who has been there.

Dr. Rick Cobb, superintendent of Mid-Del Public Schools in the Oklahoma City metro, described a year on THE PROOF that tested him harder than 2020 did. He made no permanent decision from inside it. He stayed, and the year that followed became one of the best of his career.

❝ "The yuck never lasts. When I go, I want to go out on a YUM of a year." ❞ — Dr. Rick Cobb

What the evidence adds. Chronic exhaustion tracks a mismatch between a person and the job across six areas: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Long hours alone predict it far less well. A hard season usually shows strain in one or two areas that can be expected to ease. A wrong seat shows a persistent gap in values or control that rest will not close.

For your cabinet: Which of the six areas is carrying the strain on your team right now, and is it the kind that eases or the kind that stays?

02 · The Intentional Step

The room spent real time on a move most leaders never consider: stepping sideways, or down a rung, to reach work that fits. Conventional career advice treats a smaller title as a setback. Leaders who had made the move described it as the turning point.

They were candid about why it's hard: the blow to the ego, the worry about what colleagues will think, the stretch of not knowing what comes next. Several said the deciding voice belonged to someone close to them who reminded them the choice was bigger than one job or one place.

Dr. Amy Diaz, EdD, president of GateWay Community College in Phoenix, told me on camera for THE PROOF that twenty-two years into her career, she recognized her role no longer fit her calling. She stayed in the field, stepped off the ladder, and moved into a different corner of the institution. That step sideways carried her to a presidency faster than the ladder would have.

What the evidence adds. Research on professionals who reinvent their careers finds that successful moves rarely follow a plan worked out in advance. People test possible selves through small experiments, new networks, and roles that look like detours, and the new identity becomes clear in the doing. When the calling is intact and the gap is in the seat, a different seat in the same field is often the fix.

For your cabinet: Who on your team is in the wrong seat in the right field, and what would a lateral move look like for them?

03 · Performance = Potential − Interference

This equation anchors HPG's work. When things get hard, leaders load up on potential: a new initiative, a wider network, another credential. (This is how a strategic plan ends up with four new priorities and zero retirements.) Far less effort goes into naming the friction that drains the week and removing it.

The room sharpened the point. Some interference can be mitigated and some cannot. A problem can be solved. A situation can't. Mortality is a situation, and a stakeholder fixed in permanent opposition may be one too. Treating a situation as a problem burns the energy a leader needs for the problems that will actually move.

When a leader has done everything in their power and the interference still won't move, the question changes: is my staying helping this institution, or costing it?

What the evidence adds. Decades of performance-coaching research point the same direction: removing what blocks people from capability they already have produces larger gains than stacking new capability on top of unresolved friction. Design researchers have a name for the unsolvable kind, gravity problems. When an obstacle can't be acted on, the advice is to accept it as a fact of life and move the effort elsewhere.

For your cabinet: List the three biggest sources of friction in your week. Which are problems you can solve, and which are situations you need to stop trying to fix?

04 · Grace Belongs in the Equation

A participant added a term the equation leaves out. Leaders who see the gap between their potential and their results need to extend grace to themselves first, then to their teams: sit with the shortfall, accept it, then line everyone back up for students and community. Grace is a discipline a leader practices personally before asking a team to practice it.

The room drew a second implication. Every leader at that table makes decisions that change the season of someone else's career. The person who loses a role this year may be leading a campus or a district in ten. Hearing peers describe the decisions that shaped their own careers was, several said, a reminder to keep the human side in view when they are the ones deciding.

What the evidence adds. In controlled experiments, people who responded to a failure with self-compassion were more motivated to improve, studied longer after a failed test, and were more committed to repairing a mistake than those who responded with self-criticism. The broader research links self-compassion to resilience without any drop in standards. Grace keeps people in the work long enough to get better at it.

For your cabinet: When your team missed its last big target, what did you model first: grace or blame?

05 · A Calling Removes the Need to Prove

The word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call. Don Killingbeck Jr., C.D.L., Ed.D. , superintendent of Hemlock Public Schools in Michigan, describes his work on THE PROOF as a calling and names what a calling lifts off a leader: the question of what you are trying to prove.

Dr. John J. Sygielski 🏳️🌈, president emeritus of HACC, Central Pennsylvania's Community College, describes the work as changing lives, destinies, and family trees. Nobody performs for a room when they are thinking about family trees.

Several leaders described choosing education over more lucrative or prestigious paths, sometimes against the expectations of the people who raised them. Their stories differed. Their conclusion matched: the work pays in the difference it makes, and that payment keeps them in it.

I offered the room a distinction between the "me" and the "I." The "me" is shaped by role, upbringing, hometown, and the power structure: where to sit, who to talk to, how to win. The "I" is the self that was called to the work in the first place. Every leader in these seats plays the "me" some, because the work is political. The more often the "I" makes the call, the more freedom leaders report.

What the evidence adds. People who see their work as a calling report the highest life and work satisfaction and miss the fewest days of work, even compared with colleagues in the same occupation and pay grade. The risk runs the other way too. A leader who reads a bad season as proof the calling was wrong can walk away from the very orientation that was protecting them.

For your cabinet: Which of your current decisions is the "me" making, and what would the "I" decide?

06 · Leave on Your Own Terms

Every leader in these seats will leave one day. The room made the case that the how and the when should be the leader's decision as often as possible. An exit can be planned, negotiated, announced in the leader's own words, and handed off with care. Leaders who had done it described relief more than loss, and a stronger position for whatever came next.

That choice depends on preparation made years earlier. Advice from a state association mentor, relayed in the room, drew nods all around: pay down debt and build savings early, because boards change and people at home depend on you. A leader who can afford to walk away is free to make the right decision for students while staying.

What the evidence adds. Public-sector leaders have a specific advantage. Distributions from a governmental 457(b) plan after separation from the employer are not subject to the 10% additional tax on early withdrawals that applies to 403(b) and 401(k) plans before age 59½. Every leader should consult their own advisors, and the principle holds: financial readiness turns a forced exit into a chosen one. How a leader leaves, and who tells the story, shapes the next role and the institution left behind.

For your cabinet: If you had to leave your seat in 90 days, would it be on your terms? What would need to be true for the answer to be yes?

07 · Keep Your Grounding When the Culture Won't

Leaders across the country face two pressures that test their footing. The first comes from outside: anonymous public attacks, increasingly assisted by AI, that repackage an institution's own public data to suggest wrongdoing. Strong results offer little protection.

The second comes from inside. Long-standing adult habits can drift from the standard a little each year until nobody notices anymore, because it has always been done that way. A leader who names the drift can start to feel like the one who has it wrong.

The room's answer to both was the same. Control what you can control. Find a reference point outside the system (a peer, a state association, a coach) who will tell you plainly whether what you're seeing is normal. And remember that protecting students is part of the job.

What the evidence adds. Studies of high-stakes organizational failures describe a pattern called normalization of deviance: people inside an organization gradually accept a practice that falls outside the standard because nothing bad has happened yet, until the deviation becomes the standard. Insiders often can't see it, which is why an outsider's reaction matters. National survey data also shows more than half of superintendents reporting more contentious board meetings. Leaders facing this pressure are part of a documented national pattern.

For your cabinet: Who outside your organization will tell you the truth when your own culture has started to normalize something it shouldn't?

08 · The Job and the Role

I closed with a distinction for leaders weighing whether to stay. The job of a superintendent or president is to make great decisions. The role is culture builder: forging the principles an institution lives by, grounded in a demanding kind of love that fights for the greatest good of everyone the institution serves.

If you're driving the right culture forward, press on, hard season and all. If the same interference blocks the role again and again, and the only reason left to stay is a pension milestone, the question becomes: what is it all worth? Leaders who answer that honestly and act on the answer are what I call liberated leaders.

Dr. Will Darter, Ed.D, superintendent of Everton R-III Schools in Missouri, put the answer most of us are hoping for in one line on THE PROOF.

❝ "We continuously and relentlessly believe in people. We believe in the places folks forget about. That's where we're called as leaders." ❞ — Dr. Will Darter

For your cabinet: Where is your role as culture builder blocked right now, and is it blocked by a problem or a situation?

WHAT THIS ROOM DID DIFFERENTLY · FIVE PRACTICES WORTH COPYING

They named a good season out loud. Leaders in strong seasons used that stability to listen to peers in harder ones.

They tested the diagnosis before acting. Leaders who had come through hard seasons described waiting, testing, and talking it through before making a permanent move.

They sorted problems from situations. Energy went to what could be solved. What couldn't be solved was named and set down.

They prepared for the exit long before they needed it. Debt paid down, savings built, and a transition planned in their own words.

They looked outside for a reality check. Peers outside the system confirmed what a leader inside it was seeing.

IMPLICATIONS · BEYOND THE ROOM

For superintendents and presidents. Make no permanent decision from inside the worst month. Name your season out loud to one trusted peer first, and build the financial runway that keeps every option yours.

For cabinets. A cabinet that can talk about seasons openly, good ones included, gives its leader the perceptual check no individual can supply alone. That is PQ at work, and it is a team capacity before it is a personal one.

For boards and trustees. A board that treats a candid conversation about a hard season as a resignation risk teaches its leader to stop having candid conversations. Stability in the top seat starts with a leader who can say "this is a hard season" out loud without it becoming the story.

A 35-MINUTE PROTOCOL FOR MONDAY

Step 1: Run a fist-to-five (5 minutes, next cabinet meeting). Ask everyone to show where their season stands. Name the fours and fives first. Then meet the ones and twos with grace before plans. (If every hand shows a five in October, somebody isn't telling you something.)

Step 2: Run three sorts on your heaviest strain (20 minutes, on your own). Ease or stay? Problem or situation? Me or I? Strain that will ease, problems you can solve, and a choice the "I" would make all point to a season. A persistent gap in values or control, a situation you keep trying to fix, and a choice the "me" is driving deserve a longer conversation with someone outside your walls.

Step 3: Calculate your freedom runway (10 minutes, at home). Divide your accessible savings by one month of household expenses. That number is how many months you could go without this paycheck. Then ask whether that number lets you make the right decision for students while you stay.

THE MATURITY SHIFT

Immature leaders think: "This month is the verdict on my career." Mature leaders think: "This month is data, and I'll read it with someone who's been there."

Immature leaders add when it gets hard. Mature leaders subtract first.

Immature leaders let the "me" protect the title. Mature leaders let the "I" choose the seat.

Immature leaders carry the season alone so nobody worries. Mature leaders let someone outside the walls check the read.

❝ The worst year of a career can sit one year before the best one. Don't let the worst month write the ending. ❞

Your turn. What did the hardest season of your career teach you that the best one never could? Tell us in the comments. Someone reading this in their own hard October needs proof that seasons end.

FROM DR. JOE

Who do you call when the season gets hard? I mean someone outside your system who has sat in the same chair and will tell you plainly whether what you're seeing is normal.

For a lot of leaders the honest answer is nobody, and that gap gets more expensive every year. The pressure from outside is louder. The drift inside is quieter. A leader standing in both can't see either one clearly.

What does it cost to make a permanent decision on a read nobody else has checked?

Picture the other version: a small table of peers who know the weight without being told, where leaders in strong seasons stay to hear from leaders in harder ones. That's what happened on October 7.

The next Peer-to-Peer Leadership Roundtable meets January 6, 2027, continuing THE PROOF's ten Builder traits. One hour, peers only, capped at 25 seats. You don't need to be in a hard season to come. Some of October's most valuable voices belonged to the fours.

Save your seat: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/p2p-page

If this paper helped, pass it to one superintendent or president who should be at that table, and tag a leader above to thank them for the hour they gave.

P.S. This month I'm kicking off Operation 100 PROOF: 100 THE PROOF talks on campuses and at conferences over the next 12 months. If a room comes to mind (an opening-day crowd, a board retreat, a state association conference), message me directly or email info@higherperfromancegroup.com.

Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group.

Data note: Figures are drawn from national superintendent and college president research cited in HPG's October 2026 Executive Brief, Season or Seat. Full sources are available on request.

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Higher Performance Insights | ACADEMIC INTEGRITY - SENIOR LEADERSHIP TEAM EDITION

By HPG Info • October 7, 2026

This fall, a student in your district or on your campus will get caught letting ChatGPT write an essay. There will be a meeting, a policy citation, maybe a zero. That same week, someone in your cabinet will let ChatGPT write a board memo. That one gets a thank-you. We built entire academic integrity policies on one simple idea: if you didn't do the thinking, you don't own the work. Then we quietly exempted ourselves. Try this before your next cabinet meeting. Pull up the last recommendation someone on your team sent you: the budget reduction scenarios, the enrollment projection summary, the draft revision to the attendance policy. Ask the person who wrote it to walk you through the reasoning behind their second option, from memory, with the document closed. If they hesitate, you've found something your AI rollout plan never measured. Your team is getting faster at producing work it can no longer explain. All fall, I've been asking superintendents and college presidents the same question as they plan for 2027: what are your people carrying into this year that no training or workshop seems to touch? The first answer keeps coming back as one line. Convince me this is still worthy work. The second answer, more often than I expected, is AI. Leaders can feel the work speeding up and their own grip on it loosening. In a 2025 MIT Media Lab study , researchers put EEG caps on 54 people and had them write essays. The group using ChatGPT showed the weakest brain connectivity of anyone in the study. Minutes after finishing, most of them couldn't accurately quote a single sentence from the essay they had just turned in. The researchers named the pattern cognitive debt: you save effort today and pay it back later in thinking you can no longer do. It's a small study, and the researchers themselves asked people to stop calling it proof that AI makes anyone dumb. Its message for leaders is simpler. Every prompt that does your thinking for you is a small withdrawal from the one asset your board actually hired. Every cabinet I know is using AI more this fall. Very few are getting smarter because of it. The Irony Nobody at the Board Table Has Named Both halves of our profession are under the same public question right now: can the people we serve still think? In Gallup's latest annual education poll , Americans rated K-12 schools worst on critical thinking out of the six areas measured. Twenty percent called the job schools do there excellent or good. Forty-seven percent called it poor. Presidents hear their own version from employers, legislators, and parents writing tuition checks, all asking whether a degree still proves a graduate can reason through a hard problem. Now picture the same week inside a typical cabinet. The strategic plan update was drafted by a chatbot and lightly edited for tone. The enrollment memo came back from AI, got a quick read, and went to the board. The accreditation narrative or the state report got the same treatment. Someone asked the tool which of three budget scenarios to recommend, and the recommendation it gave is now the cabinet's position. We are asking our schools and colleges to teach students to think while the adults at the top quietly hand their own thinking to a tool that has no stake in whether the institution succeeds. (Nobody at the table would say it out loud. It's awkward to admit the drafts got better while your ability to defend them got worse.) Lee Lambert , who leads the Foothill-De Anza Community College District , told me on Season 1 of The PROOF that he thinks of AI as his tenth Supreme Court justice. He won't panic about it, and he won't ignore it. That's the posture I want for every cabinet, K-12 or higher ed. Give the tool a seat at the table. Keep the gavel. A 2025 study from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon , based on a survey of 319 knowledge workers, found the same pattern at work. The more people trusted generative AI to handle a task, the less critical thinking they reported putting into it. Confidence in the tool went up. Effort in the human went down. Here's the part that should reach you personally. When the tool thinks for an individual, the damage stays in one head. When it thinks for a cabinet, the damage spreads. Five people defer to the same draft, nobody owns the reasoning, and the meeting turns into a line edit of a document nobody built. I've spent years in the chair and have since sat in many presidents' cabinet rooms, and the lesson holds in both: a cabinet that can't explain its own decision will eventually be unable to defend it. (This is the gap THE TEAM INSTITUTE was built to close. Every vendor will train your people on the tool. We help cabinets build the collective judgment the tool is supposed to serve, so AI multiplies what your team already thinks. More on that in a moment.) TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. AI can push the IQ side of your output up fast. It can't supply the EQ your team needs to disagree well, or the PQ, the perceptual accuracy, that tells you when a polished draft is wrong for the people in front of you. Let those two drift toward zero and every gain on the IQ side gets multiplied by almost nothing. The Human Intelligence Protocol Call this the Human Intelligence Protocol. Five practices that turn AI into a sparring partner. Each works for one leader and gets stronger when a whole cabinet runs it. Protect the Genius Hours. Sort all of your team's work into two zones. The compression zone is anything large, messy, or repetitive that needs to become smaller and clearer: meeting notes, update memos, survey comments, three conflicting reports on the same program. AI is excellent here. The contribution zone is where your judgment comes in: deciding what matters, reading the room, noticing the issue nobody has said out loud, and knowing that an answer can be technically correct and still wrong for this community. The mistake is handing AI the contribution zone because it can produce something that looks finished. A better prompt before your next cabinet meeting: "Organize these notes and updates into key decisions, risks, unresolved questions, and missing information. Do not make a recommendation." The tool organizes the landscape. The room still chooses the direction. Climb the Brief Ladder. Most leaders use AI like a drive-through window: "Write my board update." Vague request, average answer, polished and forgettable. The ladder has five rungs. The request says what you want. Context says who it's for and where it will land. The outcome says what it must accomplish. Constraints set the boundaries, like length, tone, and what to avoid. The standard shows what good looks like: an example, a rubric, your own best past work. The brief ladder is also the skill of delegating to a vice president, a provost, or an assistant superintendent. If you can't brief the tool clearly, you probably haven't briefed your team clearly either. (The quality of your prompt is a pretty honest mirror of the quality of your thinking.) Seat a Board of Minds. A good board asks the hard questions. Left alone, AI tends to tell you your idea is wonderful. So give it other seats at the table. The stakeholder board: "Name the five groups most affected by this decision. For each, tell me what they want, what they fear, and what they'll resist." (Parents, teachers, and the union in one chair. Faculty senate, students, and donors in the other.) The time board: "What does this decision look like after one week, one year, and five years?" The opposition board, which matters most: "I believe this is the right strategy. Build the strongest possible case that I'm wrong. Name my false assumptions and the conditions that would make this plan fail." This one has a team payoff most leaders miss. In a cabinet, dissent carries a social cost, so it often goes unspoken. When the tool plays the dissenter, nobody has to spend political capital to raise the hard objection, and the room can argue hard about the idea while the relationships stay intact. One rule stays firm: AI states wrong facts with total confidence. When a decision rests on facts, ask for sources and verify the important ones yourself. Build a Pressure Lab. Pilots train in simulators. Emergency teams run drills before the crisis. Most leaders walk into the budget hearing, the tense board work session, the faculty senate meeting, or the hard personnel conversation having rehearsed nothing but their talking points. Use AI as the simulator. "Act as a skeptical board member reviewing our proposed program cut. Ask one question at a time. Push back on vague answers and raise the difficulty as I respond. Don't coach me until we're done." Afterward: "Evaluate my answers for clarity, evidence, and conciseness. Show me where I sounded defensive." Then run it again. The same works for learning. Ask for friction on purpose: "If I get stuck, give me the smallest useful clue." Letting the tool remove every difficulty is like having a friend lift your weights at the gym. Use the Beginner Advantage. The higher leaders climb, the more expensive it feels to say "I don't understand." So they nod through the fund balance discussion, the CIO's pitch about AI agents, the retention dashboard, or state assessment data nobody has explained since the last accreditation visit. Then they search for the answer later, or never. AI gives you a private place to go back to basics. "Explain this with no assumed background, in plain language, with one example from a school district or a college." "What are the five terms I need before anything else makes sense?" "What do beginners usually get wrong?" Then run the teach-back test. Close the window, explain the idea out loud in your own words, and ask the tool what you got wrong. Tell it to help you repair your explanation without rewriting it. When the boss does this openly and says so in cabinet, basic questions become normal for everyone. What This Looks Like in a Real Team This is a composite, drawn from patterns across our 987 teams. I've watched it play out in district offices and in presidents' suites, and the only real difference is the vocabulary. A cabinet had three weeks to bring a painful reduction plan to its board. (In the district version, two programs were on the table. In the campus version, two academic programs were up for sunset review, and the faculty senate was already asking questions.) The first draft came from AI in an afternoon. It was clean, confident, and organized. In the first internal review, the board chair's likeliest question ("Why this program and not the other one?") got four different answers from four different senior leaders. So they changed the process. AI compressed six months of budget data into a two-page briefing with the open questions labeled. The cabinet argued out its own recommendation before any tool saw the problem. Then they seated the opposition board, asked for the strongest case against their plan, and found two assumptions they couldn't support. Finally, the top leader and the CFO each spent twenty minutes in a pressure lab with an AI playing their toughest board member. On the night of the vote, the board chair asked the hardest question, and every cabinet member who spoke gave the same answer in their own words. The next morning, the team could explain the plan to the people it affected. Same tool. Same people. What changed was the order: think first, then let the machine argue with you. Bad Season or Wrong Seat? Some of what leaders are feeling this fall is the AI speed-up. Some of it is older than any chatbot. When the work gets heavy, most of us carry one question we rarely say out loud: is this a bad season, or did I take the wrong seat? Season 1 guests of The PROOF answered that question on camera. Rick Cobb waited out a bad year, and the next one became one of his best. Amy Diaz, EdD saw that the problem was the shape of her role and stepped sideways into work that fit. Chris Lindholm runs the district with the longest school bus ride in America. In Everton, Missouri, 91% of Will Darter, Ed.D students live in poverty, and his campus tripled in size while enrollment dropped. On Wednesday, October 7 at 10:30 AM CT, Season 1 guests join our P2P Roundtable to talk it through live. One hour, peers only, no presentations, 30 seats, open to anyone leading systems and people in education. The question sounds the same in both chairs. You'll leave inspired, challenged, and equipped to lead as a BUILDER (not a climber, dreamer, or coaster). Save your seat: higherperformancegroup.com/p2p-page Bring your closed-document test result with you. It's a good place to start the conversation. Monday Morning Here's what to do Monday morning (assuming you're not already mid-crisis, in which case bookmark this and do it Tuesday). Step 1: Run the Zone Audit (20 minutes). Pull up last week's cabinet agenda. Mark each item C for compression or J for judgment. If yours looks like most, a big share of the meeting goes to C items: updates, report-outs, summaries of things people could have read. Now do the math: minutes spent on C items each week × people in the room × 40 meeting weeks. A cabinet of eight spending 45 minutes a week on report-outs burns 240 leader-hours a year, six full work weeks of senior judgment spent listening to things that could have been a pre-read. Step 2: Flip One Meeting (15 minutes of prep). Move every C item into an AI-organized pre-read with decisions, risks, and open questions labeled. Spend the entire meeting on J items. Watch who talks more when the report-outs disappear. (It's often the person who has been quietly waiting for a real conversation.) Step 3: Seat the Opposition (15 minutes, next cabinet meeting). Pick the decision you're most confident about. Put the opposition prompt on the screen and read the strongest case against your plan out loud as a team. Then ask one question: "Which of these objections can we answer, and which ones can't we?" "We don't have time to use AI more carefully." You're already spending it in the second meeting, where the plan gets rebuilt because nobody could defend the first version. Fifteen minutes with the opposition board is cheaper than one decision you have to take back in public. "My team won't use AI this way. They just want the draft." Of course they do. The draft is visible, and the thinking isn't. So make the thinking visible. Start one meeting a month with a single rule: nobody brings an AI draft until the room has built its own answer first. The Maturity Shift Immature leaders think: "AI makes us faster, so we should use it for everything." Mature leaders think: "AI makes us faster at whatever we already are. We'd better make sure what we are is worth speeding up." Immature leaders ask the tool for the answer. Mature leaders ask it for the landscape, the opposition, and the hardest question in the room, then decide for themselves. Every district and every college can buy the same software. The advantage goes to the cabinet that uses it to sharpen its judgment and widen what it can see. That is how the work stays worthy. Your turn: think about the last major recommendation your cabinet made. How much of the reasoning could the team still explain with the laptop closed? Bonus points if you run the closed-document test in your next meeting and tell us what happened. Most cabinets lack a clear read on the collective judgment underneath all those polished drafts, and whether the team can still think together with the tool turned off. That's the gap THE TEAM INSTITUTE closes. We measure how your cabinet thinks, decides, and perceives as a team, grounded in the TQ research behind IQ × EQ × PQ across 987 leadership teams. Cabinets that closed gaps like this saw performance improve roughly 3x, engagement rise 29%, and outcomes improve 27%, with no increase in burnout. If AI is about to multiply whatever your team already is, would it help to know exactly what that is first? Objectively? Get Started Here with the Team Intelligence Baseline Assessment Help another leader protect their team's thinking before the tools quietly take it over. Repost this with the practice you're trying first. Tag a leader whose cabinet is rolling out AI this fall. Or drop a comment with what the closed-document test turned up. P.S. If you plan a conference or member program for 2027, I built a keynote around that "convince me this is still worthy work" question. It's called The PROOF: higherperformancegroup.com/the-proof Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group

Higher Performance Insights | THE BELONGING GAP: TALKING IS NOT TRACKING

By HPG Info • September 29, 2026

Before your next leadership team meeting, try something uncomfortable. For each of your direct reports, name one person on the team who would notice if they went quiet for two weeks. Someone who would actually pick up the phone. If a name didn’t come right away for at least one of them, you just found the reason your next resignation letter will blindside you. Eighteen months before it’s written. Most superintendents and presidents have never run this check. Nothing on your dashboard measures it. Evaluations measure output. Board reports measure outcomes. Strategic plans measure progress against a timeline. All of it is a lagging indicator, proof of something that already happened. One layer underneath every number you track sits a leading indicator. It measures whether anyone on your cabinet belongs to anyone else on your cabinet. The best explanation I’ve found for it started in evolutionary psychology. Stick with me. It gets specific fast. Schools Already Measure This. For Fifteen-Year-Olds. Gallup’s newest numbers, released this month, put Americans’ satisfaction with K-12 education at 32%. That’s the lowest in 27 years of tracking, and down 11 points in two years. It’s the mood your board members carry into every meeting. Here’s the part almost nobody covered. The OECD’s PISA 2025 results landed the same month, and buried inside them is a finding that cuts the other way. In 39 education systems, more students now say they belong at school than in 2022. In 48, fewer say they feel lonely. And bullying, the clearest belonging-killer PISA tracks, is associated with lower performance. The people studying fifteen-year-olds treat belonging as a performance indicator worth measuring at scale. Nobody has told the people running cabinets full of grown adults that the same logic applies to them. Now look at your own cabinet. You already know its shape. Two or three people you’d call close. One or two you can’t quite read. And at least one who’s technically “on the team” and functionally on an island: capable, compliant, and quiet in exactly the way that gets mistaken for fine. Here’s the part nobody puts in the org chart. The isolated one is usually your best individual performer. High competence reads as self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency reads as “doesn’t need checking on.” Call it Competence Camouflage The better someone is at the job, the less anyone asks how they’re actually doing. (Which means the person most likely to be running on empty is the one least likely to get asked.) Robin Dunbar’s research on relationship layers has taken some hits on its exact numbers. The layered structure has held up better than the math: roughly 150 people you know, 50 you’d call friends, 15 you’d call close, and at the center, about 5 you actually rely on. Strip away the precise figures and one finding survives every challenge. The number of people we lean on for real support is small, and it does not grow with the number of people we know. (This is the question THE TEAM INSTITUTE was built to help cabinets answer: does everyone have someone? We map the actual relational structure of a cabinet the way good schools already map it for kids, then help build the one or two structural fixes that close what the map finds. More on that in a moment.) This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you to build more team culture. You’ve already tried the retreat, the trust falls, and the personality assessment binder gathering dust on someone’s shelf. What you have is a measurement gap. You’ve been tracking IQ and output, the two variables everyone measures, and skipping the one that decides whether either shows up. That’s PQ: how accurately your team reads each other, including who’s quietly running on empty. IQ × EQ × PQ = Team Intelligence . Leave PQ near zero and the whole product lands near zero, no matter how good the other two look on paper. The One-Name Test Call this the One-Name Test. It’s simple enough that you don’t need a consultant to run it, which is probably why almost nobody does. 1. Run the Census. Most leaders assume their cabinet is connected because meetings happen and nobody’s complained. Quiet tells you nothing about connection. So run the actual census: for each direct report, name one other person on the team who would notice if they went quiet for two weeks. A blank is your first isolated node, and possibly your next resignation letter, eighteen months early. (This is why “we didn’t see it coming” is almost never true. Someone saw it. Their role just didn’t make noticing count.) 2. The Bar Is One. Dunbar’s layers get quoted for the big number, 150. The number that moves retention on a cabinet is the smallest one. A cabinet member doesn’t need five people. They need one: someone who asks a second time when the answer is “fine.” A single reliable connection is something you can build on purpose, on a Tuesday, with no retreat budget. 3. Build Proximity on Purpose. Every school does this for kids. Advisories, teams, lunch tables. The whole architecture of a building is a belonging machine, whether anyone says so out loud. Cabinets stop doing it for adults the day everyone gets a title. Standing 1:1s that skip the status update. Co-owned projects that put two people in a room who wouldn’t otherwise talk. A rotating pair for the hard conversations, so the same two people aren’t always carrying the room. This is structural work, and structure survives a bad quarter. This is a composite, drawn from patterns across our 987 teams, not one specific leader. A university cabinet: six vice presidents, all strong, all overcommitted, all evaluated individually, all scoring well. The quietest one ran the tightest division in the institution and hadn’t taken a real day off in over a year. Nobody flagged it. Her numbers were fine. Then she resigned, gave the standard reasons, and left the president genuinely confused. Six months later, that cabinet ran its first belonging census. Two more vice presidents had no named connection. The president hadn’t known. Neither had they, until someone asked directly. The fix took three standing 1:1s and one reshuffled project pairing. In the cabinets where we see this pattern, a fix that small is usually enough. What changed? Someone finally noticed who had nobody, and acted before the resignation letter instead of after. Gallup has tracked this for years: only about two in ten U.S. employees strongly agree they have a best friend at work. The ones who do are more engaged and less likely to leave. Look around your cabinet table and count how many of your people could say yes with confidence. Monday Morning Here’s what to do Monday morning (assuming you’re not already mid-crisis, in which case bookmark this and do it Tuesday). Step 1: Run the Census (20 minutes). List every direct report. Next to each name, write one other person on the team who would notice if they went quiet. If you don’t know, leave it blank. Don’t guess to make the page look better. The blanks are the whole point. Step 2: Start With the Loneliest Node (30 minutes). Whoever has the most blanks gets the first fix. That’s usually your highest performer, which is exactly why they keep getting skipped. Build one standing connection this week: a pairing, a recurring 1:1, or a co-owned project with someone they don’t already talk to. Step 3: Ask the Discovery Question (10 minutes, next cabinet meeting). Skip “how’s everyone doing.” Ask: “Is there anyone on this team who’d notice if you disappeared for two weeks?” Let the silence sit. Someone will answer honestly. That’s your opening. “We don’t have time for relationship-building.” Do the math on the alternative. Replacing a cabinet-level leader is commonly estimated at 1.5 to 2 times salary once you count the search, the interim, and the months of lost momentum. On a $180,000 vice president, that’s $270,000 to $360,000. The census takes twenty minutes. That’s less time than the last meeting that could have been an email. “My team is professionals, not middle schoolers who need a buddy system.” Professionals are exactly who this is for. The buddy system works on ten-year-olds because it’s honest about what humans need. Adults just got better at hiding when it’s missing, which is why it takes a census to find it instead of a glance across the cafeteria. The Maturity Shift Immature leaders think: “My cabinet has a performance problem, so we need better goals and clearer accountability.” Mature leaders think: “My cabinet might have a belonging problem wearing a performance costume, and accountability can’t catch what connection was supposed to.” Immature leaders treat isolation as a personality trait: some people are just private, just independent, just built that way. Mature leaders treat it as a structural gap, the same one they’d flag for a kid with no lunch table. It’s the same gap in a suit. Dunbar made 150 famous. The number that matters on your cabinet is one. Building a single connection for one person may be the highest-leverage thing you do this month, because if you don’t design it on purpose, you’ll find out by accident, usually in an exit interview. Your turn: pull up your cabinet roster right now. Whose name can’t you pair with anyone? Bonus points if you knew before you finished reading and just hadn’t said it out loud. If that name came to you fast, you already have what you need to start. What you probably don’t have is a structured way to find the ones you’re missing before one of them hands you a resignation letter. That’s the gap THE TEAM INSTITUTE closes. We map who’s connected and who isn’t across your whole cabinet, grounded in the TQ research behind IQ × EQ × PQ across 987 leadership teams. Cabinets that closed gaps like this saw performance improve roughly 3x, engagement rise 29%, and outcomes improve 27%, with no increase in burnout. If you already suspect someone on your team has nobody, would it help to know for certain, and to find the ones you’ve missed? Start here: THE TEAM INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT Whether or not this week is the right one for that, help another leader catch this before it costs them someone. Repost this with the one step you’re taking this week. Tag a fellow superintendent or president who needs to run this census. Or drop a comment with where your belonging plan stands. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group .