Higher Performance Insights | WEINER WORD LEADERS

September 22, 2026
higher performance insights

The most persuasive person in your cabinet meeting might be the reason nothing ever gets decided.


Enrollment in a long-time program has been sliding for three straight years. The data says cut it. The community loves it. The board wants a recommendation by spring.


You already know the safe move. Commission another study. Form a committee. Push the real call into next year's budget cycle, when maybe the numbers look different, or maybe you've retired, or maybe someone else has to say the hard thing instead of you.


That's not patience. That's a decision, made by default, dressed up as diligence.


Here's the part nobody says in the retreat: the calls you're avoiding are already being made. By the calendar, by attrition, by whichever board member gets impatient first. You're just not the one making them anymore, and every month that passes makes that arrangement feel more normal.


This week: the sociologist who explained exactly what's happening in that gap a hundred years before anyone had a cabinet meeting about it, and the four ways leaders relate to a decision they already know the answer to.


THE DIAGNOSIS


Let's talk about this like adults who've sat through a strategic planning retreat that produced a beautiful deck and changed absolutely nothing.


You know the version where the program-cut recommendation gets "tabled for further study" for the third year in a row. You know the version where a board member asks a pointed question in a public meeting, and you give the answer that keeps the peace instead of the one you actually believe. You know the version where you rehearse a hard conversation in the car, word for word, and walk in and have a different, softer one instead.


Here's the honest question underneath all three: when was the last time the answer you gave out loud was the same one you already knew was true?


Sociologist George Herbert Mead named the mechanism underneath that gap. He argued every person operates from two parts of the self: the "me" and the "I."


The "me" is everything you've absorbed from twenty years of board meetings, community forums, and performance reviews. It's the internalized voice of everyone who's ever had an opinion about how you should lead. The "me" is genuinely useful. It's how you read a room, anticipate an objection before it's spoken, and avoid torching a relationship you'll need again next month.

The "I" is the actual response you generate the moment a real decision has to be made. Not the poll-tested version. The one that's yours.

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you to "trust your gut." You already knew that. The real problem is you've been trying to solve a Perceptual Intelligence problem with willpower, and willpower doesn't scale past the first hard meeting. TQ math doesn't forgive that substitution either. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. A leader who can't read whether the room can survive a real decision is multiplying by a guess, no matter how smart the room is.


(This is the exact gap THE TEAM INSTITUTE was built to close: the collective trust and shared language that let a leader spend the "me" on a real decision without the whole team reading it as instability. More on that in a moment.)


THE BUILDER MATRIX, APPLIED TO THE CALL YOU'RE AVOIDING


Call it the Builder Matrix. It won't make the decision any easier. It'll just tell you, precisely, why you're the one still holding it.

Mead argued you need both the "me" and the "I." Too much "me" and you become, in his words, "hardly more than a conventional individual": agreeable, predictable, safe, forgettable. Too little grounding in the "me" and the "I" has no credibility, no read on the room, nothing to spend.


Across our work with 987 leadership teams, we've mapped this exact tension onto four patterns, plotted on two dimensions: how much ambition a leader brings to a decision, and how much they're willing to risk the "me" to make it.


Coasters run entirely on the "me." They know precisely what the community expects and deliver exactly that and nothing more. No friction, no risk, no memory of them once they're gone. (This is the leader whose entire tenure could be replaced by a very good committee.)


Climbers manage the "me" as a performance. Every decision gets filtered through how it will look before anyone asks whether it's right. The "I" never actually shows up, only the appearance of decisiveness. (You can spot a Climber by how many times "optics" comes up in a cabinet meeting that's supposedly about students.)


Dreamers have plenty of "I." Bold ideas, real vision, sharp instincts. But the ideas stay in the retreat notebook, because acting on them risks the "me" they've spent years building. High idealism, low follow-through, and a strategic plan full of language nobody in the building has actually seen put into practice.


Builders spend years building the "me": real relationships with the board, real credibility with staff, real trust in the community. Then, when the moment calls for it, they spend it. They make the call, explain it with the actual data, absorb the first wave of backlash, and eighteen months later they're still standing and still trusted, because the decision was theirs and not a committee's.


This is a composite, drawn from patterns across our 987 teams, not one specific leader. A university president spent three budget cycles watching a beloved forty-student program lose enrollment while it quietly drained capacity from three growing programs down the hall. Two committees. One consultant study. Zero decisions.


In year four, she did something different. She spent a Tuesday afternoon with the program's faculty, in person, before the board meeting, not after. She walked them through the real numbers, said plainly that the program would be phased out over two years with a teach-out plan for every enrolled student, and told them she'd take the criticism at the public meeting so they wouldn't have to. She did. It was ugly for six weeks. Then it wasn't. The three growing programs absorbed the freed capacity, two of the phased-out program's faculty moved into roles they'd actually wanted for years, and her board chair told her privately that the meeting was the first time in his four years on the board he'd watched her actually lead instead of manage.


The difference wasn't the data. She'd had the same data for three years. The difference was she finally spent the "me" she'd built instead of protecting it.


Three years of committees and consultant studies got her nowhere. One Tuesday afternoon, spent differently, got her the outcome she'd wanted the whole time.


Now, if you're thinking, "I already know which decision this is for me, I just don't know how to make the call without torching three years of trust," that's the actual gap. Knowing the right answer was never the hard part. Spending the trust to act on it is.


 Here's where to start.


THE APPLICATION


Here's what to do Monday morning (assuming you're not already in crisis mode, in which case, bookmark this and do it Tuesday):


Step 1: Name the decision you're managing instead of making (10 minutes). Write down the actual call, in one sentence, the way you'd say it to your board chair over coffee — something closer to "we're cutting this program, and I've known it for two years" than "we're evaluating program viability." If you can't write that sentence, you haven't diagnosed the decision. You've diagnosed your discomfort with it.


Step 2: Set your own deadline before the board sets one for you (5 minutes). Pick the date you'll announce the call, and tell one trusted person on your cabinet that date out loud. A decision with a date attached is a decision. A decision that's "still being studied" is a delay with better branding.


Step 3: Draft the reversal statement before you decide, not after (15 minutes). Write the two or three sentences you'd say if new data proved you wrong six months from now. If you can imagine saying that sentence out loud and surviving it, you've already confirmed the "me" you've built can absorb the risk. That's the actual test, and almost no one runs it before they decide.


"We don't have time for this level of process on every decision." You're right, and this isn't for every decision. It's for the one you've been managing for over a year instead of making. That one has already cost you more hours in committees and consultant studies than these three steps combined ever will.


"My board will see this as me going rogue." Your board is currently watching you not decide, which they've already noticed and are already discounting. A leader who makes a clear, well-explained call earns more trust than one who keeps extending the study, even from board members who disagree with the call itself. Disagreement they can work with. A leader who won't commit is the thing that actually erodes a board's confidence over time, slowly enough that most leaders never connect the two.


THE MATURITY SHIFT


Immature leaders think: "I need everyone on board before I decide."


Mature leaders think: "I need enough trust in the bank that I can decide before everyone's on board."


Immature leaders protect the "me" indefinitely, mistaking the protection itself for leadership. Mature leaders spend it on purpose, when it's actually needed, then go back to building it again.


Here's the part that should sting a little: every month you manage instead of make, you're not staying neutral. You're teaching your cabinet what actually happens here when a hard call arrives. Some of them are already learning that the answer is: nothing, for a while, and then someone else's problem.


Your turn: name one decision on your desk right now that you're managing instead of making. What, specifically, are you waiting for that isn't actually going to arrive?


Drop it in the comments, or keep it to yourself and just answer it honestly. Either way, that decision is your "I," waiting for permission you don't need.


This is what THE TEAM INSTITUTE exists to build: a cabinet with enough shared Perceptual Intelligence that when you spend the trust, the room reads it as leadership instead of instability. Across our research, cabinets that built this shared architecture saw performance improve roughly 3x and outcomes improve 27%, largely because the hard calls stopped requiring one person to carry them alone.



If there were a way to make the call you're avoiding without spending the next year rebuilding what it costs you, would that be worth twenty minutes this week? Start here: higherperformancegroup.com/team-intelligence-assessment

Whether or not this week is right for that, help another leader see the decision they're sitting on. Repost this with the call you finally made, or the one you're still avoiding. Tag a leader who's been managing something for a year and already knows the answer. Or drop your own version in the comments — someone else's Tuesday gets easier because you did.


Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights.

Higher Performance Group | THE TEAM INSTITUTE


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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. 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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. 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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
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