Higher Performance Insights | WHEN TRUST GOES TO VOICEMAIL

November 4, 2025

THE MATH THAT DESCRIBES WHY LEADERSHIP TEAMS FAIL UNDER PRESSURE

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Do this math: 8 cabinet members × 12 meetings × 90 minutes = 144 hours annually with people you call "your team" but wouldn't call if your world fell apart.

That's not a leadership gap. That's a relationship infrastructure crisis.

73% of superintendents in our 987-team study report "plenty of colleagues but no one who really gets it." (Most won't admit this until drink two at the conference hotel bar.)

Here's the pattern: We've professionalized educational leadership so thoroughly that we've accidentally made it functionally impossible to build the one thing that determines whether your cabinet actually works—relationships that transcend the role.

I was recently in conversation with a leader who has navigated both established legacy organizations and complete startups—completely different contexts that require entirely different leadership skills. And he said something that stopped me cold: "I only have 2-5 people max who remain my friends through all the seasons of life. And that's all that really matters."

Two to five people. Not 2000 LinkedIn connections. Not your entire cabinet. Not even your full executive team.

Two. To. Five.

And suddenly, everything about why some leadership teams click and others just... meet made perfect sense.

Let's discuss what most leadership development programs overlook entirely.

LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS LIKE ADULTS WHO'VE SURVIVED MULTIPLE ACCREDITATION CYCLES

Here's what nobody tells you at leadership conferences (because they're too busy selling next year's tickets): The reason your cabinet doesn't function like a team has nothing to do with strategic planning tools or communication protocols.

It has everything to do with whether you've built trust deep enough to survive seasons.

SPECIFIC RECOGNITION:

You know this moment:

It's 11 PM on a Sunday, and the board email just hit your inbox—the one that makes your stomach drop. You scroll through your contacts looking for someone to call.

You pass right over your Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum. Your CFO. Your VP of HR.

Not because they're incompetent. Because you need someone who knows you independent of your title.

(And the person you actually call? Probably doesn't work in education.)

Or this one:

You're in a cabinet meeting debating a controversial policy change. Everyone's nodding. Taking notes. Agreeing professionally.

Then you adjourn, and three separate people text their actual thoughts to someone NOT in the room.

You've built a team that performs trust but doesn't practice it.

Or my personal favorite:

Your Chair gets promoted to Dean—brilliant strategic mind. Everyone's excited.

Six months in, she's technically proficient, but the cabinet dynamics feel off—because she's performing her new role while psychologically remaining in her old identity.

And nobody can talk about it because you've never established the kind of trust where identity evolution is safe.

ROOT CAUSE DIAGNOSIS:

Here's why this keeps happening, and I'm going to be direct because I've spent 25 years in the loneliness of the leadership seat: We've confused competency with capacity.

We hire for IQ. We develop EQ. We measure performance indicators. But we completely ignore the foundation that determines whether any of it actually works: Building Trust.

Not trust as a soft skill. Trust as the oxygen of TEAM INTELLIGENCE.

Research from our work with 987 leadership teams reveals something most leadership development completely misses: Leaders cannot skip competency levels without creating fragility in their leadership foundation. You cannot authentically empower others until you've established trust. You cannot facilitate genuine collaboration without both trust and empowerment. You cannot lead change successfully without trust, empowerment, collaboration, and influence working synergistically.

Yet what do we do? We promote people into complex leadership roles and immediately expect them to manage change, resolve conflicts, and develop others—Level 5 work—when they're operating at Level 1-2 on Building Trust.

That's not a competency gap. That's a developmental logic violation. And it's why 67% of change initiatives consistently fail.

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💡 "You cannot empower others until you've established trust. You cannot collaborate without empowerment. You cannot lead change without all prior competencies working synergistically."

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(This is actually why we created the TEAM INTELLIGENCE framework and built it into our TEAM INSTITUTE sessions—to help leadership teams develop sequentially instead of randomly. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

TQ FRAMEWORK INTRODUCTION:

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you to "create psychological safety" or "build better relationships." But you already knew that.

The real problem? Most leaders are attempting advanced leadership competencies without mastering the foundational one.

Here's the developmental sequence that actually works, drawn from our Leader Competency Assessment:

Level 1: Building Trust — Foundation for all others

Level 2: Empowerment — Builds on trust foundation

Level 3: Collaboration — Requires trust and empowerment

Level 4: Broadening Influence — Leverages collaborative networks

Level 5: Managing Change — Requires all prior competencies

Level 6: Managing Conflict — Transforms collaborative tension into breakthrough

Level 7: Developing Others — Apex competency synthesizing all others

Your cabinet isn't dysfunctional because people lack skills. It's dysfunctional because you're trying to run Level 5 plays (change management) with a team operating at Level 1-2 trust.

And trust—real trust, the kind that survives leadership transitions and organizational turbulence—isn't built in strategic planning sessions. It's built when relationships transcend the org chart.

🎯 BUILDING TRUST: THE COMPETENCY THAT DETERMINES EVERYTHING ELSE

WHY THIS ALWAYS COMES FIRST (EVEN WHEN WE WISH IT DIDN'T)

Organizations led by leaders who create a psychological safety culture are significantly more likely to foster innovative cultures, with substantially better talent retention and higher stakeholder satisfaction. (That's not motivation-poster wisdom. That's data from institutions that actually work.)

But here's what most leadership development gets catastrophically wrong: They treat trust as a soft skill you sprinkle on top of competence, rather than the foundation that determines whether competence ever becomes performance.

Trust is the oxygen of team intelligence. Without it, every other competency suffocates.

Let me break down the five levels of Building Trust—and show you exactly where your cabinet is probably stuck:

LEVEL 1: DEMONSTRATES INCONSISTENT RELIABILITY

• Communication lacks transparency

• Actions and words frequently misalign

• Tends to blame others for setbacks

Observable reality: This is the superintendent who announces, "My door is always open," but team members never walk through it. Or the cabinet member who commits to the meeting but ghosts on execution. Your team isn't underperforming because they're incompetent—they're hedging because reliability is inconsistent.

Quick gut check: How many times this month has someone on your cabinet surprised you by not following through?

LEVEL 2: SHOWS BASIC RELIABILITY BUT STRUGGLES WITH VULNERABILITY

• Generally follows through on commitments

• Shares limited information

• Hesitates to admit mistakes

Observable reality: This is where most educational leadership teams actually operate. Professional. Polite. Performing collaboration. But when something goes sideways, nobody's texting each other. They're calling someone outside the organization who they actually trust. You've built a reporting structure, not a team.

Be honest: When was the last time someone on your cabinet admitted a mistake before you discovered it?

LEVEL 3: CONSISTENTLY DEMONSTRATES INTEGRITY AND TRANSPARENCY

• Demonstrates vulnerability as a leader

• Advocates for team members even when costly

• Addresses trust violations directly and fairly

Observable reality: This is where the shift happens—from "colleagues who work together" to "people who have each other's backs." Cabinet members start processing real thinking with each other instead of around each other. When one person's worried about something, the team knows about it before it becomes a crisis.

LEVEL 4: CREATES AN ENVIRONMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

• Establishes systems that promote transparency

• Creates mechanisms for addressing breaches of trust

• Models reconciliation and repair after conflicts

Observable reality: This is the cabinet that can debate controversial decisions and still go to lunch together afterward. Why? Because they've built systems—not just goodwill—that make trust renewable even when it's damaged. They've moved from hoping trust happens to architecting it into how they operate.

LEVEL 5: BUILDS INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES OF TRUST

• Establishes formal and informal influence channels

• Develops systems for cross-campus knowledge sharing

• Connects the institution to external opportunities

Observable reality: This is rare. This is when your cabinet's trust infrastructure becomes the model for the entire district. When principals start running their teams the way you run yours—not because you mandated it, but because they've watched it work.

THE BRUTAL REALITY CHECK:

We spent this fall running TEAM INSTITUTE sessions with campus leadership teams, and we started every single one with the Building Trust assessment. Want to know the most common result?

Leaders rated themselves at Level 3-4. Their teams rated them at Level 1-2.

That gap? That's your entire performance problem right there.

THE THREE TRUST QUESTIONS THAT REVEAL EVERYTHING:

I learned these from a leader who built multiple teams across completely different organizational contexts. He said the distinguishing factor wasn't competence or chemistry—it was answering three questions honestly:

Question 1: "Who on this team would I call at 11 PM if my world were falling apart?"

If the answer is zero or one, you don't have a team. You have coworkers who attend meetings.

Question 2: "Who on this team has embraced the leader I'm becoming, not just the role I'm performing?"

Leadership transitions require identity evolution. If your cabinet can't hold space for that, people perform their new role while psychologically remaining in the old one. (This is why your brilliant new Dean still acts like a Chair.)

Question 3: "Can I make decisions WITH this team, or do I just announce decisions TO them?"

If you're married, you don't make major life decisions unilaterally and then expect your spouse to get on board. Why do we think that works with leadership teams?

The teams that can answer all three questions affirmatively? Those are the ones where trust isn't a nice-to-have. It's the infrastructure underneath everything else.

CASE STUDY: THE TEAM THAT REBUILT TRUST FROM LEVEL 1

A community college president (let's call her "Maria"—and yes, she knows I'm telling this) inherited a cabinet of seven VPs. All credentialed. All experienced. All completely siloed and performing trust instead of practicing it.

Her first 90 days, she tried what most new leaders try: strategic planning. Vision alignment. Goal cascading. Professional development.

Nothing changed.

Then she did something most leaders won't: She admitted the problem wasn't strategy. It was trust.

She brought in our TEAM INTELLIGENCE assessment. Results showed her cabinet at Level 1-2 on Building Trust, yet they were attempting Level 5 work (managing major institutional change).

The developmental logic violation was obvious.

Here's what she did:

She stopped leading cabinet meetings and started building trust infrastructure.

She asked each VP privately: "Who on this team would you call at 11 PM if something went sideways in your personal life?"

Zero VPs named anyone on the cabinet.

Then she asked: "Who on this team knows what you're genuinely worried about regarding your work right now—not the polished version you present in meetings, but the real anxiety?"

Two had someone. Five didn't.

The gap between "colleagues" and "people who trust each other through seasons" was costing them everything.

Maria created monthly one-on-one conversations where the only agenda was: "Who are you becoming as a leader, and how can this team help you get there?"

Not performance evaluations. Identity evolution conversations.

She stopped managing performance and started shepherding transformation.

Within 90 days, VPs started texting each other their real concerns instead of people outside the room.

Within six months, they'd formed what I call "micro-alliances"—2-3 people who processed real thinking together between formal meetings.

Within a year, the cabinet made a controversial curricular decision unanimously because they'd made it WITH each other.

Student success metrics? Increased 12 percentage points. Faculty satisfaction? Up 23%.

But Maria told me: "The strategy didn't change. The trust infrastructure underneath the strategy changed. Turns out, that's what actually matters."

She rebuilt from the foundation up. Level 1 to Level 4 in 18 months.

That's not magic. That's developmental sequence done right.

📋 HERE'S WHAT TO DO MONDAY MORNING (BEFORE YOUR FIRST CABINET MEETING)

STEP 1: RUN THE TRUST LEVEL AUDIT (20 MINUTES)

Pull out our Leader Competency Assessment—or just grab a piece of paper and be brutally honest.

For Building Trust, where is your cabinet actually operating?

• Level 1: Inconsistent reliability, limited transparency, misaligned words and actions

• Level 2: Basic reliability but limited vulnerability

• Level 3: Consistent integrity, demonstrates vulnerability, advocates for team members

• Level 4: Creates psychological safety systems

• Level 5: Builds institutional trust cultures

Don't rate where you want to be. Rate where the evidence says you are.

Then—and this is the hard part—ask 2-3 trusted people on your team to rate you honestly. (If the gap between your self-assessment and their assessment is more than one level, that gap IS your leadership problem.)

STEP 2: ASK THE THREE TRUST QUESTIONS (30 MINUTES TOTAL, 10 PER QUESTION)

Schedule 30 minutes alone. Write down honest answers to:

1. "Who on my cabinet would I call at 11 PM if my world were falling apart?" (Names, not theory.)

2. "Who on my team knows the leader I'm becoming, not just the role I'm performing?" (If nobody comes to mind immediately, that's your answer.)

3. "Am I making decisions WITH my team, or announcing decisions TO them?" (Check your last three major decisions. How many were truly collaborative vs. performatively collaborative?)

If you can't name at least 2-3 people for questions 1 and 2, you don't have a performance problem. You have a trust infrastructure problem.

(Objection handling: "Joe, this feels soft. We need to focus on results." Fair pushback. But here's the data: Leaders in the top quartile for Building Trust competencies are significantly more likely to achieve institutional objectives. The teams that outperform yours? They already figured this out. You can dismiss it as soft, or you can build the foundation that makes results possible.)

STEP 3: CREATE ONE "IDENTITY EVOLUTION" CONVERSATION THIS WEEK (45 MINUTES)

Pick one cabinet member. Schedule 45 minutes. No agenda except this:

"I want to understand who you're becoming as a leader, not just how you're performing in your role."

Ask:

• "What identity from your previous role are you still carrying that might not serve you here?"

• "What new leadership identity are you nervous about stepping into?"

• "How can this team hold space for who you're becoming?"

Then—critically—share your own answers first. Model the vulnerability you're asking for.

This isn't therapy. This is recognizing that leadership transitions require identity evolution, and teams that can't hold space for that will always underperform their talent level.

(Pro tip: This conversation will feel awkward the first time. That awkwardness is diagnostic. If you can't have this conversation, you're operating at Level 1-2 trust. Which means you can't do Level 5 work. The math doesn't lie.)

⚡ THE MATURITY SHIFT: FROM COMPETENCE WITHOUT FOUNDATION TO TRUST-BASED TEAM INTELLIGENCE

IMMATURE TEAM INTELLIGENCE:

• Promotes leaders based on technical competence, ignores trust capacity

• Attempts Level 5 work (change management, conflict transformation) with Level 1-2 trust

• Believes competence creates collaboration

• Confuses "getting along professionally" with psychological safety

• Optimizes for efficient meetings over authentic relationships

• Measures team health by completed initiatives, not trust infrastructure

• Views vulnerability as weakness rather than foundation

MATURE TEAM INTELLIGENCE:

• Develops leaders sequentially through competency levels starting with trust

• Recognizes you cannot skip developmental stages without creating fragility

• Knows trust creates the conditions where competence becomes performance

• Distinguishes "colleagues who collaborate" from "teams that trust each other through seasons"

• Prioritizes identity evolution conversations over performance management

• Measures team health by the "11 PM phone call test" and vulnerability indicators

• Views Building Trust as the oxygen that makes all other competencies possible

The shift isn't about being less professional. It's about being honest that principles without competencies are wishes—and competencies without sequential development are illusions.

Your cabinet doesn't need another initiative. It needs the foundational competency that determines whether any initiative actually works: Building Trust at Level 3 or higher.

Everything else is decoration on a house with no foundation.

P.S. THE FOUNDATION UNDER THE FOUNDATION

I was meeting with a superintendent recently who said something that's stuck with me: "Joe, I've read every leadership book. Attended every conference. My team is credentialed, experienced, and talented. But we're still not clicking. What am I missing?"

I asked him one question: "On a scale of 1-5, where's your cabinet on Building Trust?"

Long pause. Then: "Probably a 2. Maybe a 1.5 if I'm being honest."

"And what level of work are you attempting?"

Another pause. "Change management. Conflict resolution. Developing future leaders. So... Level 5?"

There's your answer.

You cannot skip developmental stages. Leadership competencies build sequentially—each creates the foundation for those that follow.

Attempting Level 5 work with Level 1-2 trust isn't a strategy problem. It's a physics problem.

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💡 "Principles without competencies are wishes—and competencies without sequential development are illusions."

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And here's what I've learned after 25 years of this work, grounded in principles that go way beyond organizational theory: The foundation under the foundation is actually faith.

Not faith as religion forced on secular space. Faith as the recognition that we're building something bigger than our own ambition. That how we lead matters as much as what we achieve. That trust isn't a technique—it's the recognition that we're all navigating uncertainty together, guided by principles beyond self-interest.

I know I'm among friends here who share those values. Who understand that excellent leadership flows from internal alignment with something transcendent. Who get that Building Trust isn't manipulation—it's stewarding relationships with the care they deserve.

This fall, we ran Team Institute sessions with campus leadership teams focused specifically on this: Building Trust as the foundational competency that determines everything else. We used the Leader Competency Assessment to help teams see where they actually are (not where they think they are), then gave them sequential tools to develop from Level 1 to Level 4.

The feedback? Teams are finally addressing the real problem instead of decorating around it.

If your cabinet is talented but underperforming, you don't need another strategic planning session. You need to build the trust infrastructure that makes strategy actually work.

New campus teams enroll in the Team Institute each month. We start with Building Trust. We develop sequentially through the seven competencies. We use the Team Intelligence framework to multiply individual development into collective performance.

Want the full Leader Competency Assessment to run with your team? Message me directly or email info@higherperformancegroup.com and I'll send it to you. No cost, no strings—just a tool to help you see where you actually are versus where you're attempting to operate.

If you're interested in what Team Institute might look like for your team, let's have a conversation about where your team is and where sequential development could take you.

But even if you never reach out, do me one favor: Before your next cabinet meeting, honestly assess—Where are we on Building Trust? And what level of work are we attempting?

If there's a gap of 2-3 levels, you just diagnosed your entire performance problem.

The question is: Are you willing to go back to the foundation and build it right?

ONE MORE THING...

If this resonated, I need your help with three things:

1. Repost this with your honest answer: "Where is my team on Building Trust (Level 1-5)? And what level of work are we attempting?" Tag me so I can see your assessment. (The gap between those two numbers tells you everything.)

2. Tag someone on your leadership team who's committed to building from the foundation up—not just decorating around dysfunction. Tell them specifically why you're tagging them.

3. Comment below with this: What's one moment when you realized your team's performance problem was actually a trust problem? What did you do about it? (I read every single comment because your reality shapes what we build next.)

Tag DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group in your repost or comment.

And if you're serious about moving your team from Level 1-2 to Level 3-4 trust, message me about TEAM INSTITUTE enrollment. New cohorts launching monthly. Or email info@higherperformancegroup.com to get the full Leader Competency Assessment for your team.

Most important question: Who on your cabinet would you call at 11 PM? If you can't immediately name 2-3 people, you just found your starting point.

NEXT ISSUE PREVIEW

"The $847,000 Meeting Tax: Why Your Cabinet Is Bleeding Budget in 90-Minute Increments"

You know those weekly cabinet meetings where everyone reports out, but nothing actually gets decided? I ran the numbers. For a typical superintendent cabinet, those meetings cost $847,000 annually when you calculate salary, prep time, and opportunity cost.

That's not a meeting problem. That's a TEAM INTELLIGENCE deficit costing you nearly a million dollars a year.

(Spoiler: The highest-performing cabinets meet half as often and decide twice as fast. We'll break down exactly how they do it.)

See you next week. Keep building from the foundation up.

—Joe

P.S. - If this issue helped you see something differently, take 10 seconds to repost it with your biggest takeaway. Your network needs this too.

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Higher Performance Insights | DISRUPTING THE PIPELINE

By HPG Info • December 10, 2025

Builder Insights from December's Peer-to-Peer Roundtable 2.9 million students walked away from traditional education in the last decade. Not because they hate learning. Because they discovered something educational leaders are just now admitting to each other in private Zoom rooms. Last Wednesday, a college president stood up (metaphorically—we were on Zoom, but you could feel him standing) and said something that made every superintendent in the room physically lean forward: " We have become habituated to viewing educational leadership through filters—analogous to social media platforms where individuals present curated identities disconnected from reality. Trinity Valley was profoundly guilty of this pattern—appearing to external audiences as an institution meeting mission while internally delivering bare minimum performance." Jason Morrison, Ed. D. , President of Trinity Valley Community College in Texas, just named the thing everyone in educational leadership feels but nobody says out loud. Welcome to the Snapchat Filter Effect. Your institution looks great in the photos. The reality? That's a different story. And here's why this matters right now, today, in December 2025: 1.7 million students lost in higher education since 2014. 1.2 million departed K-12 since 2019. Combined, that's roughly the population of New Mexico—students who didn't disappear, they just opted for educational providers who weren't performing behind a filter. The market already delivered its verdict. The only question is whether educational leaders will respond with the courage this moment demands—or keep adjusting the filter settings while enrollment evaporates. Comment "FILTER" if this describes your institution right now. (I'll go first in comments. Yes, I've been guilty of this too.)

Higher Performance Insights | GO TO THE ANT, YOU S-WORD?

By HPG Info • December 2, 2025

When Ancient Wisdom Calls Out Your Cabinet Meeting Three thousand years ago, King Solomon looked at lazy people and said, "Go watch the ants work. Maybe you'll learn something." Harsh? Maybe. Accurate? Absolutely. But here's what Solomon didn't know—and what your leadership team desperately needs to understand: The ant's genius isn't that it works hard. It's that the colony has an operating system your brilliant cabinet doesn't. An individual ant has roughly 250,000 neurons. Your CFO has 86 billion. By any measure, your CFO is 340,000 times smarter than an ant. Yet somehow, when you put those ants into a colony, they solve complex routing problems, allocate labor dynamically, adapt to environmental changes, and make collective decisions that consistently optimize for survival. Meanwhile, your cabinet—filled with people 340,000x smarter than any ant—just spent three hours in a meeting and made zero decisions. Again. Here's the profound part nobody in leadership wants to admit: The ants' intelligence doesn't emerge because individual ants got smarter. It emerges because of how they interact. Your cabinet? You've hired smarter and smarter ants. Sent them to better development programs. Given them corner offices and impressive titles. But you've never built the colony operating system. 73% of educational leadership teams in our study have higher individual IQ than collective intelligence. You're paying for genius and getting group project energy where everyone did their part, but nobody read anyone else's sections. Solomon told sluggards to go to the ant. I'm telling brilliant-but-stuck leaders the exact same thing. Comment "COLONY" if you've spent the last year hiring smarter ants and wondering why the colony isn't building anything. THE DIAGNOSIS: WHAT THE ANT KNOWS THAT YOUR PHDs DON'T Let's talk about this like adults who've survived at least one strategic planning retreat that somehow produced a beautiful vision statement and zero change in how your team actually operates. You know this meeting. I know you know it: Your VP of Enrollment presents compelling market data about declining numbers. Solid analysis. Clear recommendations. Your Chief Academic Officer immediately pivots: "We can't just chase numbers—we need to think about mission alignment." (Translation: I'm the guardian of academic integrity, and your proposal feels transactional. Also, I went to grad school for this, not to run a business.) Your CFO is already calculating ROI and asking about costs nobody's thought about yet. (Translation: I'm the adult who understands we can't spend money we don't have. Also, I'm the only one who actually reads the audit reports.) Your VP of Student Affairs is thinking about how this affects current students and whether anyone consulted them. (Translation: While you all strategize in the abstract, I actually talk to students. You know, the humans this is supposedly about?) Four brilliant perspectives. Each one valid. Each one advocating with genuine expertise. Zero synthesis. Zero integration. Zero collective intelligence. The meeting ends with everyone agreeing to "explore this further"—professional code for "we'll have this exact conversation in three weeks, except everyone will be slightly more exhausted." What actually happened? You had four separate monologues performed simultaneously. Four individual ants wandering in circles, each following their own pheromone trail, wondering why the colony isn't building anything. The ants don't do this. They can't afford to. A colony that operates like your cabinet meeting would be extinct in a week. The Loneliness of Seeing the Whole Nest I know the loneliness of being the leader in this moment. Of feeling like you're the only one who can see the whole nest while everyone else optimizes their individual tunnel. Of wondering if you're the problem because surely—SURELY—other leadership teams have figured out how to think collectively instead of just politely taking turns thinking individually. Of going home exhausted, not from hard work but from the emotional labor of being the only person trying to synthesize perspectives that should integrate naturally if you just had the right operating system. But here's what nobody tells you at leadership conferences: You're not the problem. You're trying to solve a colony problem with an ant solution. You keep hiring smarter ants. Sending them to better development programs. But individual ants—no matter how brilliant—can't solve problems that require colony-level intelligence. Solomon wasn't telling sluggards to work harder. He was telling them to work smarter—specifically, to work like a system rather than as isolated individuals. (This is actually why I created The GROUP —a free community where insights like this become Leader CORE Lessons you can deploy Monday morning. Because translating the ant paradox into Tuesday's cabinet meeting without an implementation guide is how good insights die in conference rooms. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) When Individual Genius Meets Collective Mediocrity Let me tell you about a community college president I'll call Marcus (not his real name, but Marcus, you know exactly which budget meeting made you finally admit your Avengers had never actually assembled). Marcus had a dream team on paper. CFO with an MBA from a top program. Chief Academic Officer with a track record of innovation. VP of Student Affairs who'd turned around retention twice before. Individual excellence? Off the charts. Each ant was brilliant—340,000 times smarter than the insects Solomon was watching. Cabinet meetings? Marcus described them as "watching brilliant people talk past each other in high definition while the institution slowly loses momentum." Someone would present an idea. Three others would immediately explain why it wouldn't work from their domain perspective. Decisions got made through exhaustion, not synthesis. Implementation was inconsistent because everyone left with different interpretations. The colony wasn't building anything. The ants were just wandering in increasingly frustrated circles. Marcus tried what you've probably tried: More communication training. Better meeting structures. Expensive retreat with a consultant who taught them "active listening." He sent people to individual development programs. Each person came back smarter, more skilled, better equipped—individually. Nothing changed collectively. Because Marcus was still breeding smarter ants when he needed to build colony intelligence. He was solving an operating system problem with a personnel solution. Tag the cabinet member who came back from their last conference excited and exhausted—whose brilliant insights somehow died in your first meeting back. THE FRAMEWORK: THE ANT PARADOX EQUATION Call this the Ant Paradox. Or don't. Either way, it'll explain why your brilliant cabinet consistently operates at 60% capacity—and what actually changes the equation. P = (p - i) (TQ) Performance equals potential minus interference, X Team Intelligence. This isn't new-age fluff. This is the mathematical expression of what Solomon observed three millennia ago when he watched ants outperform humans at collective work. 1. Your Potential Is Already There (The Ants Are Already Smart Enough) Think about your cabinet. Combined decades of experience. Multiple advanced degrees. Proven track records. Individually? Everyone's operating at 7-8 out of 10. Collectively? Your team is operating at 4-5 out of 10 of actual capacity. That 40% gap? That's not a personnel problem. That's the difference between individual ants and colony intelligence. And you can't close it by hiring better ants. Solomon didn't tell sluggards to become smarter. He told them to observe how already-smart-enough ants become collectively brilliant through their operating system. Your problem isn't insufficient individual intelligence. Your problem is the absence of protocols that turn individual intelligence into collective genius. 2. The Interference Is Killing Your Colony Every time your CFO and CAO have their polite disagreement about fiscal sustainability versus academic mission—without any framework for how both can be true simultaneously—that's interference. Every time someone leaves a meeting unclear about who actually decides what, that's interference. Every time perspectives collide instead of integrate, that's interference. Interference isn't drama. It's the friction that happens when high-performing individuals lack the operating system to become a high-performing collective. The ant colony solved this with pheromone trails—simple communication protocols that turn one ant's discovery into colony-level action. When one ant finds food, it doesn't schedule a meeting to discuss optimal resource allocation. It doesn't form a committee to study implementation. It doesn't send three follow-up emails clarifying the decision-making process. It leaves a chemical trail. Other ants follow it. The colony eats. Simple protocol. Zero interference. Maximum collective intelligence. You need the human equivalent. 3. Team Intelligence Is the Operating System Here's where 99% of leadership development completely misses Solomon's point: They try to make each individual better at communication. Better at strategy. Better at whatever competency is trending. They're breeding smarter ants. But TQ isn't about making individuals better. It's about creating conditions where your team's collective intelligence exceeds the sum of its parts. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ "The ant colony has foragers, soldiers, nurses, builders—specialized roles working in concert. Your team needs the same: diverse perspectives with integration protocols." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The breakthrough isn't getting your CFO to become more emotionally intuitive or your Student Affairs VP to become more financially analytical. The breakthrough is creating the operating system where all perspectives integrate into decisions better than any single leader could make alone. That's what the ants have that you don't: Not smarter individuals. Smarter interaction protocols. That's what Solomon saw that you've missed: The wisdom isn't in the ant. It's in how the ants work together. Marcus Built the Colony Operating System Marcus finally understood what Solomon was saying three thousand years ago: His team didn't need to work harder. They needed to work like a colony instead of isolated individuals. His team took the Team Intelligence assessment. (Results were humbling. His CFO: "Well, this explains why I leave every meeting feeling like I'm the only one who gets it"—which, plot twist, everyone else was also thinking.) They were operating at Level 7-8 individually but Level 3 collectively. High individual IQ, catastrophically low team operating system. They had brilliant ants with no pheromone trails. Here's what changed: Communication protocols —not "let's communicate better" platitudes, but actual rhythms for how perspectives integrate before decisions get made. Simple. Clear. Executable. When presenting a recommendation, include the perspective of at least two other roles. When someone presents, the next person synthesizes before adding. When we disagree, we state what would make both perspectives true before choosing. Decision rights —so people stopped treating every decision like it needed consensus. The ant colony doesn't vote on where to build the nest. It has clear protocols for when different roles engage. They mapped their top 10 decision types. Assigned clear rights. Watched 40% of meeting time vanish because they'd stopped having colony-level conversations about ant-level decisions. Thinking out loud together —not performative agreement, but actual cognitive diversity where "this is financially impossible" and "this is pedagogically essential" became inputs into a solution neither could see alone. Six months later: Same people. Same budget constraints. Same enrollment pressures. Cabinet meetings went from three hours of polite disagreement to 90 minutes of actual decision-making. Not because they agreed more—because they'd built the operating system for integrating disagreement into better solutions. Decisions got made faster, implemented more consistently, and actually stuck. Not because individuals got smarter—because the team got smarter. Marcus got 14 hours per week back. They stopped trying to hire smarter ants. They built the colony operating system that turned brilliant individuals into collective intelligence. They finally went to the ant. Considered its ways. And became wise. Revolutionary? No. Obvious? Yes, once you see it. Common? Based on 987 leadership teams—absolutely not. Now, if you're thinking "this makes perfect sense, but how do I actually facilitate the 'build our operating system' conversation with my cabinet on Tuesday without it turning into another meeting about meetings?"—I get it. That's the gap between insight and implementation. This is what The GROUP is for. Each week, I turn the newsletter topic into a Leader CORE Lesson and Guide: facilitation notes, discussion prompts, the Team Intelligence diagnostic, team exercises for building your operating system—everything you need to lead your team through this content without spending Sunday night trying to translate ant colonies into something your CFO won't roll their eyes at. It's free (because charging you to learn how ants solved this problem 100 million years ago would be peak irony), built for busy leaders who need practical resources, not more theory, and designed for Monday morning meetings when you're already exhausted. Grab this week's Ant Paradox implementation guide: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group But whether you join The GROUP or not, here's what you can implement immediately... THE APPLICATION: BUILDING YOUR COLONY OPERATING SYSTEM (MONDAY MORNING EDITION) Here's what to do Monday morning (assuming your cabinet isn't already in crisis mode from the three decisions you didn't make last week): STEP 1: The Ant Paradox Audit (20 minutes) At your next cabinet meeting, before diving into the seventeen urgent items everyone brought, put this on the agenda: "Solomon told sluggards to go to the ant because the ant had something they didn't. I'm going to suggest we have the same problem. Let's run a diagnostic. On a scale of 1-10, rate two things: 1. How smart is each person on this team individually? 2. How smart are we as a collective when solving complex problems together?" Write down answers privately. Then go around the room. What you'll discover: If Question 1 averages 7-8 and Question 2 averages 3-4, congratulations—you've just discovered you have brilliant ants with no colony operating system. If everyone rates both questions equally high, someone's lying (probably the person who scheduled three sidebar conversations before this meeting to "align" because they don't trust the group process). If answers vary wildly, you don't have shared understanding of whether you're even trying to build colony intelligence or just managing individual ants more efficiently. The diagnostic question: "Are we breeding smarter ants, or are we building a smarter colony?" If you don't know the answer, you're doing the first thing while hoping for the second. Solomon wouldn't be impressed. STEP 2: The Pheromone Trail Mapping Exercise (25 minutes) This one's uncomfortable but worth it: "The ant colony's intelligence lives in its pheromone trails—the communication protocols that turn one ant's discovery into colony-level action. Let's map our equivalent. Think about the last major decision we made. How did information actually flow? Who talked to whom? Whose perspective never made it into the final decision?" Draw it on a whiteboard. Literally map it. You'll probably discover one of three patterns: Pattern A - The Hub and Spoke: Everyone talks to you, but not to each other. You're trying to be the central processor for the entire colony. This is why you're exhausted. The ant colony doesn't work this way because it can't scale. Pattern B - The Siloed Clusters: Your CFO and VP of Operations talk. Your CAO and Student Affairs VP talk. But the two clusters never integrate. You have two colonies pretending to be one. Pattern C - The Random Chaos: Information flows based on whoever happens to run into whom in the hallway. Your "operating system" is geographic proximity and scheduling luck. None of these creates colony intelligence. They create very busy, very frustrated individual ants who are each 340,000 times smarter than actual ants but producing worse collective results. Now ask: "What would our pheromone trails need to look like for information from one perspective to actually inform action across the whole team?" Don't solve it yet. Just name what's missing. That gap between your current communication pattern and actual colony intelligence? That's your TQ deficit. That's what Solomon saw three thousand years ago that you're just now discovering. OBJECTION HANDLING "But we don't have time to think about ant colonies when we have actual crises to manage." You have crises BECAUSE you don't have colony intelligence. You're managing the same problems repeatedly because you've never built the operating system that would solve them collectively. Also, you just spent three hours in a cabinet meeting that produced zero decisions. You have 14 hours per week trapped in meeting cycles that don't work. You don't have time NOT to build this. The ants figured this out while also building nests, farming food, and defending against predators. You can figure it out while managing enrollment and budgets. Solomon didn't tell busy people to go to the ant. He told sluggards—people who were working but getting nowhere. That's the diagnostic: Are you working, or are you building? THE MATURITY SHIFT ❌ Immature leaders think: "I need to hire smarter people." ✅ Mature leaders think: "I need to build the operating system that makes my smart people collectively brilliant." ❌ Immature leaders optimize individual ants. They send people to development programs, hire consultants for better communication, add more expertise to the table, and wonder why team performance stays flat. ✅ Mature leaders build colony intelligence. They create interaction protocols, communication rhythms, and decision-making frameworks that turn brilliant individuals into collective genius. ❌ Immature leaders believe: "If everyone just did their part better, we'd get better results." ✅ Mature leaders know: "If we built better integration protocols, doing our parts would produce exponential results." The sluggard works hard but gets nowhere. The wise person goes to the ant, considers its ways, and builds differently. The difference is the difference between breeding smarter ants and building a smarter colony. One keeps you busy managing individual performance. One makes impossible inevitable because you've unlocked the collective intelligence that was always there—you just never built the operating system to access it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ "You have smarter ants than the ants do. You just don't have their colony operating system. And until you build it, you'll keep hiring smarter individuals while getting the same mediocre collective results." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The ant paradox isn't a cute nature metaphor. It's a brutal diagnosis of why your brilliant cabinet consistently underperforms its potential. Solomon saw it three thousand years ago. The ants figured it out 100 million years ago. You're still trying to solve it with better meeting agendas and individual development programs. That's not a personnel problem. It's an operating system problem. And unlike your budget constraints or enrollment challenges, this one is 100% within your control to fix. YOUR TURN: THE QUESTION SOLOMON ASKED THREE THOUSAND YEARS AGO Think about your last major decision as a cabinet. Honest assessment—did you synthesize multiple perspectives into something better than any single view? Or did you average perspectives into a compromise that satisfied no one? Did you work like a colony? Or like individual ants wandering in circles while calling it collaboration? Drop a comment with your cabinet's Ant Paradox score: Rate individual intelligence 1-10, then collective intelligence 1-10. Post both numbers. Let's see how many brilliant leadership teams are operating at ant-level collective intelligence. Tag the cabinet member who you think sees this pattern too. Or screenshot the ant paradox section and text it to your CFO with the message "We need to talk about Tuesday's meeting." P.S. IF YOU'RE THINKING "I DON'T HAVE TIME TO TURN THIS INTO A TEAM MEETING RESOURCE" I already did it for you. The GROUP is a free community where every newsletter becomes a ready-to-deploy Leader CORE Lesson and Guide. Facilitation notes. Discussion prompts. Team exercises. The Team Intelligence diagnostic that shows your team exactly where their operating system breaks down. JOIN THE GROUP: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group Think of it as the meal kit version of team development. I prep the ingredients and recipe. You just facilitate. Your team gets fed. Everybody wins. Plus, you get access to hundreds of campus leaders who are also trying to eliminate their performance gaps and understand why their last cabinet meeting went sideways. The implementation guides save you hours. The peer conversations? Those might save your sanity. FOUND THIS VALUABLE? The LinkedIn algorithm won't show this to your network unless YOU share it: → Repost with YOUR Ant Paradox score (individual IQ vs. collective IQ—be honest) → Tag 3 cabinet members trapped in the meeting cycle → Comment: "COLONY" if you're ready to build the operating system Tag DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group in your repost. (LinkedIn's algorithm prioritizes posts that generate tags and reposts in first 2 hours. Help other leaders discover this.) The more leaders who shift from individual heroics to team intelligence, the better our educational systems become. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights. NEXT ISSUE: "Your Cabinet Is The Avengers (If Nobody Watched Each Other's Movies)" We'll explore why your all-star leadership team operates like superheroes who've never fought together—each one brilliant in isolation, each one solving problems with their signature move, but with zero coordination when the real battle starts. Spoiler: You're not having a talent problem. You're having an integration problem, and no amount of individual superpowers fixes a team that's never learned to assemble.