Higher Performance Insights | YOU CHOSE THIS WORK FOR A REASON. DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS?
There is a specific look I've learned to recognize.
It's not burnout — burnout has an edge to it, an exhaustion that at least announces itself. This is quieter. It's the superintendent who has navigated everything thrown at her for nineteen years, who is admired by everyone in the room, who gives a precise and thoughtful answer to every question — and who, if you ask her privately when the last time she felt like she was actually making something was, has to think about it for a long time.
I've seen that look in cohort after cohort. I've seen it in leaders I deeply respect. And I want to tell you something I've earned the right to say by getting this wrong for a long time myself:
That's not exhaustion. That's drift. And drift and exhaustion are different problems with very different solutions.
I spent years watching capable leaders develop individually — conferences, frameworks, credentials, coaching — and quietly wonder why the work still felt thin. I kept pointing them toward better strategy. Toward better self-management. Toward better leadership development.
What I wasn't pointing them toward was the thing underneath the strategy. The reason they chose this in the first place. The calling that existed before the cabinet did.
That distinction took me twenty years and 987 leadership teams to fully understand. And once I understood it, I couldn't unsee it anywhere.
The Diagnosis: What Drift Actually Looks Like
There's an old Zen story about a novice monk who asks his master what his job will be. Before enlightenment, the master says: You chop wood and carry water. Decades pass. The monk reaches mastery. He returns with the same question. The master's answer is unchanged: chop wood and carry water.
The point isn't that nothing changes. The point is that the calling was never in the job. It was in the orientation toward the job. The same work — one version a slog, one version a vocation — the only variable being whether the person doing it understood what they were making and for whom.
Education is full of people who started as the monk before enlightenment. And who gradually — through the accumulation of board meetings and accreditation cycles and strategic planning retreats that somehow all look exactly the same — drifted back to chopping wood and carrying water without the orientation that made it mean something.
I don't say that to be harsh. I say it because the drift is almost invisible.
It looks like professionalism. It looks like stability. It looks like the leader who has held everything together for two decades and cannot remember the last time she felt called rather than required.
The leaders in our research who slipped from 90% capacity back toward 60% didn't lose skill. They lost orientation. And their teams — who couldn't name what they were sensing — started mirroring it.
This is the part I wish someone had told me earlier: when a leader's EQ dimension approaches zero — not from incompetence but from a loss of meaning — the TQ equation collapses across the whole cabinet. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. The multiplication is ruthless. One dimension trending toward empty pulls everything else down with it.
The capacity crisis inside most institutions isn't primarily a skills problem. It's a meaning problem that eventually becomes a skills problem. And most leadership development was designed to solve the skills problem — which means it misses the root entirely.
(This is one of seven forces quietly draining what your people brought to this work. I've spent years documenting them — not to assign blame, but to name what most teams have been paying a tax on without knowing what to call it. The Burnout Force is a 60-minute keynote built to do exactly that: name the forces in the room, give your full team language for what they're carrying, and hand every person a way to fight back. Not a motivation talk. A diagnostic. More on that in a moment.)
The Framework: Three Dimensions of Calling That Development Programs Miss
Call this the Calling Cultivation Framework. Or don't. It'll still explain why your last leadership retreat gave you better frameworks and no deeper sense of why the work matters.
Calling is not primarily found — it's cultivated. And it's cultivated through three specific practices that most leadership development never gets near.
1. INTRINSIC CLARITY
The honest interrogation of what gives this particular leader coherence, purpose, and significance in their work. Not abstractly. Specifically.
What, in the last month, did you do that made you feel like you were doing your work — not the role's work, not the institution's work, but the thing that required your actual judgment and your actual values and your actual self?
If you can't name it, that's not a rhetorical gap. That's a diagnostic one. And the absence of an answer is worth more data than any 360 assessment you'll run this year.
(This is the IQ dimension of TQ working against itself — when brilliant leaders are deployed on tasks that don't require their actual intelligence, they don't just underperform. They drift. And drifting leaders build drifting cabinets.)
2. FASCINATION
The reliable emotional signal that points toward calling. Not fun. Not ease. Fascination — the state of genuine engagement where you'd pursue the thing even if nobody paid you to.
The president who still reads the research because she genuinely wants to know. The superintendent who shows up at the Saturday community event because he actually wants to be there. Not for the photo. Not for the optic. Because his fascination with this particular community and its particular children hasn't been fully extinguished by the organizational distance.
And here's where it gets uncomfortable for leaders who've drifted far: the fascination doesn't disappear. It goes underground. It becomes the thing you feel briefly in the hallway conversation that wasn't on the agenda — in the moment a direct report shares something they figured out and something lights up in you that hasn't lit up in a while.
That's not nostalgia. That's data. That's the original calling, still intact, waiting for you to stop managing your schedule long enough to follow it.
3. FELT NECESSITY
The experience of being genuinely needed. Not institutionally required. Genuinely needed.
The essence of meaning in work is to feel that what you specifically do specifically matters to specific people. When the feedback loop gets long enough — when positional leadership adds enough distance between your judgment and the material it was meant to touch — that felt sense disappears. The work continues. The meaning drains.
The leader who once couldn't walk past what was broken starts walking past it. Not from callousness. From the slow accumulation of distance that nobody decided to build, and nobody knows how to close.
Let me tell you about a superintendent I'll call David. (Not his real name — but David, if you're reading this, you know exactly who you are, and so does the cabinet that sat with you through what I'm about to describe.)
David had led the same district for eleven years. Every objective measure pointed toward success: enrollment stable, staff retention high, board confidence strong. He was, by any external measure, exactly where he was supposed to be.
He hadn't felt fascinated by his work in four years. He had stopped noticing.
What surfaced when we worked together wasn't a leadership problem. It was a drift problem. David had, over eleven years, gradually handed the parts of the work that generated fascination to other people — and filled the recovered hours with the parts that required his presence but not his particular self. He was the superintendent. He just wasn't David anymore.
We didn't redesign his role. We did something smaller and more specific: we identified three recurring interactions in his week where the original calling was still live — still capable of generating fascination. A biweekly conversation with a school principal who was building something genuinely new. A student advisory session he'd been delegating. A community listening session he'd been sending his deputy to.
He took those three back. He protected them structurally. He stopped treating them as low-priority because they weren't operationally urgent.
Within one semester, his cabinet described him differently. More present. More generative. More like he was building something rather than managing something. His EQ dimension — the communication architecture, the emotional register of the room — came back online.
David hadn't become a better leader. He'd become himself again. And it turned out that was the thing his cabinet had been missing.
The Application: Four Moves. This Week.
Here's what to do Monday morning (assuming you're not already in the middle of a board situation, in which case bookmark this and do it Wednesday):
Move 1: Run the Fascination Audit (15 minutes, before tomorrow)
Look at the last two weeks of your calendar. For each significant block — every meeting, every obligation, every recurring commitment — ask one question: did this require my actual self, or just my presence?
Be honest. Presence is showing up. Self is bringing the judgment, the values, the fascination that made you the right person for this role in the first place.
If more than half your calendar required presence but not self — that's not a scheduling problem. That's a drift diagnostic. And the gap between those two things is costing your cabinet more than you've been told.
Move 2: Name the Last Time You Felt It (10 minutes, alone)
When is the last time you felt genuinely fascinated by something in your role? Not satisfied. Not effective. Pulled toward it — the way you were before the title, before the cabinet, before the cycle.
Write it down. Not for anyone else. For the data.
If it comes to you quickly, protect whatever produced that. Structurally. Non-negotiably. Whatever it was — that interaction, that kind of problem, that particular relationship — it is not a luxury. It is the upstream resource for everything else your leadership produces.
If you have to think hard — or if the honest answer is I don't remember — then the most important work in front of you isn't strategy. It's reorientation.
Move 3: Return One Thing You've Been Delegating (This Week)
Somewhere in your current role, there is a thing you used to do that generated fascination — and that you have, gradually and without deciding to, handed to someone else because you were too busy or it felt below your level.
Take it back. For one week. See what happens to the quality of your thinking in the hours around it.
This isn't about efficiency. It's about reestablishing contact with the part of the work that still has your fingerprints on it.
Move 4: Ask Your Cabinet the Question You Haven't Asked (20 minutes, next meeting)
Add this to the agenda of your next cabinet meeting:
"When is the last time you felt like you were doing the work you were made for — not just the work that was assigned to you? What produced that?"
Then hold the question open. Don't answer it first. Don't fill the silence. Let the room actually enter it.
What you'll discover — consistently, across cabinets — is that this question has been waiting in most of your people for longer than they'll admit. And when a leader asks it out loud, something shifts. Not inspired-different. Honest-different. And honest-different is where the real work can finally start.
"We don't have time for this kind of reflection."
You are currently spending 18+ hours per month managing the downstream effects of a cabinet where some people have lost the thread of why they're here. That's not a time problem. That's a meaning deficit that has become a performance tax. You have the time. The question is what you're doing with it.
"My team won't engage with something this personal."
Your team is currently engaging with something that isn't working — and doing it with extraordinary professionalism and almost no visibility into why it feels so heavy. The bar is lower than you think. The question isn't whether they'll engage. It's whether they believe you actually want to know the answer.
The Maturity Shift
Immature leaders think: "I need to find a better role — one that reconnects me to the work that matters."
Mature leaders think: "I need to find the work that matters inside the role I already hold."
Immature leaders drift from their calling and call it exhaustion. Mature leaders recognize drift as a diagnostic — the signal that the orientation has slipped, not that the calling is gone.
Immature leaders wait for meaning to arrive when the circumstances improve. Mature leaders understand that meaning is not downstream of circumstances. It precedes the strategic plan. It precedes the cabinet. It precedes the title. And it will precede whatever comes next — if they choose to carry it there.
The 987 leadership teams in our research who moved from 60% capacity to 90% didn't get there by becoming individually better. They got there when the leaders at the top stopped managing their calling and started living it again.
Their cabinets, who had been mirroring the drift without knowing it, found their own orientation in the reflection.
Your turn: When did you last feel genuinely fascinated by something in your role — not satisfied, not effective, but pulled toward it? One word in the comments is enough. Because naming it is the beginning of protecting it.
Tag a leader you've watched hold onto their original orientation — someone who still seems to be doing the subjective thing, not just the objective one. They deserve to know you noticed.
Your team didn't lose their calling because they stopped caring.
They lost it because seven specific forces — built into the structure of most educational institutions — have been draining it without anyone knowing what to call what was happening.
Drift is one of them. Fragmentation. Exhaustion. Scarcity. Isolation. Noise. Comparison. Every force in this framework was operating in your organization before anyone in your cabinet arrived. Your people inherited it. They've been paying its tax every single day.
The Burnout Force is a 60-minute keynote that names every force in the room — not to demoralize, but to liberate. When your team has language for what they're carrying, something shifts. Not inspired-different. Honest-different. And honest-different is where the real work can finally start.
Built for your full team — teachers, faculty, staff, administrators, and everyone in the building who chose this work because it mattered.
From 987 leadership teams: 3x performance improvement. 29% higher engagement. 27% better organizational outcomes.
If your institution is planning a convocation, faculty retreat, or all-staff session — schedule a 30-minute conversation to explore whether The Burnout Force is the right fit for your moment.
Book The Burnout Force · higherperformancegroup.com/burnout-force
Found Value in This?
Help other educational leaders find it:
→ Repost with the one word that describes what called you to this work before the calendar got full
→ Tag a leader you've watched stay genuinely in it — not just managing it
→ Comment with your fascination answer — your answer helps others find the language for theirs
The more leaders who shift from managing a calling to living one, the better our educational systems become.
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