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.