Higher Performance Insights | YOU WERE BORN A GENIUS. SCHOOL FIXED THAT

June 9, 2026

Inside The June Roundtable Where District And Campus Leaders Finally Said The Quiet Part Out Loud.

THE PAPERCLIP. SIXTY SECONDS. AND A ROOM FULL OF GENIUSES.

Here's a question eleven educational leaders answered before 10:00 AM on June 3rd: How many uses can you list for a paperclip in sixty seconds?

The chat filled fast. Restart your modem. Fishhook. Lockpick. Holding hair back out of your eyes. Key ring.

The best one — from Kim LeClaire, Education Advisor and Strategist out of Denver — the one that stopped the room: the paper clip that held her rain cape together as she walked the Camino de Santiago.

Then the data landed.

In 1968, NASA commissioned Dr. George Land to build a test to find the most innovative thinkers on the planet. He gave it to 1,600 children aged four and five. Ninety-eight percent scored at genius level — the same standard NASA used for rocket scientists.

He retested them at age ten: 30 percent. At fifteen: 12 percent. He then tested 280,000 adults.

Two percent.

Land's conclusion: non-creative behavior is learned. We are not born uncreative. We are taught — institution by institution, grade by grade — to believe the paperclip is only for paper.

That conclusion is the premise of every Peer-to-Peer Leadership Roundtable Higher Performance Group convenes. And it was Kim (for the win) who named what the data actually means for every institution in that room:

"How do we support the human capacity for creativity?"

That is not a warm-up exercise. It is the essential question for every institution these eleven leaders walk into every day. And on June 3rd — leaders from Washington and Minnesota, Ohio and Virginia, Texas and Illinois, K–12 districts and college campuses — they spent sixty minutes attempting to answer it together.

Not with frameworks. With the room thinking out loud.

THE DIAGNOSIS: YOUR SILOS ARE STRUCTURAL, NOT PERSONAL — AND THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING

Let's talk about this like adults who've survived multiple accreditation cycles, bond referendums, and at least one strategic planning retreat where the mission statement got wordsmithed for four hours while the actual problem waited patiently in the parking lot.

Silos are not a character failure. They are not a communication problem. They are not evidence that your VPs don't respect each other — although, statistically, two of them might not.

Dr. Rick W. Smith Sr., CFRL, CCDP President of Dallas College North Lake — a former hospital administrator for 23 years, then a decade in television news, now a decade in higher education — named it with the precision of someone who has led three entirely different systems:

"Silos are often the unintended consequence of how organizations are organized, measured, and — too many times — rewarded. The challenge is ensuring those priorities remain connected to institutional goals."

That reframe changes the entire fix. If silos are a character failure, you call a retreat. You invest in communication training. You hire a consultant who facilitates a trust exercise that everyone finds mildly uncomfortable and immediately forgets.

If silos are structural — the predictable output of incentive architecture — you redesign who makes decisions, where resources flow, and how information moves between people who serve the same students but rarely occupy the same room.

TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. The PQ dimension — Perceptual Intelligence, the capacity to accurately read what's actually happening in your institution — depends on this. You cannot build organizational perceptual accuracy when the structural design actively prevents the right people from seeing the whole picture.

And here's what our research across 987 leadership teams in 43 states tells us: the teams operating at 60% capacity aren't there because of talent deficits. They're there because the architecture was never designed for multiplication.

(This is the exact problem THE TEAM INSTITUTE was built to address — not by making individuals better at working around broken structures, but by helping cabinets redesign the architecture itself. More on that in a moment.)

In a BANI environment — Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible — architecture optimized for Coasters isn't just inefficient. It becomes existentially dangerous.

Dr. Nathan S. Schilling, CSBO, Superintendent of Lansing School District 158 brought the session's most vivid metaphor: his 1973 Mustang, purchased specifically after confirming it had undergone a full frame-off restoration — all body paneling removed, foundational work done first, then reassembled.

"Some restorations slap new panels over a completely rusted frame. That looks great inside — it's completely rusted and falling apart."

That is the institutional response most strategic plans represent: new panels, rusted frame. The leaders in this room are not interested in new panels.

THE FRAMEWORK: BUILDERS, DREAMERS, COASTERS, AND CLIMBERS

Not every leader in your institution responds to BANI the same way. Our research names four behavioral patterns that show up in every institution navigating disruption — and the distribution matters more than the diagnosis.

The framework exists not to celebrate the people in the room but to name the structures around them. A Builder can lead an institution still optimized for Coasters. The challenge is not character — it is architecture.

The difference between a Builder and a Dreamer is not ambition. Dreamers are often spectacularly ambitious. The difference is specificity: does what you just committed to have a date, a name, and a measurable outcome? Without all three, it is a dream, not a plan.

Rick Aulie, first-year superintendent of CROSBY IRONTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS - ISD 182 on Schools in Minnesota, offered the session's most precise illustration of BANI lived rather than theorized. He navigated 36 staffing changes since July 1st — two new principals, a new tech director, a retiring HR director — in a district of 950 students. Two buildings, two and a half miles apart. Completely different emotional climates. Same leadership. Same year. A referendum won on the third attempt.

That is not exceptional talent. That is a Builder who looked at brittleness, anxiety, nonlinearity, and incomprehensibility and said: this is the design brief. What are we building?

WHAT ELEVEN LEADERS SAID WHEN THE ROOM FINALLY GOT HONEST

The session's most productive stretch was not a structured exercise. It was the sixty minutes after the framework landed — when every leader in the room stopped performing a role and started describing what they've actually seen.

On the Handoff Gap Between K–12 and Higher Education

Jason Mantell, Superintendent of OAK HILL UNION LOCAL SCHOOL DISTRICT in southern Ohio, described a relationship with local universities that most districts would call unusual: genuinely collaborative. He didn't study the teacher shortage. He made the call.

"We went to local universities and said: we need to start a teacher-in program in high school. We need to find out when kids are 17 or 18, not when they're sophomores in college." That program now exists.

"It really hasn't been a battle. It's been more of an engagement."

Dr. Richmond Hill, Ed.D., Provost at Northern Virginia Community College described what happens when you run the cross-sector play correctly. In February, his campus convened a math faculty summit with the local school district — not a planning meeting, but faculty from both institutions in the same room.

"Now they are doing it on their own. We don't have to convene them any longer."

That sentence contains an entire theory of institutional change. The organizer eventually becomes unnecessary. That is not a program. It is relationship infrastructure.

On the Students Falling Through the Gap

Dr. Nathan Schilling brought the micro-step perspective the macro conversation consistently loses. His late brother Aaron graduated from high school, enrolled at a four-year college, didn't find his footing, came home, enrolled at Oakton Community College, earned A's and B's, transferred to Northern Illinois University, earned his degree, became a director of finance for a school district.

Community college was the bridge. Not everyone needs the same path. The question is whether you've built the micro-steps.

Melanie Matta, Superintendent/Principal of Hope Elementary in Porterville, California, brought the student-voice methodology down to daily practice. She surveyed her students: what do you want your classroom environment to look like? Who on campus do you feel connected to? What parts of your day feel like a waste of time?

"Several of them said lunch. Lunch was a waste of time. And I'm like — okay. How could we restructure lunch so that it doesn't feel like a waste of time to them?"

That is not a listening session. That is design thinking as daily leadership practice.

On the Third System Nobody Talks About

Yianni (John) Vassiliou, Ph.D., Chancellor at Albizu University - Miami Campus, named the system that sits at the end of the pipeline — and that both K–12 and higher education consistently fail to connect with: the workforce.

"No one is going to any institution to get a piece of paper and put it on the wall. They're going to get something — knowledge that will apply to real work. So it's our due diligence to find those opportunities for them."

Vassiliou launched four new programs at Albizu this fall — intersecting behavioral science with AI, wearable technology, and cybersecurity — specifically because he went to local organizations, asked what they actually need, and built curriculum around the connection.

On What Leaders Are Actually Carrying

Dr. Ellen Perconti, Superintendent of Goldendale School District #404 in Washington, days from the end of a distinguished career, described the emotional texture of transition that most leaders are too professional to name: "People start routing around you before you've gone."

She brought the session's sharpest readiness reframe:

"Our Kinder teachers say that incoming children are not prepared for school. My response is — so how do we prepare for the students who will come this fall? We want to maintain high expectations and build different supports for students to succeed."

Kim LeClaire connected the personal to the institutional. She named student voice as a structural choice, not an oversight:

"Rarely do I see in any organization bringing in the people we serve into the leadership discussions — literally student voice as we discuss issues. It's an art to design the experience with them at the table."

Dr. Richmond Hill extended that principle with the closing metaphor of the cross-sector exchange: "We often plan a party for a person — bring chocolate cake and ice cream — and they hate chocolate cake and are lactose intolerant. We brought the wrong thing to the right party. All because we didn't ask the guest of honor."

"We do this in education a lot."

And Dr. Michael Lubelfeld, completing 30 years as superintendent as of June 30th, named what runs through all of it: "It's 2026 and we are now preparing for the 22nd century. Whether we're publics or privates, charters or micros, profit or nonprofit — we are one team and we're team society."

DR. JOE HILL closed the cross-sector exchange with the observation that named what made June 3rd different from every regional conference these leaders had attended:

"What you just did is rare. A superintendent and a president describing the same student from two sides of the same handoff. That gap is a silo. It belongs to both of you. Neither of you can fix it alone. The question is not whether you need each other. It is what you are willing to build."

40 million Americans hold college credits and no credential. Not because they quit. Because the handoff infrastructure was never built. 60% of community college students who intend to transfer never complete it.

Superintendents: those are your graduates. Presidents: those students started in your buildings.

That number belongs to both sectors. And the leaders in this room are the ones choosing to own it.

THE APPLICATION: FOUR MOVES. THIS WEEK.

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

Move 1: Name Your One Silo (15 minutes, before your next cabinet meeting)

Kim LeClaire closed the session with the sharpest challenge of the morning: What is the ONE silo you will undo before end of year?

Not "we need to improve cross-functional collaboration." That is a Dreamer sentence. A Builder sentence has a wall, a date, and a phone call. Name the specific structural gap that costs your students the most. Write it down. Give it a deadline. Name who you need to call.

If you can't answer that in fifteen minutes, you don't have a clarity problem. You have an avoidance problem.

Move 2: Ask the Guest of Honor (next time you're near students)

Melanie Matta surveyed her students on what feels like a waste of time and then asked them how to fix it. Dr. Richmond Hill described a college president who skipped the conference circuit and went to the commons area to listen. Dr. Yianni Vassiliou brought K–12 principals into his campus and said: tell me your actual challenges.

The wisdom of proximity over performance. Your students are not the guest of honor at your strategic planning sessions. Fix that.

Move 3: Make the Cross-Sector Call (one specific person, one specific ask)

Jason Mantell made the call to local universities about a teacher pathway. Dr. Richmond Hill got math faculty from both institutions in the same room. Dr. Rick Smith built the Dallas College Next Gen Sector Partnerships table — industry, secondary institutions, legislators, all at once — because he understood: no one side finds the resolution alone.

One call. Not a task force. Not a committee. The person on the other side of the handoff your students are falling through.

Move 4: Apply the Builder Test (before your next board presentation)

Before your next initiative launch, your next "we should really...": Does it have a date? Does it have a name attached to it? Does it have a measurable outcome that tells you in 90 days whether it worked?

If not, it's a dream. Dr. Lubelfeld closed the session with the phrase that ran through it all:

"Be about it. Don't just talk about it. That's kindergarten innovation at the highest leadership level."

Two Objections, Handled:

"We've tried cross-sector work before and it didn't stick."

Ask the question Dr. Rick Smith's reframe demands: was it the initiative that failed, or the incentive architecture you were trying to build it inside? If the structure rewards siloed performance, collaboration programs die between fiscal years. Every time. Without exception. The fix is not more buy-in. The fix is redesigning what gets measured.

"We don't have capacity for new partnerships right now."

You are currently paying the cost of every student who falls through the handoff gap. That cost is invisible on your budget and enormous in your outcomes. You don't have capacity to keep paying it. You just haven't calculated it yet.

THE MATURITY SHIFT

Immature leaders treat BANI as a threat to be survived. Mature leaders treat BANI as a design brief for what to build next.

Immature leaders bring students the chocolate cake and ice cream. Mature leaders ask the guest of honor what they actually want — and build the party around the answer.

The difference between a Builder and everyone else isn't talent. It's that a Builder asks: what specifically am I willing to commit to, with a date, by which I can be held accountable? And then answers it out loud. In the room. Before the meeting ends.

Your turn: Name the ONE specific silo your institution will unbuild before December 31. Not a vision statement. A wall, a date, a phone call. Drop it in the comments. Tag the colleague on the other side of the handoff.

If you were in the room on June 3rd — you know who you are. The room was better for having you in it. Drop your one word.

THE TEAM INSTITUTE

Here is the uncomfortable truth the June 3 roundtable made plain: most leadership development programs are designed to make individual leaders better at operating inside broken collective architecture.

You leave the conference sharper. You return to the cabinet. The cabinet is the same. The incentive structure is the same. The silos are the same. Within sixty days, the insight has paid the full translation tax and you are back to managing the same structural problems with marginally better frameworks.

That is not a development failure. It is an architectural one.

What the leaders in the June session were actually demonstrating — cross-sector table-building, student voice integration, faculty summit convening, workforce pipeline creation — is Level II work. It requires a cabinet that has been built for multiplication, not just individual competence. A room where the right questions get asked and held open.

THE TEAM INSTITUTE is an 8-month sequential development journey for full leadership cabinets — not individual leaders, but the collective architecture they operate inside. Built for superintendents and university presidents who have done everything right individually and are ready to build the system that multiplies what they've already built.

From our research across 987 leadership teams in 43 states: 3× performance improvement. 29% higher engagement. 27% better organizational outcomes. Zero burnout increase.

One requirement: full cabinet participation. Partial collective architecture is not architecture. It is a majority position wearing the name of the whole.

If you recognize the gap between your cabinet's individual talent and what they are collectively producing — and you are done explaining that gap as a communication problem — this is the conversation worth having. Schedule a 30-minute consultation: https://calendly.com/higherperformance/30minutecoffee

THE ROOM THAT MADE THIS HAPPEN

The following eleven leaders gave their time on June 3rd voluntarily, without compensation, because they believe the conversation is worth having. Every insight in this issue came from them.

Dr. Michael Lubelfeld · Featured Moderator

Superintendent (retiring June 30, 2026), North Shore SD 112. Author of The Unlearning Leader and The Unfinished Teacher. 2025 ISTE-ASCD Generation AI Fellow. Closed with the session's defining phrase: "Be about it. Don't just talk about it."

Dr. Joe Seabrooks Jr.

President, Cedar Valley Campus, Dallas College. 30+ years in higher education workforce development. Set the session's authenticity tone: resist the pursuit of perfection and be who you are in the moment.

Dr. Rick W. Smith Sr.

President, North Lake Campus, Dallas College. Former hospital administrator 23 years. Delivered the structural diagnosis: silos are the predictable output of how organizations are organized, measured, and rewarded.

Dr. Richmond Hill, Ed.D.

Provost, Woodbridge Campus, Northern Virginia Community College. Built the math faculty summit that became self-sustaining. Named the goal: "The organizer eventually becomes unnecessary.

Dr. Ellen Perconti

Superintendent, Goldendale School District, Washington. Completing a distinguished career June 2026. The session's sharpest readiness reframe: the question is not whether students are prepared for our system — it's whether our system is prepared for them.

Dr. Nathan Schilling

Superintendent, Lansing School District 158, Illinois. Brought the 1973 Mustang frame-off restoration metaphor. Shared his late brother Aaron's story as a testament to the micro-step.

Dr. Yianni Vassiliou

Chancellor, Miami Campus, Albizu University. Named the workforce as the third missing system. Launched four new programs at the intersection of behavioral science, AI, and wearable technology.

Melanie Matta

Superintendent/Principal, Hope Elementary School District, Porterville, CA. Author of Unwritten. Brought student voice to life: surveyed students on what feels like a waste of time, then asked them how to fix it.

Kim LeClaire

Education Advisor & Strategist, Denver, CO. Opened with the essential question: "How do we support the human capacity for creativity?" Closed with the sharpest challenge: name the ONE silo you will unbuild before year's end.

Rick Aulie

Superintendent, Crosby-Ironton Schools, Crosby, MN. First-year superintendent. Navigated 36 staffing changes and won a referendum on the third attempt. The session's most precise illustration of BANI lived — not theorized.

Jason Mantell

Superintendent, Oak Hill Union Local, Ohio. Built a teacher-in program and Ohio's first pre-med/athletic trainer hybrid pathway. His philosophy: "It really hasn't been a battle. It's been an engagement."

JOIN THE AUGUST 5TH SESSION

The next Peer-to-Peer Leadership Roundtable is Wednesday, August 5, 2026, at 10:30 AM CST. Same format. Different room. Eleven more leaders who've decided the conversation is worth having.

If the June session left you poked — if something in the silo-mapping conversation named something you've been carrying — don't just agree with it. The August session is where you come to do something about it.

FOUND VALUE IN THIS?

Help other educational leaders find it:

→ Repost with your answer to the Builder Test: name the one silo your institution will unbuild before October.

→ Tag a leader you've watched make the cross-sector call — someone who didn't wait for a committee.

→ Comment with one word. If you were in the room on June 3rd, you know exactly what to say.

The more educational leaders who shift from individual development to collective architecture, the better our institutions become.

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

Looking to Accelerate Your Team Performance in 2026-2027? Check out THE TEAM INSTITUTE. New cohorts now enrolling.

Help Spread the Word

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Higher Performance Insights | AI WILL NEVER TELL YOU YOU'RE ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION

By HPG Info • September 7, 2026

Fluent. Confident. Wrong. In that order. Every cabinet meeting I've sat in since the second week of June has opened with some version of the same sentence: "The board wants to know our AI plan." Nobody's arguing AI matters. That fight's over. What almost nobody's asking is the question underneath it: the one that actually decides whether this fall helps your cabinet or quietly wrecks it. Before you put a machine on the payroll as your cabinet's newest ghostwriter, have you checked what it already believes about you? Here's what nobody tells a team of senior leaders walking into its first AI rollout: the tool doesn't create your team's judgment. It ghostwrites it, fluently, into every board memo and parent email and strategic plan you hand it, sounding exactly as confident in the ones that are wrong as the ones that are right. Two stories explain what's actually at stake this fall. One's old. One's brand new. Together, they're the whole problem. THE SENTENCE In third grade, a teacher tried to stop a boy from getting bullied. He'd been held back in reading, had migraines nobody diagnosed, and needed things repeated more than his classmates did. So she stepped in, pointed at him in front of the whole room, and said the thing she thought would protect him: "Leave that kid alone. That's the boy with the broken brain." She meant it kindly. He heard two words. Broken brain became the sentence he ran, silently, for the next decade: every time he wasn't picked for a team, every time he failed a test, every time he took the back-row seat hoping nobody would call on him. That kid grew up to be Jim Kwik, now one of the most recognized names in learning and memory training on the planet, the guy Fortune 500 companies and elite athletes call when they need to think faster under pressure. He told the story in a conversation earlier this year, and the line that stopped me wasn't the injury. It was what he said actually held him back: "Under stress, we don't rise to the level of our aspirations. We fall to the level of our stories, our systems, and our self-image." Not his intelligence. Not his skill. His self-image, inherited from a five-second sentence somebody else said, replaying under pressure for ten straight years. Now sit with the version your own cabinet is running. Maybe it's a board comment from three budget cycles ago that nobody's repeated out loud since, but everybody still quietly believes. Maybe it's a single paragraph an accreditation team wrote four years back that's still deciding what your provost thinks she's allowed to propose. Maybe it's simpler: a founding leader who once told this team they weren't ready for something, and nobody has tested whether that's still true. Here's the part that should actually worry you. Kwik didn't get better at learning by treating the injury. He got better by finding, and rewriting, the sentence. Your cabinet's talent isn't the variable in question here. It rarely is. The sentence running underneath the talent is. THE TURN Here's why this matters more this fall than any fall before it. For every year of your career until now, your cabinet's inherited sentence stayed mostly contained. It shaped a meeting here, a hesitation there, a proposal that quietly never got made. Slow damage, spread out over years. That containment is gone. Kwik, talking about the exact tools your board is asking about, put it plainly: "AI can scale and amplify. But it can only scale and amplify what a human brings to it." Feed it a clear, tested, collectively-owned judgment, and it multiplies your best thinking across every email, every plan, every decision your cabinet touches. Feed it an untested inherited sentence, and it does the exact same thing to that. (This is the exact gap THE TEAM INSTITUTE was built to close this fall: surfacing what the room already believes before the tool starts repeating it back at scale, which is different work than training your cabinet on the tool itself. Every vendor already offers that part. More on that in a moment.) TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ still holds. What's new is the multiplier. A cabinet with strong IQ and an untested self-image used to produce one flawed decision at a time. The same cabinet, with AI in the loop, can now produce that flawed decision a hundred different ways before lunch: in a strategic plan draft, a parent email, a board memo, and every version will read as confident, because the tool can't tell the difference between confidence and an old wound. THE OLD PLAYBOOK If you want proof this isn't just a Higher Performance Group observation, change management researchers are already redrawing the map. Kotter's 8-Step Change Model has run more transformations than any framework in modern management: create urgency, build a coalition, communicate the vision, empower people to act, anchor the gains. It's built for change that holds still long enough to sequence. A comparative model published this year in the Journal of AI, Robotics & Workplace Automation puts Kotter's eight steps next to a proposed AI Adoption Change Model, and the contrast is the whole argument in one picture. Source: Journal of AI, Robotics & Workplace Automation, Vol. 5 (2026), Henry Stewart Publications. Look at where each model starts. Kotter opens with urgency and a coalition, top-down, already decided. The AI model opens with exploring potential and discovering champions, bottom-up, still being tested. Kotter ends with anchoring the change in culture. The AI model ends with "cultivate AI-driven culture" and loops straight back into exploring again, because the tool never stops shipping new capability long enough for anything to get anchored. That's the structural version of what Kwik is describing at the individual level. AI adoption isn't a project you finish. It's a loop you run, and every pass through that loop amplifies whatever judgment your cabinet brought to it, tested or not. Which is exactly why the next five steps matter more than the eight above them. BUILD BEFORE YOU BORROW Kwik teaches a five-step discipline for exactly this problem, built for one person working with AI. It translates almost perfectly to a cabinet. You just have to run it as a room, not as one person with a laptop. Brainstorm first. Before anyone opens a tool, the cabinet talks through the problem out loud, together, with nothing feeding them an answer. This has nothing to do with whether the tool can be trusted. A room that's never practiced thinking together won't notice when the tool starts thinking for it instead. Understand the real problem. Most cabinets solve the presenting problem (enrollment's soft, a program's underperforming) instead of the one underneath it. Kwik's rule: spend the bulk of your time understanding what's actually broken before anyone reaches for a fix. AI is exceptionally good at answering the wrong question with total confidence. Imagine your own solution before you borrow one. Draft the cabinet's own answer first, even a rough one, before any tool sees the problem. This is the step almost every cabinet skips under deadline pressure, and it's the one that actually builds Team Intelligence. Skip it enough times, and the room stops being able to do it at all. Leverage the tool to stress-test, not to think for you. This is the one step where you deliberately fire the ghostwriter. Kwik's own practice: ask AI to argue against what the room already believes, to name the room's blind spots, to poke holes. Not "write our plan." "Tell us what's wrong with our plan." Different question, completely different outcome, and the only one of the five steps where you want the tool talking back instead of taking dictation. Decide, because the tool never has to live with it. AI has no stake in your decision. It doesn't sit in the parent meeting when the plan fails, or defend the budget line to the board. That accountability doesn't transfer, no matter how good the draft looks. Somebody in the room still has to own it. Five steps. None require new software. All five require your leaders to still be doing the thinking it's currently outsourcing, to the tool, or, just as often, to whichever one of you has quietly become the only person who does the real thinking before anyone else weighs in. (Kwik teaches this in far more depth than one newsletter can hold: his book Limitless and his Kwik Brain podcast go deep on the underlying discipline. No affiliation here, just work worth pointing you to.) THE CASE STUDY This is a composite, drawn from patterns across our work with 987 leadership teams , not one specific president's story. A university cabinet spent the spring drafting its first AI use policy the way most do: one dean built a draft using a chatbot over a weekend, and the cabinet spent forty minutes debating word choices in a document none of them had actually thought through together. The policy read confidently. Nobody in the room could say, if asked directly, what problem it was actually solving. Before the fall rollout, the cabinet ran Build Before You Borrow on that same policy, live, in one meeting. Brainstormed first, out loud, no laptops. Named the real problem: not "we need an AI policy" but "we don't yet agree on what we're willing to let a machine say on our behalf." Drafted their own answer as a room, in plain language, before any tool touched it. Only then brought a draft to AI, and only to argue against it. The resulting policy was four sentences shorter than the first one and, according to the cabinet, the first draft everyone in the room could actually explain from memory without looking at it. Same five people. One real conversation, finally had before the tool had it for them. THE FIRST MEETING You don't need a retreat for this. You need one meeting, early in the semester, run differently than the ones you've been running. Name the sentence (20 minutes). Ask your cabinet directly: what's something this institution believes about itself that nobody's tested in years? Write every answer down without editing them. You're not solving anything yet. You're finding out what you've all been quietly agreeing not to say. Run one live decision through Build Before You Borrow, out loud, before anyone opens a laptop (30 minutes). Pick a real one: the fall enrollment message, the AI policy itself, whatever's actually on this week's agenda. Brainstorm together first. Name the real problem. Draft your own answer as a room. Only then bring in a tool, and only to argue against what you just built. Agree, as a cabinet, on one rule for how AI gets used this year (10 minutes). Not a policy document. One sentence everyone says out loud and means: something like "nothing this tool wrote goes out first without a human draft underneath it." Whatever you land on, make it specific enough that you'd notice the day you broke it. If your first objection is that you don't have sixty extra minutes this month, you're already spending more than that reworking decisions that got made too fast, by whoever talked first in the room. This isn't additional time. It's the same time, spent before the mistake instead of after it. If your second objection is that your team will treat this as one more initiative, they're already operating under an initiative. It's just an unspoken one, and it's been running since before you took the job. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "We need to move fast before we fall behind on AI." Mature leaders think: "We need to know what we actually believe before we teach a machine to say it for us." Immature leaders let the tool draft first and edit for tone. Mature leaders draft the room's own answer first and let the tool argue with it. Kwik calls the difference between these two postures victim mindset and heroic mindset: whether you let your hardest chapter keep narrating you, or you use it as fuel. It's a private decision about your own institution's story, one nobody else can make for you, and this fall, a machine is about to say that decision out loud, on schedule, to everyone. YOUR TURN Your cabinet is about to find out, in public, at scale, which story it's been running. No scandal required. A machine is about to say it back to everyone, fluently, on schedule, forever. Name it. What's the sentence your cabinet has been running that nobody's tested? Where did it come from, and is it even still true? You don't have to post the answer. But if you're willing to, I'd genuinely like to know what you find. If you already suspect which sentence it is, and you're wondering whether it's about to get amplified before you've even chosen a vendor: that's precisely what the TEAM INTELLIGENCE Assessment is built to surface. Fifteen minutes, no pitch, just a clear read on what your cabinet is actually working with before you put a machine in the room as your ghostwriter. higherperformancegroup.com/team-intelligence-assessment Across the 987 leadership teams we've studied, the cabinets that did this work before scaling anything (a new initiative, a new tool, a new plan) outperformed the ones that scaled first and diagnosed later, by a wide enough margin that "later" stopped being a viable strategy. The point is simple: make sure what gets sped up is actually worth repeating. If this is useful for someone else's first fall cabinet meeting, send it their way before their board asks the same question yours did. Tell them which sentence you found. Somebody in your network is about to let a machine ghostwrite a story they've never actually tested, and this might be the newsletter that stops them in time. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group . — Dr. Joe Hill, Higher Performance Group | THE TEAM INSTITUTE

Higher Performance Insights | THE WRONG VERSION OF THE RIGHT CONVERSATION

By HPG Info • September 1, 2026

Three Convos Hiding Inside Every Hard One Somebody walks into your office. The numbers are off. Or the mood is off. Or both. And you already know which conversation you're about to have — because you decided it before they sat down. Here's the tell: most leaders run the exact same script regardless of what's actually in front of them. Stern voice for a performance problem. Soft voice for a feelings problem. Same script every time, because building a new one for every person is exhausting — and exhaustion, not indifference, is usually the real reason cabinets default to autopilot. Here's what that shortcut actually costs you. The conversation you're avoiding right now is a decision you're already making. Every week you skip the two-minute diagnosis, you're choosing — by default — to either let something slide that shouldn't, or come down hard on someone who needed something else entirely. This week: the diagnosis every leader skips, and the three conversations hiding inside every hard one. THE DIAGNOSIS Let's talk about this like adults who've sat through a cabinet meeting that started at 2:00 and ended, for reasons nobody could later explain, at 3:47. You know the version where a VP's reports go late and thin, and you assume skill drift — because skill drift is the explanation that requires the least from you. You know the version where someone's tone shifts in a meeting and you file it under “having an off week,” then quietly start managing around them instead of asking. You know the version where the story someone tells you doesn't quite add up, and you let it go because confronting it feels worse than not knowing. Here's the pattern underneath all three: once you decide someone is lazy, or checked out, or doesn't care as much as you do, you stop looking for any other explanation. Every late report confirms it. Every quiet moment in a meeting confirms it. You've stopped diagnosing and started collecting evidence for a verdict you already reached — and the story becomes true simply because you quit checking it. That's not a people problem. That's a leader who made the moment about their own read of the room before they made it about what was actually happening in the room. (This is the exact gap THE TEAM INSTITUTE was built to close — not by teaching your cabinet better scripts for hard conversations, but by building the shared diagnostic language that lets seven people read the same situation the same way, before anyone opens their mouth. More on that in a moment.) This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you to “communicate better.” You already knew that. The real problem is you've been trying to fix a Perceptual Intelligence gap with an Emotional Intelligence tool — and TQ math doesn't forgive that substitution. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. Skip the diagnosis, and you're not being direct. You're multiplying by a guess. THE THREE-CONVERSATION DIAGNOSTIC Call this the Three-Conversation Diagnostic. Or don't — it'll still explain why your last “tough conversation” left the room worse than before you started it. 1. The Skill Gap. They don't know what's expected, or nobody's ever shown them. Treat it like a character problem, and you'll manufacture resentment where clarity would've done the job. Lead with the headline, not the buildup: “I need you in this seat, and right now it needs three specific things you're not doing yet.” Name them. No mystery. (This is the only one of the three that's actually about skill — which is exactly why it's the one leaders misdiagnose least often, and the other two most.) 2. The Life Crisis. Something outside work has knocked the wheels off, and performance is just where it shows up first. The move is holding real support and real expectations at once: “Here's what I can flex. Here's what I can't.” Extend that grace with no word to the rest of the cabinet, though, and you've created sanctioned incompetence — everyone sees the standard slip and quietly assumes you're letting it slide, because nobody told them why. 3. The Integrity Break. Someone isn't telling you the truth, and opening with the receipts triggers defense, not honesty. Slow it down instead. Ask them to walk you through it again — a true story holds up the same way twice; one that isn't tends to shift, a detail moves, someone else gets blamed. If it never settles, you're not managing a performance problem anymore. You're holding a values line, and holding it is the only thing that tells the rest of the cabinet the standard was ever real. This is a composite, drawn from patterns across our 987 teams — not one specific leader. Call him Isaac: assistant superintendent, six years in the seat, historically one of the most reliable people on the cabinet. Then two board cycles running, his reports came in late and thin. His superintendent did what most of us do under pressure: assumed skill drift. She scheduled a “let's get you back on track” conversation, brought data, brought a plan, opened with concern about standards slipping. Isaac sat through it politely. Said he'd do better. Nothing changed. It wasn't until she asked one different question: “Is this a 'you're not clear on what I need' problem, or is something else going on?” That's when Isaac told her his father had been moved into hospice three weeks earlier, and he'd been driving two hours each way most weekends to be there. She'd diagnosed a skill gap. It was a life crisis wearing a performance-review costume. Not because she's a bad leader — she's excellent — but because she skipped the one step that tells you which conversation you're actually in. She offered two weeks of reduced load, had a peer cover his board prep, and told the cabinet only, “I'm aware, we're handling it together” — enough that nobody rewrote the standard in her silence. Isaac was back to full strength within a month. Same person. Right diagnosis, finally. 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: Run the Filter (2 minutes, before you open your mouth). Before your next hard conversation, ask yourself: skill, life, or trust? Don't skip this because it feels obvious. It's obvious after the fact in roughly zero percent of the conversations that actually go sideways. Step 2: Match the Opening Line (30 seconds). Skill gap gets the headline, not the buildup. Life crisis gets “here's what I can flex, here's what I can't.” Integrity break gets “walk me through it again,” not the receipts. Three different diagnoses, three different first sentences — using the wrong one is how a life crisis turns into a resentment-generating skills lecture. Step 3: Name Your Own Story First (1 minute, inside the conversation itself). Try: “Here's what I've noticed. The story I'm making up about it is ______. Help me understand what's actually true.” You've named the gap without attacking the person, and left room for a story that might be completely wrong. If your own emotions are rising while you say it — irritation, defensiveness, the urge to decide right now — that's the signal to slow down, not speed up. Good decisions and hot emotions have never once shared a room. “We don't have time for a diagnosis, we just need to handle it.” You don't have time not to. Every wrong-diagnosis conversation gets repeated — once when you misread it, again when you have to walk it back. Two minutes of diagnosis is cheaper than two conversations, every time. “My team will think I'm overthinking a simple conversation.” Your team is currently watching you run the same tough-leader script on everyone, regardless of what's actually happening in their life. That's not simple. That's a coin flip they've already noticed. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: “I need the same tough-leader energy in every hard conversation.” Mature leaders think: “I need to diagnose before I speak — and let the diagnosis choose my tone.” Immature leaders protect their own consistency. Mature leaders protect what's actually true in the room. Here's the part that should sting a little: you're not just managing one relationship in that conversation. You're managing a room that's always watching how you handle everyone else. Get the diagnosis wrong in either direction, and you're not just mishandling one person — you're teaching the other seven what actually happens here when something goes sideways. This is a PQ problem before it's an EQ problem. You cannot communicate your way out of a diagnosis you never made. Your turn: think of the last hard conversation you avoided, or ran on autopilot instead of running the filter. What did skipping the real diagnosis actually decide, by default? — Bonus points if you can name which of the three conversations it turned out to be. If your cabinet keeps having the wrong version of the right conversation, that's exactly the collective-architecture gap THE TEAM INSTITUTE was built to close. Not by teaching your team seven individual scripts for seven different personalities — that's the traditional playbook, and it's why most leadership development doesn't survive contact with an actual cabinet meeting. THE TEAM INSTITUTE builds the shared diagnostic language so the whole room reads the same situation the same way, before anyone opens their mouth. Across 987 leadership teams , cabinets that built this kind of shared architecture saw performance improve roughly 3x, engagement rise 29%, and outcomes improve 27% — without any increase in burnout, which is usually the quiet, unadvertised cost of every initiative that just asks people to “communicate better.” If there were a way to give your whole cabinet one shared diagnostic filter — instead of seven leaders each running their own private version under pressure — would that be worth twenty minutes to explore? Start with the Leadership Team Performance Assessment Whether or not this week is right for that, help another leader catch their own blind spot before it costs them a good person: repost this with the diagnosis you almost got wrong, tag the cabinet member who needs the three-conversation filter, or drop your own story in the comments — someone else's hardest conversation this week gets easier because you did. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights.