About Me

I'm Dr. Joe, and I specialize in helping district and campus leaders transform their brilliant individual leaders into breakthrough leadership teams powered by Team Intelligence.

I spent three decades in K-12 and higher education watching the same frustrating pattern: Individual brilliance somehow becoming the team's ceiling instead of its breakthrough. Smart people. Average team results. Sound familiar?

In 2018, everything changed when I discovered what I call the "Individual Brilliance Ceiling"—the counterintuitive reality that your smartest leaders can actually become your team's biggest performance barrier. Here's the breakthrough: individual IQ doesn't automatically create collective intelligence.

But it wasn't always like this...

Growing up in a dysfunctional home of alcoholism and divorce, caring for a sibling with Down Syndrome, quitting was never an option. As a first-generation college student, that relentless drive carried me to success as a two-sport college athlete and through my post-graduate degree. It propelled me into a nearly three-decade career as a high-impact campus and district leader, advancing through the ranks with sheer determination and individual excellence.

Then, at 45, an unexpected curveball—a significant life event (SLE)—forced me to re-evaluate what was most important in life and work. This moment forged my lifework based on a relentless purpose: to see our broken systems of education change, not through the power of the super leader, but through the practices of building higher-performance teams.

Here's what I discovered: Great leaders don't scale. Great leadership teams do. The secret isn't individual grit—it's teams that think and work together intelligently.

Now I help campus leaders solve the gap between individual talent and team performance through TQ | Team Intelligence—the measurable capacity of a team to think, learn, and adapt together at a level greater than the sum of individual contributions.

The TQ Framework

The work centers on the integration of three foundational capabilities:

PQ - Perceptual Intelligence: Collective ability to perceive and respond to internal and external dynamics accurately

IQ - Intellectual Intelligence: Educational expertise and problem-solving capabilities

EQ - Emotional Intelligence: Capacity for productive relationships and psychological safety

At the intersection of PQ, IQ, and EQ is where breakthrough progress is found. Research across nearly 1,000 leadership teams proves that teams developing TQ outperform similar talent by 2:1 on key performance indicators.

My Mission

My drive in life and leadership is to #CancelAllThingsAverage. Why? Because everyone deserves to live in a community served by healthy teams and highly reliable systems. When leadership teams operate at only 60% of their potential capacity (as research shows most do), students and communities pay the price.

My life mission remains: Live by Faith, be Known by Love, and be the Voice of Hope.

The bottom line: Your system deserves more than talented individuals—it deserves a truly intelligent team that transforms individual brilliance into collective breakthroughs.

When I'm not helping leadership teams break through their performance ceilings, you'll find me writing at the cabin, running the trails, kayaking the lakes, and learning the ropes of grandparenthood with my wife, Ms. Becky, in the Twin Cities.

That's the work. That's why I'm here.

Ready to transform your leadership team?