Read Time:
Leadership Insights
June is a rare window.
The academic year has wound down. The next one hasn’t started pulling at you yet. It’s the one stretch where most higher education leaders have some version of breathing room, and the temptation is to fill it immediately with planning for fall.
Before you do, we want to offer a different first move: Figure out what you’re not taking with you.
Change leadership is usually framed as an additive act. New initiatives. New priorities. New ways of working. But some of the most effective change happens through intentional subtraction—of things like the processes that drained your team’s capacity without a clear return. Or the recurring meetings that became ritual rather than productive. The informal habits that made sense two years ago but don’t anymore.
You likely already know what those things are. Most leaders do. The challenge isn’t identifying them; it’s building the discipline to actually let them go, rather than defaulting to inertia.
The Keep-Toss-Change framework is a simple way to make that decision concrete. Take 10 minutes this week and draw three columns:
- Keep: What genuinely worked this year? What had clear impact, built trust, or made your team stronger?
- Toss: What caused friction without a clear payoff? What would your team quietly thank you for eliminating?
- Change: What worked but needs a meaningful refresh before it stays on the calendar?
The goal isn’t to audit everything at once. Pick one item from each column and decide what happens to it before July. That’s it—small, specific, actionable.
This kind of intentional subtraction is particularly relevant right now because the beginning of a new academic year is when inertia is at its strongest. Decisions made in June become default by October.
A note on the “Toss” column: This is harder than it looks. Higher ed cultures tend to reward addition over elimination. There’s often implicit pressure to keep something alive simply because it took effort to build. That pressure is worth naming with your team. When you can articulate why something is being retired, rather than just letting it fade, you model the kind of transparent decision-making that builds institutional trust.
Pause & Reflect
Think back over the last academic year. Identify one recurring meeting, process, or practice that nobody on your team would miss if it disappeared. What’s kept it alive? And what would you need to say or do to let it go?
Pro Tip: Open Sophia in your Academic Impressions account and enter this prompt: “I’m trying to decide whether to retire a recurring practice on my team. Help me think through what I should consider before making that call.” She can help you to stress-test your reasoning before you socialize the change.
Learn more about leading change in Lessons from the Work, a recent paper by Amit Mrig.