Editorial articles surfaced in the My Path experience.
It’s worth being direct about what shifting out of an enabling pattern is not.
It isn’t withdrawing care. It isn’t pivoting to a hardline approach because you’ve decided you were too soft before. It isn’t treating the previous months of support as a mistake to be corrected.
When a leader enables an underperformer, the mental model is usually bilateral: There’s the leader, and then there’s the struggling employee. The dynamic feels private. Delicate. Something to be handled carefully, between the two of you.
But there’s a third party that’s been watching the whole time: your team.
Think about someone on your team that you’ve been supporting through a performance challenge. You’ve extended a deadline when the work wasn’t ready. You’ve softened the feedback so that it would land better. You’ve coached them through the same issue more than once, privately, because naming it directly felt like it would damage something between you.
None of that feels like avoidance. It feels like care.
If Monday named the experience and Wednesday helped you to locate it, today is about what to do next. The good news: recalibration isn’t reinvention. You’re not starting over. You’re closing a gap that opened gradually, which means that it can close gradually too. You don’t need a sabbatical, a new role, or a clean slate. You need a few honest moves in the right direction. Start with acknowledgment, not action. The instinct when you recognize drift is to immediately fix it—to restructure your calendar, recommit to your values, and announce a new leadership direction to your team. That instinct is understandable… and it’s usually premature. Drift that built over months doesn’t resolve in a week. What it requires first is honest acknowledgment—to yourself, and possibly to a trusted peer or coach—that the gap exists. Naming it clearly is not a small thing. Return to your original signal. Most leaders have some articulation of their leadership philosophy, even if it’s informal: a values list from a retreat, notes from a Five Paths to Leadership® debrief, a purpose statement they drafted during a professional development program. Find it. Read it honestly against the last 90 days—not to punish yourself, but […]
The challenge with slow drift is that by the time you notice it, you’ve been rationalizing it for a while. The signals aren’t loud, and they’re easy to explain away. But they’re consistent and worth paying attention to. Here are four signal clusters to look for honestly. Decisional signals. You’re saying yes to things you would have questioned a year ago. Your internal reasoning has shifted from “Does this align with my values?” to “This is just how it works here.” You find yourself making the pragmatic call more often and feeling vaguely unsatisfied afterward. The decisions aren’t wrong, exactly. But they’re not quite you. Relational signals. There are conversations you keep not having. A colleague you’ve stopped being fully honest with. Feedback you’ve stopped seeking because you’re not sure you want to hear it. Your interactions are professionally functional but not particularly real. You’re present in meetings but not quite connected. Energetic signals. The work that used to genuinely engage you now just gets done. You’re competent. You’re reliable. But you’re not bringing the same presence you once did. Tasks that used to feel purposeful now just feel like tasks. You’ve learned to perform engagement without fully experiencing […]
You haven’t had a crisis. Your team is functioning. The work is getting done. And yet something feels slightly off. Not wrong enough to flag. Not urgent enough to address. Just a low-level hum of, “This isn’t quite who I intended to be as a leader.” That feeling has a name: leadership drift. And it’s not the same thing as burnout. Burnout is an empty tank—when you know you’re running on fumes. But drift is something subtler. Your tank may be fine, but you’ve been driving in the wrong direction for long enough that you’re not sure how you got here. Why drift is hard to spot Burnout tends to announce itself. Drift tends to justify itself. Each small shift comes with a reasonable explanation: The budget is tight, the semester is full, and the situation required flexibility. No single decision feels like a betrayal. The accumulation is what creates the gap. Especially in higher education, the conditions for drift are structural. Academic calendars create a constant “We’ll revisit this after” rhythm. The culture rewards self-sacrifice and adaptability. And the demands on leaders are diffuse enough that it’s genuinely hard to tell the difference between “I’m adapting appropriately” and […]
Most pushback fails not because it’s wrong, but because of how it’s positioned. When you raise a concern framed around your discomfort, your team’s workload, or your personal read on the situation, the senior leader receives it as a preference—maybe even as resistance. That’s not what you intended. But that’s what they heard. The leaders who are consistently effective at disagreeing upward have learned one move that changes the dynamic almost completely: they frame their concern around the leader’s stated goals, not their own. One tactic: Anchor your pushback to what they already care about. Before you bring a concern forward, ask yourself: “What does this person actually want to achieve? What have they said matters most to them, to this initiative, or to the institution?” Now ask: “How does my concern connect to that?” This is not spin, it’s translation. You’re taking a real concern and surfacing the part of it that’s most legible to the person who needs to hear it. Here’s what that looks like in practice. Instead of: “This rollout timeline is going to burn out my team,” try: “I want to make sure we hit the outcomes you laid out for this. I’m seeing some risks in the current timeline that could undermine that. Can I walk you through them?” The content is the same. But the frame is completely different. One sounds like a complaint. The other sounds like someone […]
You’re sitting in a meeting, and something is said that you disagree with. Your brain runs the options: speak up now, or let it go. Most leaders pick “let it go” far more often than they should—not because the concern isn’t real, but because speaking in the room feels riskier than it probably is.
The problem is that “let it go” and “bring it up later privately” are not the same thing. The first is silence. The second is strategy.
Most higher ed leaders have experienced this moment: You’re in a meeting with your Dean, your VP, or your Provost. A decision is being shaped. You see a problem with it—a gap in the data, a consequence that’s being overlooked, a premise that doesn’t hold. And you say nothing.
Some teams feel smooth on the surface and strained underneath.
Meetings run without visible tension. Decisions get made without pushback. Everyone seems to be getting along. But the real conversations happen in the hallway, not in the room. The hard things don’t get said. And over time, the team stops bringing problems to the leader because they’ve learned, quietly, that the leader will find a way to smooth them over rather than to solve them.
