Archives: Leadership Insights

You know the feeling—the restlessness that hits when you have an open window in your day and your instinct is to fill it. The feeling that keeps you checking email at 10 p.m., pulling up a task list when you should be thinking, or jumping into a project before you’ve asked whether it’s the right project. 

Here’s why some team work requires stepping away from the calendar. Most leadership teams are busy. Calendars fill quickly—with standing meetings, project updates, and urgent decisions that can’t wait. The work feels productive, and the agenda gets through its bullet points. And yet—important agenda items have the nasty habit of getting postponed. Items like: The strategic question that deserves deeper thought. The tension between two units that no one has quite addressed. The workflow challenge that everyone knows exists but they haven’t had time to unpack. These conversations require more than ten minutes at the end of a meeting. They require time, reflection, and space to think together. But that space rarely appears in the normal rhythm of the week. Why Retreats Matter This is where retreats can be powerful for leadership teams. A retreat isn’t simply time away from the office. It’s time intentionally set aside for the work that doesn’t fit into ordinary meetings. When teams step away from daily pressures—even briefly—they create conditions where deeper conversations can happen: Strategic questions receive sustained attention. Lingering challenges can finally be surfaced. Team members have the time to listen, reflect, and problem-solve together. Many teams discover that issues lingering for […]

Learn to distinguish between staying busy and making real progress—and why that distinction is the foundation of intentional leadership. You probably said this last week: “I’m slammed.” And you meant it. After all, your calendar is full, and your inbox keeps moving. You’re responding, attending, deciding, and reviewing. You are, by any observable measure, extremely busy. But here’s a question worth sitting with: What did you actually accomplish? Not what you completed. What have you done that has moved a goal forward, shifted a situation, or created a real outcome? If you’re pausing on that question, you’re not alone. Many leaders work at full capacity yet still struggle to name two or three things at the end of the week that are genuinely different because of their effort. That gap—between motion and direction—is the Activity Trap. And it’s sneaky because it feels like productivity. You’re not scrolling social media. You’re doing real work. But a lot of that work may be legacy requirements (things you’ve always done), reactive responses (things others sent your way), or low-stakes tasks that provide the satisfying sensation of progress without the substance of it. Shifting the Work from “Busyness” to Progress Questioning your busyness is […]

In-the-moment practices to help you reset. This week, we’ve covered both daily and weekly reflective practices to help you become a more effective leader. But you also need some in-the-moment practices for times when things get tense or unexpected. They’re the tools you can deploy instantly when a difficult conversation erupts, a crisis hits, or you feel yourself slipping into reactive patterns. Here’s why having several ready-to-use practices matters: Immediate stress response management: Depending on how your Five Paths to Leadership® profile changes under stress, you may find that people see you show up differently then. In-the-moment practices—like a three-breath reset or a brief pause to ask “What does this person need right now?”—can redirect that energy productively. Context flexibility: Different situations call for different tools. A heated team meeting might need a grounding technique, while a one-on-one conflict might require an empathy practice. Having multiple options means that you can match the tool to the moment rather than forcing one approach everywhere. Cognitive load reduction: When stress hits, your decision-making capacity shrinks. Having practiced, automatic responses means you don’t have to think through what to do—you just deploy a familiar tool. Building new neural pathways: Each time you use […]

Why being conflict avoidant is hurting your team. To close out the week, the final theme we’ve seen emerge about how people are using Sophia (our AI leadership coach) is around having difficult conversations. So many of us are trained to meet students’ needs, teach, research, organize, event plan, and so on. But few of us are actually trained to have the difficult conversations needed to be a leader. As a reminder, if you haven’t used Sophia yet, here are some resources to check out: 50 Conversations to Have with Sophia What’s New, What’s Next: Your Membership Unlocked — Register for free to join us on May 18. In the unique ecosystem of higher education, many of us pride ourselves on collegiality and consensus. However, this often leads to a common leadership trap: conflict avoidance. We delay giving feedback or addressing performance issues because we don’t want to “be mean” or disrupt the unit’s harmony. The reality is that avoiding these talks creates a persistent sense of frustration at work for everyone involved—a key component of burnout. When expectations aren’t clear, team morale suffers. Addressing issues directly isn’t just a management task, it’s an act of leadership that provides the […]

Weekly rhythms build consistency, clarity, and impact. In Monday’s Leadership Insights, we focused on how reflective practice serves to build your leadership effectiveness. We offered some suggestions on how to build in daily reflection time—a real challenge for higher ed leaders! Today, we’ll share about how to take a step back and focus more at the weekly level. There’s actually a strategic difference between daily and weekly habit rhythms that can make or break your consistency as a leader. Weekly habits capture the bigger picture: While daily habits focus on immediate actions (like a morning routine or end-of-day reflection), weekly habits allow you to step back and assess patterns, relationships, and strategic alignment. They’re perfect for things like reviewing team dynamics, evaluating progress on longer-term goals, or planning ahead for upcoming challenges. Weekly rhythms match leadership cycles: Much of leadership work operates on weekly cycles—like team meetings, project check-ins, or planning sessions. Weekly habits can anchor to these existing rhythms rather than fighting against your natural workflow. Sustainability through flexibility: Daily habits can feel rigid and create guilt when missed. Weekly habits offer more flexibility—you can do your weekly reflection on Sunday morning, Wednesday evening, or Friday afternoon depending on […]

From reflection to action. Today, we’re going to focus on how you can apply what you’ve learned about yourself and your leadership this week. We invite you to get out your notes on what worked well this year from Monday’s newsletter prompt and what didn’t work well this year (from Wednesday’s newsletter) before you continue reading. Applying what you’ve learned is where reflection transforms from intellectual exercise into actual leadership growth. Without application, even the most insightful self-awareness remains theoretical. Here’s why the application step is crucial: It builds neural pathways for new behaviors. Knowledge alone doesn’t change how you lead under pressure. You need to practice new approaches in real situations to make them instinctive. Each time you consciously apply a lesson, you’re rewiring your default responses. It tests the validity of your insights. Sometimes what we think we’ve learned doesn’t hold up in practice. Application reveals which insights are truly useful and which need refinement. This creates a feedback loop that deepens your self-awareness. It creates compound growth over time. Small, consistent applications of lessons learned accumulate into significant leadership development. A leader who applies one insight per month will be dramatically different after a year than one […]

How the Sage path helps you choose the right leadership response. When we cover the Sage path in the Five Paths to Leadership® debrief, we talk about how the Sage is a practice that requires reflective time built in. A leader working from the Sage is thinking about how they naturally lead, what people need from them in each moment, and how they can best learn and grow as a leader. They can then decide what’s the most effective path to lean into to lead. But to use the Sage path, you have to have time to reflect on how you’ve led in the past—on what worked, and what didn’t. In this week’s Leadership Insights, we’ll cover the need for building reflective practices into your workdays, and we’ll suggest some ways you can accomplish that. Learn more about how the Sage path works. Join us at Five Paths and the Sage on April 22 online. This event is free to members! Why Build in Reflection Reflection time serves as your leadership compass, especially during periods of stress and change. When we’re constantly in motion—responding to crises, managing competing priorities, attending back-to-back meetings—we can lose sight of our most effective leadership […]

It’s time to reflect on the challenges. You took some time on Monday to reflect on what went well for you this year. Before you start reading today’s issue of Leadership Insights, pull up your notes! Today we’re going to focus on your low points of the year. Reflecting on what didn’t go well serves a fundamentally different purpose than celebrating successes—it’s about learning and prevention rather than replication and momentum. This type of reflection helps you to: Identify gaps in leadership and patterns you might miss otherwise. When things go smoothly, we often don’t examine the process closely, but challenges force us to look deeper at what contributed to the outcome and what we might have overlooked. Build resilience and problem-solving capacity. By analyzing setbacks, you develop a more nuanced understanding of how to navigate similar situations in the future. You’re essentially building your professional toolkit for handling complexity. Separate controllable factors from external circumstances. Not everything that goes wrong is within your influence, but reflection helps you to distinguish between what you can learn from and what was simply context. This prevents both over-responsibility and learned helplessness. The key difference in this reflection is the mindset—you’re not dwelling […]

Here’s how to give feedback across the org chart. Giving feedback without formal authority isn’t just possible, it’s essential for a healthy institution. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all skill. The approach that works with a peer might fall flat with your department head. Now, you may find yourself asking: “Do I need to be able to give feedback to a wide array of people?” Yes! In higher education, work happens across complex networks of faculty, staff, committees, and project teams. Feedback moves through these relationships differently. To be effective, you must adapt your approach to meet people where they are and connect with what they value. Remember, the ultimate goal of feedback isn’t correction, it’s collaborative improvement. Influencing the Academy Up, Down, and Across the Aisle Following below are lenses to consider when offering feedback to the people you report to, your peers, or junior colleagues. Going Up: Leading with Curiosity and Data When offering feedback to a leader or superior, your position requires a delicate touch. The key is to shift from giving “feedback” to providing “insight.” This is why you should lead with genuine curiosity and ground your observations in objective data. Instead of: “I think we should […]