Editorial articles surfaced in the My Path experience.
You’ve been in this meeting. The agenda item that seemed routine turned into something else. Where someone raised their voice—or didn’t raise their voice but said something that landed like a slap. Where the temperature in the room shifted, and now everyone was looking at you.
What you do in the next sixty seconds matters more than the last thirty minutes of structured discussion.
The performance conversation model from Monday works reasonably well when you have positional authority over the person you need to address. But it gets more complicated when you don’t. When the friction takes place with a peer who controls resources you need, or with a supervisor whose direction you think is wrong, or with a faculty colleague whose buy-in you can’t mandate, the same directness that works downward can feel like overreach.
It isn’t. But it does require a different approach.
Most leaders in higher education don’t avoid hard conversations because they lack courage. They avoid them because they lack a script. When you don’t know how the conversation will start, where it needs to go, or how you’ll handle the moment it goes sideways, delay feels like wisdom. It isn’t.
Here’s a pattern we see regularly at Academic Impressions: higher education leaders who manage the academic year with extraordinary drive and discipline, who then spend June doing the same thing, just with different tasks. The calendar clears, but the pace doesn’t.
We understand the pull. Planning feels responsible, while rest feels indulgent. And in a sector that has been navigating sustained institutional pressure, compressing your recovery window might even feel like the right call.
Most leaders begin fall planning by asking some version of the question: What are we trying to accomplish?
It’s the right question. But there’s a second question that most planning conversations skip entirely: Why might this fail?
The Pre-Mortem is a change management tool built around that second question. Rather than evaluating risks abstractly, it asks you to project forward in time: Imagine it’s June of next year, and the initiative you’re planning right now didn’t work. What happened?
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.
If there’s one idea worth carrying out of the study of collaborative leadership, make it this:
Collaboration is not something that happens to a group. It’s something a leader builds for a group.
Effective collaboration requires you to engineer the experience—to design the environment so that participants understand when and how to contribute, and so that the work can move forward even when things get tense or messy. That involves a lot of moving pieces: process flows, communication channels, and meeting design. It can feel like a lot to take on all at once.
Most of us default to building or relying on teams where we know people will get along. It’s comfortable. It’s manageable. But “manageable” and “high-performing” aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them often comes down to one thing: perspective diversity.
At the start of a new year, it’s tempting to imagine a completely new version of ourselves: a leader who is calmer, clearer, more strategic, more measured. But leadership never changes through sweeping reinvention. It shifts through intention, by choosing a direction and taking one grounded step at a time. The year ahead isn’t asking you to become someone else—It’s inviting you to become a more deliberate version of who you already are.
Practice Every January brings the same quiet pressure: This year will be different. Leaders from all levels set ambitious resolutions—rewriting processes, rebuilding teams, reclaiming time, recommitting to their own growth. But by February, the urgency fades. Not because people aren’t committed, but because resolutions rely on willpower, not infrastructure. Sweeping changes fueled solely on willpower rarely stick. What does stick are micro-habits—small, repeatable practices that compound over time. The leaders who thrive aren’t the ones who overhaul everything on January 1; they’re the ones who build systems that make the right behaviors easier every day. Sustainable leadership growth comes from: So, where do you begin? Start smaller than you think you should. If a habit feels almost embarrassingly easy, you’re on the right track. Instead of “I will be more reflective,” try writing one sentence at the end of the day about what worked. Over time, that simple practice helps you to notice patterns, track progress, and make more intentional adjustments as your leadership evolves. Small commitments are the ones leaders keep—and the ones that last. Tip: Resources like Sophia, the AI leadership coach in the My Path section of your Academic Impressions account, can help you to get started with new habits. We’ll include usage tips throughout this week’s newsletters. Reflection: Naming What’s No Longer Yours to Carry Earlier this week, we explored why sustainable leadership growth doesn’t come from sweeping change, but from small habits designed to hold up under real pressure. […]
