Editorial articles surfaced in the My Path experience.
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.
None of them are dramatic. That’s the point. 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 […]
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.
Frame your concern around the leader’s stated goals, not your own. 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 […]
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.
There’s a version of kindness that protects people from discomfort in the short term yet leaves them worse off in the long run.
Softened feedback is one of its most common forms in leadership.
You said yes to the committee request you didn’t have the bandwidth for. You softened the feedback until it lost its point. You let the decision sit another week because raising it felt risky.
None of this felt like a leadership failure in the moment. It felt like being considerate. Keeping things smooth. Preserving a relationship that matters.
