Slow Down Before You Speed Up

Treating what you knew about your team last year as still current, without checking, is where leaders lose the thread early in the year.

A new academic year has a pull to it. You want to set priorities, communicate direction, and signal that you’re ready and energized. Calendars fill up fast in the first two weeks: kickoff meetings, welcome-backs, planning sessions. There’s real pressure to arrive with something to say.

That instinct isn’t wrong. But the leaders who navigate the year most effectively tend to resist it, at least for a while. They spend the first stretch doing something less visible—looking hard at the team actually in front of them, not the team they remember from June or the one they’re hoping to build by October.

Here’s why that matters more than it sounds like it should: The team you’re leading in August is not the team you left in May. Because someone took on a caregiving responsibility over the summer that’s changed what they have capacity for. A colleague who seemed checked-out last spring spent the break doing real thinking and came back with more energy than you’d expect. Another person who always seemed rock-solid is, this year, quietly stretched thin in a way they haven’t said out loud yet. And none of that shows up in an org chart. Most of it won’t come up in a first team meeting, either. It shows up in a hallway comment, in a slightly different tone in a Teams message, or in a “How was your summer?” that gets answered too briefly.

The Trap of Familiarity

If you’re returning to a team you’ve led before, your risk isn’t inattention—it’s overconfidence. You already know who’s reliable under pressure, who needs more structure to do their best work, who thrives when given room, and who spirals without it. That knowledge was earned, and it was true—once.

The trap lies in treating that previous knowledge as still true without checking. A department chair who assumes that their most dependable faculty member is still fully available—because she always has been—may miss that she’s now caring for a parent and quietly drowning. A Dean who assumes that a program director is still resistant to change—because he was two years ago—may miss that a difficult year taught that same director to welcome it.