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Most leaders plan additions. The best ones plan subtractions.
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.
Change leadership is usually framed as an additive act. New initiatives. New priorities. New ways of working. But some of the most effective change happens through intentional subtraction—of things like the processes that drained your team’s capacity without a clear return. Or the recurring meetings that became ritual rather than productive. The informal habits that made sense two years ago but don’t anymore.
You likely already know what those things are. Most leaders do. The challenge isn’t identifying them; it’s building the discipline to actually let them go, rather than defaulting to inertia.
The Keep-Toss-Change framework is a simple way to make that decision concrete. Take 10 minutes this week and draw three columns:
- Keep: What genuinely worked this year? What had clear impact, built trust, or made your team stronger?
- Toss: What caused friction without a clear payoff? What would your team quietly thank you for eliminating?
- Change: What worked but needs a meaningful refresh before it stays on the calendar?
The goal isn’t to audit everything at once. Pick one item from each column and decide what happens to it before July. That’s it—small, specific, actionable.
This kind of intentional subtraction is particularly relevant right now because the beginning of a new academic year is when inertia is at its strongest. Decisions made in June become default by October.
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