June 20, 2026

Read Time - 4.5 minutes

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." ~ Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Many years ago, we changed how our school made scholarship decisions.

For years it had worked the same way: individual faculty were allocated their own pots of funding and used it to recruit the students they wanted into their programs. A talented student landed on a faculty member's radar, scholarship offers were made, and the decision lived almost entirely with that single faculty member.

It had real advantages. Faculty were the first point of contact for prospective students and their families, and they could make a scholarship offer on the spot, from someone the student already trusted.

It also carried costs. It put faculty in an awkward role, as financial negotiator instead of mentor. It led some of them to pour big scholarship dollars into dazzling students who had us third or fourth on their list, which left us holding a pile of unspent aid after May 1. And it made it nearly impossible to put our collective resources behind a single enrollment strategy. Everyone worked their own way, and the larger vision got no say.

It was a great example of a poor approach that had a lot of support, because everyone held their own piece of control.

So, we moved all of it into one representative committee, driven by a school-wide enrollment plan built with faculty input. The committee made awards based on the school's overall needs, and it weighed students more holistically based on several factors that optimized our scholarship funding.

The results were hard to argue with. We brought in record incoming classes two years in a row and we set an overall enrollment record. Any enrollment professional will tell you there's no silver bullet, and there wasn't one here either. Plenty went into it, including the recruiting our faculty did individually. But the scholarship change was the single biggest move we made, and it made us genuinely more competitive for the students we wanted.

Sounds like a clean win, right?

It wasn't, at least not at first.

It was deeply unpopular the first day it was raised in a meeting. Think about what we were actually doing. We were taking something individuals controlled and handing it to a group. It took almost two full years for the results to show up clearly enough to settle the argument. And in those two years, the people who disagreed had a standing invitation to take their shots.

The Two Clocks

Big decisions run on two clocks at once, and the clocks keep very different time.

Criticism runs on the fast clock. It shows up the day you announce change. Results run on the slow clock. They take a semester, a year, sometimes two before the data is solid enough to show proof of concept.

So we spend the gap between the two clocks holding a decision that looks, to everyone watching, like it might be a mistake. The objections have arrived. The proof hasn't.

We tell new leaders to "make the tough call" as if the call is the hard part. The call is the easy part. Living in the lag is the hard part.

Why Reversing Course Feels Like Relief

It helps to understand why the fast clock has such a grip on us, because the pull to give in to it how most of us are wired.

We're built to weight bad more heavily than good. After reviewing hundreds of studies, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues landed on a title that says it all: "Bad Is Stronger Than Good." Negative feedback hits with roughly two and a half times the force of equivalent praise. So the people quietly benefiting from the new system never balance the scale against the one who corners us after the meeting. One sharp critic outweighs a room full of quiet wins, and will, unless we catch it happening.

It runs deeper than irritation. Naomi Eisenberger's research found that the brain processes social rejection through some of the same circuitry as physical pain. Disapproval doesn't just bother us. On some level it registers as a threat. We're wired to want the group's approval, because for most of human history losing it was genuinely dangerous. So when a colleague we respect thinks we blew it, the quickest way to make the discomfort stop is to give them what they want.

That's the real trap. Reversing course pays off immediately, because the noise stops today. Holding the line pays off maybe, eventually, in numbers nobody is looking at yet. And folding rarely feels like folding. It feels like listening. Like humility. Like responsive leadership (and sometimes it honestly is). But just as often we're buying quiet and calling it open-mindedness. The tell is relief. If walking back a decision floods you with relief more than conviction, that relief is information about your own discomfort, not about whether the decision was right.

How to Hold the Line Without Going Deaf

The discipline here isn't ignoring criticism. It's managing feedback and giving slow results room to finish. Here are a few things that help:

Name the slow clock before you start. Before you make the change, decide what metric will actually tell you whether it worked, and when you should expect to see it. We knew enrollment and incoming class quality were the real scoreboard, and we knew those wouldn't turn for a couple of cycles. Write that down in advance. If you don't define the measure and the timeline yourself, the loudest voice in the building will define them for you, and they'll pick "right now."

Sort the feedback by what it's really about. Most early pushback on a good change isn't about the merits of the decision. It's about loss. When we centralized the money, the discomfort wasn't really a claim that students would suffer. It was that people who'd held something were losing it, and loss feels bigger than gain every time. Both kinds of feedback deserve a response, but different ones. Feedback aimed at your actual goal, you act on. Feedback that's really about the discomfort of change, you acknowledge with respect, and then you hold steady.

Expect the dip, and say it out loud first. Michael Fullan calls the early slump after any real change the implementation dip, the predictable drop in performance and confidence that comes while people are still learning the new way. That dip looks exactly like failure to anyone hoping you were wrong. When you name it ahead of time, a rough first semester reads as the expected cost of the change instead of evidence against it.

Refuse to relitigate every Monday. A vocal critic wants a fresh referendum every week, because every week the slow clock still hasn't delivered. Set a real review date and protect it. "We'll evaluate this honestly in the spring" is both a fair commitment and a complete answer to "is it working yet?" It gives the change room to breathe and gives you somewhere to stand.

The Bottom Line

We like to imagine that leadership courage lives in the big moment, the announcement, the tough call in the room. It mostly doesn't. It lives in the long, unglamorous stretch afterward, when the criticism is loud and the proof is still months away and reversing course would make the noise stop today.

A good decision held through that stretch eventually becomes an obviously good decision. Leaders have to be able to tell the difference between a decision that is failing and a decision that simply needs more time.

Try This Before Friday

Pick a decision you've been quietly thinking about reversing. Before you do, ask one honest question: would walking it back feel like relief, or like conviction? If it's relief, that's about your own discomfort, not about whether the decision was right. So don't move on the feeling. Decide what would actually tell you whether it's working, and when you'll know, then tell your team that's when you'll take a real look at it.

Thanks for reading. I hope this issue serves you well.

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