May 30, 2026

Read Time - 4 minutes

"You can't calm the storm. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass." ~ Timber Hawkeye

I remember the first annual evaluation I received as a department chair. Out of a department of fifty faculty, only five people submitted feedback. Three of those submissions were, to put it generously, thorough in their criticism (they raked me over the coals). One looked like it may have been submitted by accident. And one — clearly the most discerning person in the building — seemed to genuinely understand the magnitude of what I was bringing to the role. (I say that with complete objectivity.) This was a role I was pouring my heart and soul into, thinking about night and day, one where I had seen some of our collective work start to bear real fruit. So I sat with that feedback longer than I'd like to admit. When I reviewed it with my dean, the conversation was actually helpful. They'd seen this before. They reminded me that this kind of response is, in their words, pretty normal. And based on my experience since then, they were right. It is normal. What I learned from that is this: normal is a description of frequency, not a feeling. The fact that nearly every academic leader I know has a version of this story doesn't make it easier to absorb. It doesn't mean you should be able to shake it off by Monday. Normalizing an experience is not the same as resolving it. If you're ending this academic year feeling a little defeated, a little unseen, a little less sure of yourself than you started — I wrote this issue for you. And if you're not feeling that way, forward it to someone who is. Because I've talked with dozens of leaders across many campuses over the past few months, and the sentiment is consistent: this was a hard year, grace is in short supply, and some of the most talented people I know are quietly questioning themselves right now.

The Leadership Takeaway

Academics love a good framework. Some best practices. A textbook formula that unlocks universal agreement. “Say these words, in this order, and everything will work out.” But here’s something you won't hear in a leadership development program: the majority of decisions you made this year probably didn't have a right answer.

They had a best available answer — given the information you had at the time, the resources you didn't have, the relationships you were trying to protect, and the constraints you were working inside that nobody else could fully see. That's the actual texture of leadership. Not clean frameworks from a book applied to obvious problems. It's choosing between two imperfect options on a Tuesday afternoon with no clear precedent and real consequences either way. Leadership is messy.

When we understand that, we can start to evaluate our decisions more honestly — not by whether they worked out perfectly, but by whether we made them with integrity, with the best information available, and for the right reasons.

And yet many leaders I know aren't doing that accounting. They're doing a different one — where mistakes get recorded in permanent ink and wins get written in pencil. Where the three harsh evaluation submissions get read six times and the one genuine compliment gets skimmed once. Where a year of hard, consequential work gets reduced to the two or three moments that didn't go as planned.

I want to make sure you hear this from someone: that is not an honest ledger of your year or your worth as a leader. And it's not a useful one either.

Finding Your Footing

Hard seasons produce doubt.

If you took heat this year that you didn't deserve, that doesn't make you less of a leader. The decision that looked obvious in hindsight wasn't obvious in the moment. The narrative that got away from you wasn't the whole story. The criticism that felt disproportionate probably was. You can learn from a hard year without letting it rewrite who you are — and too many good leaders are doing the latter right now. Every leader who's been in this long enough knows: hard seasons come. Good ones do too. And it’s not about avoiding the hard ones, but knowing how to move through them.

So here's how you stay grounded when the doubt gets loud.

Stop and take inventory of the invisible work. The budget anxiety absorbed on behalf of the team, the political pressure from above, the staff uncertainty you held quietly so others didn't have to. You didn't just manage your unit this year. You held onto it while the outside world shook it. Until you name that clearly, you can't put it down. And you can't assess your year fairly without seeing the full weight of what you were carrying while you led.

Return to your values, not your outcomes.  When external feedback dries up or goes sideways, outcomes become an unreliable measure of your worth as a leader. Your values aren't. Did you make your decisions with integrity? With the best information you had at the time? For the right reasons? That's the real question — not whether everything worked out perfectly. Or whether everyone agreed. A good process can produce a difficult outcome. That's not failure. That's leadership in conditions you don't fully control (which goes for all of us).

Know the difference between doubt that sharpens you and doubt that consumes you.  There are two very different sentences a leader can say to themselves after a hard year. The first is: I need to get better at X. The second is: I'm not cut out for this. One is correctable information. The other is identity collapse. Both can feel equally true at the end of a hard May. Your job is to stay in the first sentence long enough to figure out what you actually learned — and refuse to let exhaustion drag you into the second.

Find your people. Hard seasons are hard enough. Processing them alone makes them harder. Your self-perception is often as accurate as the voices you've been hearing — and if those voices have been mostly critical, your picture of yourself has drifted without you noticing. Lean on a mentor who's been through it, a peer who's living it alongside you, a coach who asks the questions you've stopped asking yourself. These aren't people who just make you feel better. They help you see what a loud year can make you forget.

Don't make permanent decisions in temporary storms.  The impulse to pull back, stop trying, or question whether any of this is worth it — those feelings are loudest right after the hardest stretches. They deserve to be heard. But they don't deserve to be acted on immediately. Rest if you need to rest. Step back if you need to step back. Just don't confuse exhaustion for clarity. They feel similar and they require very different responses.

The Bottom Line

One more thing…

The grace that should have been extended to you this year? Consider sending it in another direction — upward.

The leader above you who made a call you didn't fully agree with, who communicated something poorly, who seemed disconnected from what was actually happening on the ground — they're probably sitting in the same silence you are. Making decisions with incomplete information. Being evaluated by people who weren't in the room. Nobody telling them what they got right either.

This isn't a pass for poor leadership. Accountability matters. But the good guy/bad guy story that we sometimes love to tell — the clear villain, the obvious failure, the easy target — is almost always incomplete. The grace you're hoping someone will extend to you is the same grace you can send upward.

Lead with it in both directions: inward and upward. That's what the most mature leaders I know have learned to do.

It was a loud year. Your leadership gifts didn't disappear. And the fact that you're still here — still asking questions, still caring enough to read a newsletter on academic leadership on a Saturday morning — that says everything about the kind of leader you are.

If you know someone who's ending this year quietly questioning themselves, forward this to them. Sometimes the most important thing a leader needs is to know that someone sees what they're carrying.

Try This Before Friday

This week, set aside fifteen minutes to ask yourself a few questions. Not all of them will speak to you equally, and that's okay. This isn't a checklist. It's an invitation to identify and acknowledge the quiet work — the work that didn't make it into a report, didn't earn a standing ovation, and probably won't come up in your next performance review. I’d encourage you to write your answers down if you can.

• What decision did you make this year that you'd make again — even knowing how it turned out?

• Who on your team grew because you were paying attention?

• What held together this year because you were there?

• When did you do the right thing when the easier thing was available?

• What are you better at today as a leader than you were a year ago?

Most leaders can recite their failures from this year without hesitation. These questions are asking for the other half of the ledger.

Thanks for reading. Onward and upward.

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