May 9, 2026

Read Time - 4 minutes

📅 Before we dive in: I'm hosting a free live session this Tuesday, May 12 at 12pm CST: Campus Culture That Makes Feedback, Conflict, and Change Easier. Followed by live Q&A. Register here: luma.com/875gom0h

"Gettin' good players is easy. Gettin' 'em to play together is the hard part." 

~ Casey Stengel, Hall of Fame manager who led the New York Yankees to seven World Series championships.

A close colleague of mine thought she'd hit the jackpot when she stepped into her new director role. $1.5 million operating budget. Updated facilities. Strong programming. On paper, she'd inherited a healthy, functioning department.

What she actually inherited took a few weeks to see clearly.

Faculty were doing strong individual work — the kind that gets published, funded, and recognized. But strong individual performance wasn't translating into collective momentum. Committee work was seen as a hindrance, curriculum hadn't been updated in years, resources were tied down with legacy projects, and decisions that should have been simple kept circling back. The department had high achievers who had never learned to row in the same direction.

The budget told the whole story.

No workshops. No team retreats. No investment in how decisions got made or developing shared goals. Staff development wasn't even a line item.

The department hadn't been neglectful. It had simply never asked the most important question: are we investing in how our people work together? The answer, buried in that budget, was no. It had never come up.

Leadership Takeaway

Most of us have felt it — the meetings that go in circles, the decisions that get relitigated three times, the initiatives that stall because nobody's working from the same playbook. Simple work becomes harder than it should be.

And yet most institutions keep funding the same things year after year — because some investments are easy to defend and others aren't.

A new software platform has a price tag and a go-live date. A renovated classroom shows up in the alumni magazine. Capital investments arrive with line items, timelines, and someone's name on the ribbon. They're easy to justify because they're easy to see.

The work of building a team that actually functions together doesn't come with any of that. It happens slowly, in rooms that don't get photographed, producing outcomes that don't show up until something stops breaking. So that funding gets deferred — one budget cycle at a time — until the number is so small nobody questions it anymore.

And when it goes unfunded, the questions that should anchor every team go unasked.

• What are we actually trying to achieve together?

• How do we make decisions when we disagree?

• How will we know if we're moving in the right direction?

• How do we define success?

Those questions don't answer themselves — and in most departments, nobody's ever formally asked them.

McKinsey's Organizational Health Index — built on data from more than 2,600 organizations worldwide — found that healthy organizations are three times more likely to outperform their peers. Not marginally better. Three times.

My colleague's department wasn't poorly led.

It was under-invested in. Those are not the same thing.

Practical Guidance

The Leadership Takeaway names the pattern. Here's what to do with it.

You're already paying for the dysfunction

The cost of an underdeveloped team doesn't show up in a budget report. It shows up in your calendar — in the meetings that should have been an email, the one-on-ones that turn into conflict mediation, the decisions that land on your desk because nobody below you feels empowered to make them, and the hours you spend managing friction that should never have reached you.

You're already paying for this. It just doesn't have a line item. It's wasted hours, duplicated effort, and the slow erosion of trust between your office and the areas you're trying to lead.

The question isn't whether you can afford to invest in this. It's whether you can afford to keep absorbing the cost of not doing it. Name that cost — specifically, in your own calendar — before your next budget conversation. It changes what feels defensible.

Invest in the collective, not just the individual

Most units allocate something for professional development. Travel funds, conference registrations, the occasional workshop. That matters — and it's a start.

But the development that actually shifts how a unit operates works at a different level entirely. It builds shared language so your team describes the same standards and expectations to the people they lead. It creates common frameworks for how decisions get made and how disagreement gets surfaced productively rather than avoided or escalated. It builds the practiced coordination that makes collaboration feel effortless instead of exhausting.

That kind of development doesn't happen in a single event. It happens over time, with the whole team, in ways that change how the work gets done — not just how individuals feel about it. The result isn't a more informed staff. It's a more functional unit.

The question to bring into your next budget conversation: are we investing in how our people work together, or just in what they know individually? Those are different investments. Only one changes how the unit operates.

Your vision only travels as far as your people's capacity to carry it

You can articulate the clearest strategic direction in your unit and still watch it land differently with every person responsible for carrying it forward. They respect the vision. They just don't have the tools to translate it into coordinated action as a team.

When people haven't been developed to work together, they default to their own instincts. They set different standards. They handle conflict differently. They make decisions that feel individually reasonable but create friction and inconsistency everywhere else.

From where you sit it can look like resistance. It rarely is. What looks like pushback is usually a team working without the shared language, frameworks, and agreements that make coordinated action possible. Give them those tools — together — and the resistance tends to disappear.

The Bottom Line

My colleague eventually turned her department around. Not by upgrading anything. She did it by investing in the one thing the budget had never touched: how her people worked together.

That's the actual strategy. Not the plan, not the new initiative, not the restructured org chart. Those are all decoration if the people executing them haven't been developed to operate as a unit.

Your vision is only as strong as the team carrying it.

Invest there — deliberately, over time — and everything else gets lighter.

Try This Before Friday

Set aside ten minutes this week for an honest audit of your unit. Two questions:

1. Picture your team at its best — everyone rowing in the same direction, decisions made cleanly, the work actually moving. How often does that version show up?

2. Think about the last time something simple took longer than it should have. What was actually in the way?

   
   

None of this builds itself. Great teams are always someone's decision.

See you next Saturday.

If this issue of the newsletter resonated, I'd love to see you Tuesday. 📅 Campus Culture That Makes Feedback, Conflict, and Change Easier — on May 12 at 12pm CST. We'll cover how culture actually forms, why disagreement goes underground in academic units, and how to fill the expectation gaps before culture fills them on its own terms. Live Q&A afterward.

Register free: luma.com/875gom0h

The Playbook gets you thinking. Here's what gets you moving:​

💡  Coaching Built for Campus Leadership

A team that operates more independently. Decisions that move faster. A management bench that's ready. A clear picture of what comes next in your career and a plan to get there.

I work with chairs, deans, and senior leaders as a thinking partner on the leadership that compounds over time, building the people, the systems, and the strategy that move the institution forward. A few spots open each quarter. Learn more.

🏛️ Institutional and Team Development

The strategic plan is only as strong as the leaders executing it, chairs, directors, deans, and the senior staff doing the work across every unit on campus. I work with leaders who want to build capacity, developing the teams, the shared language, and the infrastructure that transfers across people and holds through transitions. Learn more.