Essays
Notes on leading under pressure, on ethnic matching and the research behind it, and on how these questions get measured.
You Trained Your New Hire for a Job Nobody Has
Onboarding teaches the calm version of a role. On the second body of knowledge nobody hands over, why a strong new hire goes quiet around month two, and…
You Cannot See Your Culture on a Good Week
Every culture statement describes an institution that is not under pressure. On why culture is the record of what got protected when protecting it was…
Leading When There Is No One to Talk To
Isolation in a leadership role is not a mood that shows up with the title. On the three relationships the job contains, why none of them can hold what you…
The Review That Changes Nothing
Teams that repeat a failure are usually not failing to reflect. On why a finding without a decision right behind it lasts about a month, and how to tell a…
Boundaries Do Not Break. They Get Traded.
Nobody votes to abandon a standard. On why every exception is defensible on the day it is made, and how the comparison point moves until the rule is gone…
Nothing in Your Unit Ever Finishes
The pile is not a throughput problem. Where there is no stated standard for good enough, closing is the only move that carries personal risk, so people…
Rumors Are a Communication Failure, Not a Gossip Problem
People would rather hold a bad story than no story. On why a quiet channel produces a worse account than the truth you were still finalizing, and what to…
The Conversation You Have Been Avoiding for Six Months
Deferring a performance conversation is rarely a nerve problem. It is that two separate questions, one about the person and one about the role, have been…
The People Who Stopped Caring Are Not Burned Out
Burnout is depletion, and rest helps. What you are looking at in one or two of your best people may be something else, and time off does not touch it.
When Everything Is a Priority, Your Team Decides Which Ones Are Not
An unranked list does not stop the ranking from happening. It moves the ranking to whoever is holding the work when the week goes sideways.
Your Team Stopped Telling You Things About Six Weeks Ago
Nobody announces the decision to stop bringing a leader problems. On how the price of raising something gets set, and how to tell it has already happened.
Leading a Team When You Have Lost Confidence in the People Above You
Your team already knows something is off. What stays open is what they conclude, and that part belongs to you.
What Your Calendar Says About Where Authority Actually Lives
You already delegated the work. Whether the authority moved with it is a question last month's calendar can answer in twenty minutes, using evidence you…
Escalation Is Not a Confidence Problem
When capable people check with you before acting, they are reading the system accurately. It taught them to.
The Hero Leadership Trap: Why Absorbing Chaos Destroys Teams
When a leader becomes the human shock absorber for every crisis, the organization does not speed up. It freezes.
What Forty Years of Research Already Knows
A pre-release note on Season 3 of The Cultural Context of Knowledge. Twelve episodes, one through-line: ethnic matching, what the research has settled…
AI as the New Gatekeeper: Whose Knowledge the Model Was Built to See
A high-school junior types a question into a chatbot and gets back three confident paragraphs.
Still Searching for a Match
A note on my new article in Urban Education's 60th-anniversary issue, which returns to a question I first raised in 2009 and asks what ethnic matching…
Leadership Without Stability
Thirty years of watching institutions has taught me that what the conventional account calls stability is better understood as the temporary absence of…
Lifting as We Lead: A Preview
A preview of a forthcoming chapter on Black male deans mentoring Black male faculty — the benefits, the structural costs, and what the institution's…
Why Most Leadership Models Fail in Chaos (And What Actually Works)
Most leadership models assume stability, time, and clarity. Real leadership does not happen in stability — it happens in chaos.
Purpose That Actually Works
A purpose statement that can be recited is not the same as one that can resolve a trade-off.
Ethnic Matching Beyond the Classroom
The matching research has begun to extend from K-12 classrooms into college transitions, faculty-student mentoring, and academic leadership.
How do you actually measure belonging in a classroom? A note on methods.
The word shows up in every grant proposal and half the conference titles. Here is what the instruments actually measure, what they can't, and the one I…
The Cost of Being Indispensable
The leader who keeps everything together through personal effort is running a unit whose capability lives in one person.
Twenty Years on Ethnic Matching
A retrospective on how the ethnic-matching field has matured over two decades — from the correlational critiques of the early 2000s to the rigorous…