Evolve isn't prescriptive; it is personal.
As your coaches, faculty, and facilitators, Drs. @drbrianarao , @dawnfromhere Lee, and I join you on your journey to move your forward deepening your capacity and adding to your capabilities.
Here's what we bring that makes Evolve different. It comes down to four Es:
Experience: We've held leadership roles in higher ed. Budget cuts, crises, search committees. We've been there.
Expertise: This is our discipline, not just our practice. And every cohort sharpens what we know about what leaders actually need.
Empathy: We hear the real stories every week. The things you can't say out loud at your own institution. We're not here to evaluate you. We're here to be helpful.
Engagement: This isn't a program you receive. It's a partnership you participate in. Personal, not prescriptive. We are with you.
If you're leading in higher ed right now, you already know the complexity is real. Evolve helps you build the capacity to lead through it.
One of the things I hear most from student affairs teams is this: "We would love to be more intentional, but we are too busy."
The Curricular Approach launch workshops designs space for teams to step back, think together, and actually build something that serves them and their students, not just talk about how busy they are.
A few things participants said recently:
"We can do more by being more intentional about what we do."
"We're walking away with progress made, not just ideas."
"This workshop gives you space to do a little bit of unlearning."
A curricular approach launch isn't just a new set of learning goals. It asks teams to examine assumptions about what they're doing and why, bring a beginner's mind, and bring intentionality, clarity, alignment, and integration to their work.
If that sounds like what your team needs, let's talk.
Each of my coaching calls is done on a 3-mile loop through my neighborhood. I have been walking this loop with senior leaders for the past five years. I get to see seasons change, home renovations, trees being planted and cut down, families move out, and new families move in, and dogs and children growing up. The movement, being outside in nature, and changing perspective all help me best help my clients with insight and perspective. This time of year, it is wonderful to see spring springing.
Are you telling yourself that your leadership team is too busy to take the time to develop their individual and collective leadership?
When coaching clients text me to say, "I don't think I can make our coaching call today. I just have too much going on." I respond, that means today's the day we need to do the call more than any other.
Here's what happens nearly every time they keep the call: within one hour, they've found perspective, figured out what actually matters, and let go of what doesn't. Many tell me that a single hour saved them 10 hours that week.
Now imagine scaling that across your entire leadership team.
A client recently canceled a leadership development series for their team. "We're just too busy right now."
I get it. The demands are real. The pressure is real. But here's what I've learned after years of coaching higher ed leaders:
The moment you feel too busy to invest in your people is exactly the moment you need to the most. Busyness without development isn't sustainable. It's just survival.
One focused coaching conversation can reframe a challenge, unlock a decision, or restore the energy to keep going. Now imagine that for an entire leadership team: collective capacity, strategic clarity, shared language, recovered hours.
There will never be a perfect time. There will always be another reorg, another budget cycle, another crisis. That's not a reason to wait. That's why you should invest now.
Your team deserves to lead well, through the complexity, not after it passes.
What are higher education leaders like you saying about Evolve?
Excellent insights, focus on being, critical reflection, immeasurable value, and transformative.
If you're a VP, AVP, or Dean wondering whether this is the right time to invest in your own development, these voices might say what we can't.
A Curricular Approach isn't static. It is iterative, always evolving as you learn, reflect, and engage.
Stepping back from all your hard work and being willing to let go and reimagine can be challenging.
A few months ago, I got to work with a team doing just that. They were able to let go of ego and focus on what was best for students, which led them to some reimagining that is also better for them. They stayed committed to student learning and gave themselves permission to think differently and ease up on the perfectionism.
When we say that a Curricular Approach is never done, this is the kind of liberating approach we are talking about.
What do the highest-performing teams actually do differently?
Ron Friedman’s research in the Harvard Business Review studied teams that rate themselves a 10 out of 10. What he found challenges how most of us think about team performance.
These aren’t just high-functioning individuals who happen to work together. They’re teams that have invested in their development as a team. There’s a difference.
In this clip, I break down what this means for leadership teams in higher education and why the shift from leader development to leadership team development changes everything.
"Every senior leader should have a coach." I agree. But there is more to it.
I keep hearing this refrain from senior leaders, and I couldn’t agree more. Coaching builds capacity, clarity, and more effective action.
However, individual coaching is just the beginning. Senior leaders don’t lead alone. They lead together. And a group of individually developed leaders is not the same as a developed leadership team.
When a leadership team develops together, the benefits aren’t additive. They’re exponential. Shared language. Shared experiences. Shared content and context. These become the foundation for how a team actually operates and leads under pressure.
You were excellent in your last role. People noticed. You got promoted. And now something feels off.
You are working harder than ever, busier than ever, and somehow barely staying afloat. The tools that served you so well before are no longer working the way they used to. And a quiet voice starts asking: maybe I should have never left that last role.
You would not be the first senior higher education leader to feel this way. It is all too common. And it does not have to be that way.
There are three paradoxes at the heart of higher education leadership that create exactly this kind of friction. They get in the way of high-potential leaders and keep very good people from doing the transformational work that higher education needs right now.
You were good at your last job.
Then you got promoted.
And now something feels off.
Not catastrophically. You're hard-working, dedicated, and busier than ever. But the tools that used to serve you so well no longer seem to be serving you. You wonder if you should have stayed in your last role.
You wouldn't be the first senior leader to feel that way. And that feeling is pointing at something real.
There are three paradoxes quietly embedded in senior higher education leadership — the Promotion Paradox, the Expertise Paradox, and the Learning Paradox. They drain energy, slow momentum, and keep smart, dedicated leaders busy without moving their institutions forward.
