Pace is a leadership skill
Pace is a leadership skill (not a personality trait)
Most leadership advice assumes you have unlimited energy. Real life doesn’t.
In higher education, the calendar never stops. There’s always a board cycle coming, a budget that needs a decision, a vendor issue that becomes urgent at the worst possible moment, and a campus community that deserves transparency even when the story is complicated.
Early in my career, I thought leadership was mostly about intensity: work harder, respond faster, and push through to achieve results. I still believe in high standards and strong execution. But over time—through capital projects, budget reductions, systems conversions, and more than a few “how did this land on my desk on a Friday at 4:30?” moments—I’ve learned something that now guides how I operate:
Pace is a skill. And it’s one of the most underrated leadership competencies.
What pace means in an executive role
Pace is not calmness. Pace is not avoidance. Pace is not “work less.” Pace is the ability to sustain decision quality over time while still moving the organization forward.
It shows up as:
Knowing what deserves urgency and what just feels urgent
Creating a rhythm for work so teams aren’t living in reaction mode
Making hard decisions with enough time to communicate them well
Protecting the capacity to think, not just to react
When pace is missing, you get the predictable symptoms: endless “fire drills,” inconsistent priorities, decision fatigue, and a team that starts to feel like it’s always behind even when it’s working extremely hard.
The cadence that protects your team (and your judgment)
In CFO/VP roles, the workload itself is not the only stressor. The bigger issue is randomness—the constant disruption of switching between strategic and tactical without a system to manage it.
A few practices that have helped me:
1) Use dashboards to reduce “story time”
When leaders don’t trust the numbers, you spend all your time narrating them. I’m a believer in simple dashboards—not for decoration, but to reduce rework and enable faster alignment. When you can point to a shared set of metrics, you create pace: less debate about “what’s true,” more time discussing “what we’re doing about it.”
2) Put decision points on the calendar
Many organizations mistake activity for progress. If you want pace, anchor key decisions—budget assumptions, capital approvals, cash strategy, major contract renewals—into a predictable cycle. You can still handle emergencies, but you stop treating everything like an emergency.
3) Build “two-speed” capacity
Some work needs fast response (a payroll issue, a compliance deadline). Some work needs depth (a multi-year financial model, a capital plan, a complex negotiation). Pace comes from protecting deep strategic work. I’ve learned to explicitly label projects as “tactical” and “strategic,” and to defend strategic time the way you defend meeting time with a board chair: respectfully, but firmly.
4) Communicate financial reality early, plainly, and with empathy
Pace improves when people aren’t surprised. In budget reduction discussions, for example, the technical work is hard—but the emotional work is harder. If you can communicate early, show your logic, and connect decisions to mission and strategy, you reduce thrash and build trust.
What running taught me about pace at work
In marathon training, the temptation is to prove you’re strong by pushing every run. That approach usually ends in injury, missed workouts, or a late-race collapse. Similar to my professional career, I only learned these hard lessons through personal experience. As I developed as a runner, I learned that the better runners don’t train “hard” every day. They train consistently. They know when to push (e.g. treating speed work as strategic) and when to recover.
Leadership is similar:
Over-exerting feels heroic in the moment
Under-recovering is invisible until it isn’t
Consistency wins over volatility
The most reliable executives I’ve worked with aren’t always the loudest or the most intense. They’re the ones who show up, week after week, with clarity and steadiness—and who create that steadiness for their teams.
