Leadership Guidance for Higher Ed Teams

Redefine who "counts" as a leader in your institution
Todd Cherches draws a distinction between Capital L leadership (titles, org charts) and small L leadership (influence without authority). In a higher ed context, this matters: the admissions counselor who mentors a first-gen student is leading. The marketing coordinator who shifts how a team thinks about storytelling is leading. Institutions that reserve leadership development for senior staff are leaving most of their people out.

Replace data dumps with stories, facts alone don't move people
Cherches is direct about this: facts and figures inform, but they don't motivate. Feelings and stories do. For enrollment and marketing teams, this translates to a concrete audit question: are your campaign messages built around data points, or around real student outcomes that someone could actually picture? If your value proposition reads like a statistics sheet, it's not going to land.

Use visual communication to make ideas stick, four modes available
Cherches outlines four modes of visual communication: imagery, models, metaphor, and storytelling. These aren't design-department tools; they're thinking tools. A well-chosen metaphor in a team briefing or a simple visual model in a strategy deck does more work than a page of bullet points. Higher ed leaders tend to underinvest in this, defaulting to slides full of text.

Empathetic listening means understanding first, not formulating your response
As Cherches describes it, most people aren't really listening, they're waiting for their turn to talk. Empathetic listening means suspending your own agenda long enough to actually understand what the other person is communicating. For managers in fast-moving marketing or recruitment teams, this is a practical skill: slow down the response, confirm the understanding, then react. It changes what you hear.

Model boundaries visibly, your team won't protect theirs if you don't protect yours
Cherches is candid about burnout: the people who need to find an "off switch" most are often the ones who never demonstrate one. Leaders set the ceiling on what's considered normal. If you answer emails at 11pm without comment, your team reads that as an expectation. Protecting your own recovery time isn't a personal preference, it's a management signal.

Build learning into daily routines, not special occasions
Cherches has kept a daily journal since 1980 and makes a point of consuming one TED talk and one podcast episode per day. That's not a productivity flex, it's a compounding strategy. Small, consistent inputs accumulate into a different kind of leader over years. For anyone in a marketing or enrollment role looking to grow, the practical version of this is simple: pick the format that works and make it a daily non-negotiable, not something saved for slow weeks.