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Case Study: Senior Academic Leader

The Person and the Context

I want to tell you about a deputy head of school I worked with. They'd been in higher education for years, managing the usual mix of teaching, research, and administrative responsibilities. They were good at it, too – knew how the institution worked, how to get things done, who to talk to when the official processes weren't working.

But they were absolutely exhausted.

The Assessment Results

The scores told an interesting story. Learning sat at 6.4 – perfectly decent capacity there. But both Motivation and Identity were down at 4.2. This is what I call a dual constraint, and it's particularly challenging because the two feed each other.

What's Actually Going On

Here's what I think had happened. They'd been so busy serving institutional needs – keeping the department running, managing upwards, supporting colleagues, dealing with student issues – that they'd completely lost touch with who they were outside of all that.

The work-life imbalance everyone talks about? That was a symptom, not the cause. The real issue was that all those hours of institutional service had cost them something deeper. They couldn't remember what mattered to them anymore. They'd become very good at being a deputy head of school, but somewhere along the way they'd forgotten who they actually were.

And when you don't know who you are, and you've lost touch with what genuinely motivates you, having the capacity to learn new things doesn't help much. Learn what? For what purpose? To serve whose agenda?

The Work Ahead

Someone with this pattern doesn't need to be told to work harder or develop new skills. They need to stop long enough to remember who they are and what they actually care about.

First, separate the expertise from the identity

All that knowledge about how universities work, how committees function, how to navigate institutional politics – that's valuable. But it's not who they are. The first work is distinguishing between "what I know how to do" and "who I actually am."

Then, examine the exhaustion

Work-life imbalance is what it looked like from the outside. But what had they actually been sacrificing by staying in service mode? What parts of themselves had they set aside to maintain all that institutional effectiveness?

Use the learning capacity wisely

They could develop in new directions – that 6.4 Learning score tells us that. But only once they've figured out what directions actually matter to them. Learning new skills right now, without addressing the Identity constraint first, just creates more tools for serving other people's agendas.

Reconnect with intrinsic motivation

The Motivation constraint at 4.2 wasn't about lacking drive generally. It was about having exhausted the drive that comes from institutional service. What would re-energise them? What work would they do even if nobody was asking them to?

The Bigger Picture

This dual constraint pattern – low Motivation and low Identity, with reasonable Learning capacity – is something I see quite often in senior university roles. You accumulate expertise in how the institution works. You become indispensable because of that knowledge. And in the process, you lose yourself.

The good news? That Learning capacity at 6.4 means they can develop in whatever direction they choose, once they figure out what that direction is. But they won't reconnect with genuine motivation until they step back from all that accumulated institutional expertise long enough to remember what actually matters to them.

The stored corporate knowledge about university operations is useful. But it's not who they are. And they won't find their way forward until they remember that.