The Game is Faster Than You Think

Four things that helped me step into academic leadership without losing my footing

You hear NFL players talk about it all the time. The game is faster at the professional level. Players are bigger, quicker, and more precise. Decisions that used to take a half-second now need to happen in a tenth. The learning curve doesn’t just steepen, it nearly goes vertical.

The transition into academic leadership works the same way.

When I stepped into the dean’s role, I knew the work would be different. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how much faster everything would move. The communication. The decisions. The expectations. The pace of information coming at you from every direction (faculty, students, budget cycles, accreditation timelines, personnel matters) doesn’t slow down while you get your bearings. It just keeps coming.

What you learn in the first ninety days will shape the next three years. So how you learn matters as much as what you learn.

Here are the four things that made the biggest difference for me.

1. Learn the curriculum…all of it.

Faculty are trained to go deep in a narrow field. That’s not a flaw; it’s the entire point of disciplinary expertise. But when you move into the dean’s office, that same instinct becomes a liability.

As a dean, you are responsible for every program, every department, and every discipline in your school. And here’s the uncomfortable reality: you will be asked to speak intelligently about areas you have never studied, often without notice, in rooms full of people who have spent their careers in those areas.

So I read every course description in every program we offered. I asked about every acronym I didn’t recognize. When discipline-specific language came up in a meeting, I wrote it down and looked it up afterward. I asked a lot of questions, more than felt comfortable, and probably more than people expected from someone in my role.

That discomfort is the point. The questions you don’t ask in the first ninety days become the gaps you try to hide for the next three years.

2. Study the film.

In football, elite players don’t just practice, they study. They watch tape of their own performance, their opponents, and the tendencies of the systems they’re playing in. They arrive to the field already knowing what they’re going to see.

Academic leadership has its own version of film study, and most new leaders skip it.

Before your first week, get your hands on everything you can: the organizational chart, the budget structure, past strategic plans, department self-studies, accreditation reports, and faculty CVs. Read the school’s history—the wins, the struggles, the pivots. Look at enrollment trends. Understand where the resources have been allocated and where they haven’t.

This isn’t about coming in with answers. It’s about coming in with the right questions. The leaders who walk in on day one having done this work don’t look like outsiders trying to catch up. They look like they belong, because they’ve already started learning the playbook.

3. Schedule meetings with every office your school touches.

One of the first things I did as dean was schedule one-on-one conversations with the leaders of Enrollment, the Budget Office, Student Services, and—because my school supports our university’s athletic programs through our bands and dance team—Athletics.

Not to introduce myself. To listen.

I wanted to know what the relationship had looked like before I arrived. What had worked. What hadn’t. Where communication had broken down. What the school’s reputation was in each of those offices, and what unspoken expectations were sitting on the table.

Every institution has a relational infrastructure that doesn’t appear on any org chart. It lives in the history between offices, in the memories of staff who’ve been there for twenty years, in the workarounds people have built because formal channels failed them. You can’t lead effectively without understanding it. And you can’t understand it without asking.

Go find out what people actually think. It’s information you can’t afford not to have.

4. Take notes like your job depends on it…because it does.

The volume of information in the first ninety days of an executive role is staggering. Names, histories, processes, politics, priorities. It comes at you faster than any single conversation can hold.

Write everything down. And then, at the end of each day, synthesize it.

I kept a daily journal during my transition. Not a diary, a thinking document. Each entry answered three questions: What did I learn today? Why does it matter? What do I need to do with it? That discipline forced me to process what I was absorbing instead of just accumulating it. It helped me see patterns across conversations. It gave me something to return to when I needed context I had forgotten I already had.

Information without synthesis is just noise. The journal turns it into something you can actually use.

You don’t need to know everything when you step into an executive leadership role. Nobody does, and anyone who pretends otherwise is performing confidence they don’t have.

What you need to know is that the game is faster than you think, and your learning has to match it. Not eventually. From day one.

The leaders who make the transition well aren’t the ones who arrived with all the answers. They’re the ones who built systems for learning faster than everyone else expected.

The film doesn’t study itself. What are you doing to learn faster than the game?