Energy, Karma and Groups of People
The best teams in higher education are not built on org charts. They are built on energy. And the energy you bring to a group determines what the group becomes.
There is a thing that happens when you put the right people in a room together. Not the right titles. Not the right credentials. The right energy.
I have been in faculty meetings that felt like funerals and planning sessions with adjuncts that felt like the birth of something real. The difference was never the budget or the strategic plan. It was the people and what they brought with them when they walked in.
In higher education, we spend enormous amounts of time on structure. Committees, task forces, working groups, steering committees for the working groups. We build org charts and reporting lines and approval workflows. And then we wonder why nothing moves.
Here is what I have learned in 30 years: the structure does not matter if the energy is wrong. And the energy does not lie.
When you walk into a room and feel resistance, that is real. When you pitch an idea and someone leans forward, that is real. When a colleague says "that's interesting" but their body says "please stop talking," that is real too.
Karma in organizations works the same way it works everywhere else. What you put out comes back. If you show up to every meeting defending your territory, people stop inviting you to the meetings that matter. If you show up genuinely trying to solve a problem, people start bringing you problems worth solving.
The institutions that will survive the next decade are not the ones with the best strategic plans. They are the ones where the right people found each other, trusted each other, and decided to build something together despite the org chart, not because of it.
Find your people. Protect that energy. Everything else is paperwork.