In higher education, July 1 isn’t the middle of anything. It’s the start of everything.
It’s a new budget cycle, with new goals, and just a short window before fall swallows the calendar whole.
For leaders, it’s also an ideal time to reexamine communications practices. How do you connect with your campus community? With your team? How are you maintaining relationships beyond your institution?
Now is the perfect time to reset. Not after welcome week or the annual cabinet retreat, or when weekly fire drills are back in session. Begin now, while you can still see the pattern before you’re back inside it.
A summer reset is not a content audit in warm-weather clothes. It’s a leadership practice.
So take a few moments to consider: how have you been showing up? Where has your voice gone quiet? What has your presence been saying while you were busy doing the work? Meaningful digital leadership begins with paying attention.
Start Here: A 5-Minute Communication Audit
If you only have five minutes, start here.
The 5-Minute Leadership Communication Audit is a short check-in for leaders who want to evaluate their digital presence. It's not a grade or a performance review.; it's a way to pause and listen.
In five minutes, you'll have language to describe:
- Where you are with your digital presence
- Where your voice is clear
- Where your visibility has drifted
- Where your communication needs more intention before fall picks up speed.
Communication is already happening. The question is whether the messages going out reflect the leader you want to be.
Digital Presence Is Leadership Evidence
For the past 12 years, my research and consulting work has focused on how higher education leaders build trust, visibility, and community online. My book, Digital Leadership in Higher Education, grew from original research with campus executives, student leaders, and higher education professionals.
Digital leadership is a leadership practice.
I still see many senior leaders communicating without a plan. Something feels important, so they post. The work gets complicated, so they go quiet. A major announcement comes along, so they show up. But the smaller moments, the ones where reliability and reputation are established over time, are less consistent.
I say that with care because I know why it happens.
The calendar is packed, and the comment section is not always kind. And being visible without being “too visible” is a very specific higher ed dance.
Still, a leader's digital presence reveals patterns that teach people what you notice, what you value, who you celebrate, how you respond to complexity, and whether there's a human being behind the role.
Students, staff, faculty, families, alumni, donors, community partners, governing boards, and colleagues may all encounter you in different spaces. They may not see every message or follow you on every platform, but they will experience the larger patterns your presence creates.
A Summer Presence Scan
After you take the 5-Minute Audit, spend twenty minutes reviewing your communication from the past twelve months. No massive data haul required. You're looking for patterns across your public and semi-public presence:
- Social media posts
- Campus messages
- Newsletters
- Remarks
- Event photos
- Comments
- Videos
- Other visible leadership moments
As you scan the last year, look for:
- Messages, posts, or moments that resulted in an uptick in responses
- Themes you returned to again and again
- People, programs, or priorities you consistently amplified
- Moments where your voice sounded clear, grounded, and human
- Places where your communication became overly formal, vague, or reactive
- Topics you avoided, softened, or delayed
- Audiences who were centered and audiences who may have been missing
- The difference between what you communicated consistently and what you say matters most
That last one is where the real work often begins.
Misalignment in leadership communication is usually subtle. A leader may say students are at the center of the work, but their visible communication rarely includes student stories. A division may say staff recognition matters, but appreciation only appears during annual award ceremonies. An institution may name belonging as a priority, but the leader's presence focuses mostly on rankings, achievements, and announcements.
A scan like this helps reveal whether your communication reinforces your priorities or quietly competes with them.
None of this is failure. It's data. And data, interpreted with care, gives leaders options.
The numbers are also part of that picture. Reach, engagement, clicks, shares, comments, and impressions can help you see what traveled and what your community responded to. But it’s important to remember metrics are incomplete on their own. Not everything that matters gets rewarded by the algorithm. Higher ed knows this well. We live in the land of work that matters deeply and often resists clean measurement.
As you review, ask what the communication made possible. Did it help people understand where you were going, not just what was happening? Did it grow trust? Did it clarify direction? Did it help people feel seen?
That's how digital leadership moves beyond content.
Use the Digital Leadership Principles as a Lens
I know frameworks can sound tidy on paper, while actual campus life is anything but tidy. That's why I keep coming back to these five principles. They hold up in the messy middle.
In Digital Leadership in Higher Education, I organized purpose-driven digital leadership around five guiding principles: connection, personalization, strategy, change, and legacy.
They also offer a useful lens for a summer reset.
- Connection: Is your communication nurturing relationships, or mostly distributing information?
- Personalization: Can people recognize your values, voice, and perspective?
- Strategy: Is your presence aligned with institutional priorities and community needs?
- Change: Are you helping people make meaning during uncertainty, transition, and complexity?
- Legacy: What is your presence building over time for you, your institution, and the communities you serve?
At this point, the check-in becomes more than a content exercise. You're examining whether your digital presence reflects the kind of leader you are and the kind of community you're trying to strengthen.
That's a more useful question than whether you posted enough, or if your LinkedIn profile cover photo is pretty.
Listen for Your Voice
One of the surest signs of alignment is your leadership voice.
Voice is often mistaken for style or personality. In leadership communication, voice goes deeper than that. It is a representation of how your values, judgment, care, and perspective become recognizable across different messages, platforms, and moments.
When your voice is clear, communication feels connected even when the topics change. A message about budget realities, a post celebrating students, a welcome speech, and a note to staff can all serve different objectives and still sound like they come from the same leader.
When voice drifts, communication starts to feel overly generic or overly institutional. Or what we're all becoming more aware of: copied and pasted directly from the first AI prompt.
Messages may be accurate. They may be approved. They may even be beautifully written. But that doesn't always mean they’re helping people understand the leader who sends them.
A summer reset gives you the chance to ask whether your communication still sounds like you, the real leader, with language driven by your values and personalized for your community.
Let the Next Season Have a Direction
After you review the evidence, give yourself a moment before turning everything into a posting plan. (Hint: that's a tactic, not a strategy.)
Imagine it's next summer, with a full year of leadership communication behind you. Where would you hope to see change in how you're reaching people?
Maybe your community better understands your priorities, or students see more of themselves reflected in your presence. Maybe staff feel more consistently recognized. Your messages during change may feel clearer or less reactive.
Those outcomes are not superficial. They're strategic.
In higher education, visibility is often treated as optional or personal, as though public presence sits outside the real work of leadership. I see it differently. Visibility, practiced with purpose, helps leaders convey meaning and strengthen community.
Being everywhere was never the goal. The goal is to be aligned, consistent, and useful to the people you serve. The calendar matters. So do the platforms and tactics. But they work better when they're built from a place of intentionality instead of constant urgency.
We Don't Have to Do This Work Alone
Some of what surfaces in a summer reset will be easy to act on. Some of it may need deeper thought, outside perspective, or a more formalized strategy.
Campus leaders are often navigating visibility without a reliable thought partner. They're balancing institutional politics, audience expectations, public scrutiny, brand guidelines, platform shifts, crisis communication, and their own capacity. They're expected to be visible but not performative, personal but not too personal, strategic but still human.
That's a complex leadership assignment.
My executive communications coaching supports leaders in exactly this space: leadership communication planning, voice development, thought leadership strategy, and a trusted partner behind the scenes when the stakes are high and the calendar is full.
Summer gives us a rare chance to reflect before the year accelerates again. The pause comes before the plan. That's where the real work of digital leadership begins.
And next summer, when you're looking back at what changed, you may be glad you didn't wait to start making the shift.
