If you’ve felt like being visible online costs more than it used to, you’re not imagining it.
I’ve spent the last ten years coaching presidents, provosts, VPs, and deans through that exact challenge. And the thing I want to say up front, before anything else, is this: the pressure you’re feeling is real. It is not a sign you’re behind. It’s a sign you’re paying attention to a genuinely different landscape than the one leaders faced even five years ago.
Let me show you what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what real support looks like now.
It Used to Be About Learning. Now It’s About Managing Personal Risk.
Ten years ago, when a leader sat down with me for the first time, the conversation usually started with some version of “I have a lot to learn.” There was curiosity in it. A little nervousness, sure, but mostly the energy of someone getting ready to try something new.
That’s not the conversation anymore.
Today, leaders show up having already watched what happens when visibility goes wrong. They may have seen a colleague publicly dismantled over a single post, or a moment taken out of context and turned into a smear campaign. The fear isn’t abstract anymore. It’s specific, it’s recent, and it’s usually about someone they know.
The emotional starting point for this work has moved from “help me learn this” to “help me not get hurt by this.”
The Caution Got Specific, Too.
A few years back, leaders worried about “the political divide” in general terms. Now the concern is precise: specific state laws, institutional doctrines, and a much narrower lane to walk than before. Guardrails used to be nice-to-have supportive context for a coaching conversation. Now they’re load-bearing.
Here’s What Hasn’t Moved.
Through all of that, one thing has stayed exactly the same: your students still need to know a real human is leading them.
They don’t want to hear from a brand or a communications office, or a carefully managed account that could belong to any administrator at any institution. They want to see a human, someone they can recognize, trust, and feel is present on their campus.
That need never went anywhere, even as the risk of showing up as a real person got higher. And that’s the tension at the center of all of this. The stakes rose, but what your community needs from you didn’t. Which means the answer was never to retreat and go quiet. It was to find a way to show up as yourself, safely, on purpose, and with real support behind you.
That’s the work I do with executives and other leaders. And it’s why, over these ten years, my own role has had to grow.
This Isn’t Just Executive Coaching Anymore.
I still think of myself as your coach first. But if I’m honest about what the work requires now, coaching isn’t the whole word for it.
I’m your strategist working through what to say when and why, before a single draft exists. I’m your advisor, helping you weigh a real institutional risk against a real institutional need to be seen. And increasingly, I’m your hands-on partner, sitting in the actual building of the thing alongside you, not just handing you a plan and stepping back to see how you do. Some days I’m a cultural interpreter too, translating shifting platforms, trends, and language for a leader who has a hundred other things demanding their attention that week.
That evolution isn’t about my calendar being full (though it is). It’s because the job changed. Behind-the-scenes strategy now means real time spent processing fear before we start writing the first sentence. It means thinking through what’s safe to say in your specific state, at your specific institution, before we think about what’s compelling to say. And it means being present enough in the content itself, your voice, and your words, to make sure none of that careful thinking gets lost between the strategy conversation and the thing that gets posted.
Here’s Who I’m Talking To.
This isn’t just for the person already in the visible seat. It’s for you if you’re a sitting president or provost navigating all of this in real time. It’s for VPs and deans already fielding board questions about what “too much” looks like. And it’s for tenured faculty on the path toward a provostship, the ones who can feel the visible seat coming even though they’re not in it yet. If that’s you, the time to build this is before your title changes, not after.
I’ll say the honest part out loud, too: for some people, the right coaching call is to pull back, not push further. I’ve sat with leaders who tried to build a public presence that just didn’t fit who they are. Some leaders are better served by a smaller, quieter footprint, and a good coach says so.
The Support System Had to Change Shape Too.
For years, this work looked like one leader and one advisor, meeting occasionally, with a strategy handed over in between sessions. That model asked a lot of a busy executive: absorb the thinking, then go implement it alone.
That’s not how I work anymore, and it’s not how the leaders I work with are set up to succeed.
The work now folds in whoever is already supporting you on campus, whether that’s a single student worker helping with your calendar, a communications director, or a full team. Instead of a strategy that lives only in your head until our next call, it lives somewhere your support system can see it, contribute to it, and carry it forward when you’re pulled into the fifty other things an executive leader’s week holds.
And I’ve gotten more hands-on, not less. That means sitting in the actual drafting with you, in real time, so the strategy doesn’t just live on paper but makes its way into actual posts, emails, and remarks going out that week. It’s faster, and it’s also better. A strategy tested against a real draft holds up in a way a strategy tested only in conversation can’t.
Here’s what that process looks like, in practice. A coaching engagement today isn’t a single strategy session and a document you take home. It’s:
- An honest audit first. A real, evidence-based look at how you currently show up, across search, your institution’s site, and the platforms that matter, before a single piece of advice gets offered.
- Recurring sessions, not a one-time conversation. Regular, ongoing coaching time, often twice a month or more, so the work keeps pace with your actual week instead of living in a folder between check-ins.
- Sessions with your support system, not just you. Working time with whoever already helps you — a student worker, a director, a small team — so the strategy has more than one person carrying it.
- Content built alongside you. A set number of pieces created in real time together: posts, reflections, talking points, short-form video concepts, not handed to you as a template to imitate on your own.
- A living system, not a static plan. A working calendar and framework the team can use day to day, instead of a strategy document that gets read once and shelved.
- A closing report that looks backward and forward. A synthesis of what changed, with clear next steps, so the work doesn’t just end when the engagement does.
That’s the shift in one sentence: the deliverable used to be a plan. Now it’s time, and real-time creation, alongside you and the people who support you.
Why I Built the Executive Communications Studio.
In August 2026, I launched the Executive Communications Studio, a platform backed by AI-powered insights and informed by my time coaching leaders on their digital presence. I didn’t build it to replace the strategist, advisor, or co-creation partner roles that benefit this work. I built it because that shift, from solo effort to a supported system, needed a place to live between our sessions.
There’s another reason, and it matters just as much to me. Not every leader can afford an executive coach or a consultant, and I don’t believe good, values-aligned support should be reserved only for the ones who can. That belief is a big part of why I’ve spent my career in higher education in the first place. The Studio exists so a leader who isn’t ready for the full coaching relationship, or may never be, still has somewhere real to start.
The Studio is built around something I call your Executive Brief: a voice profile that captures how you sound, so every draft, whether it’s written by you, your director, or a student staffer, comes out in your unique voice instead of sounding like whoever happened to be at the keyboard that day.
In practice, that starts with the same handful of questions I ask every leader I coach, especially anyone newly stepping into a visible seat: How would you describe your own tone? How do you want to come across? Are there words or phrases that are unmistakably yours? What matters to you? That’s where your real voice starts to surface.
It’s the same principle that’s always been at the center of my coaching. Your voice has to be yours. I’m not here to install a new one. I’m here to help the one you already have reach the surface more easily, and to give the people supporting you a way to help without flattening it.
That’s the whole idea behind the Studio: your voice, preserved, even when more hands are involved in getting the words out the door.
The Coaching Relationship Is Still Very Much Here.
I want to be direct about this, because I know some of you reading this have worked with me before and are wondering where that fits now.
It fits exactly where it always has, just with more of me in it. Some leaders want the one-on-one relationship, working through the real bottleneck underneath the surface-ask — whether that’s capacity, board pressure, or the plain fear of getting it wrong in public. Some leaders want the Studio, so their team has a tool that keeps everything sounding like them day to day. Many want both, running together with me as a strategist and hands-on partner and the Studio as the tool that keeps the work alive in between.
There’s no wrong door here. There’s just the one that fits where you are right now.
Where to Go From Here
If you want to see this model in action, including a real look at how the Studio works alongside a support team, I recently walked through it live in a webinar called Behind the Account: How Executive Digital Presence Actually Gets Strategized. The recording and every resource from that session are collected on the Behind the Account resource page, and I broke the core frameworks and support model matrix down in a companion post called Right-Sizing Executive Support.
And if what you need right now is a person in your corner, not a platform, my coaching practice is open. Reach out and let’s talk about what you’re facing out in the real world.
Your students still need to see a genuine person leading them. Let’s make sure that person can show up safely, with support in their corner and a guide who cares about both their work and their well-being…
