Over the past two decades, I’ve had the privilege of designing and delivering more than 100 leadership development programs in higher education and supporting institutions as they launched dozens more.
These programs have ranged from single, cohort-based initiatives to multi-layered efforts designed to shape institutional culture over time. At Academic Impressions, we’ve worked with first-time department chairs as well as with presidents rebuilding senior cabinets. We’ve partnered with well-resourced research universities as well as with small and mid-sized institutions doing the best they can with very limited capacity.
The good news is that during this time, I’ve seen a growing recognition that leadership development is mission critical. More institutions are investing in helping leaders to build emotional intelligence, resolve conflict more productively, lead teams effectively, and navigate change with greater confidence. Many are also working intentionally to build pipelines for future leaders who will be ready when the moment calls.
And yet, because many institutions have limited experience designing leadership development programs, a predictable set of mistakes shows up again and again. Ironically, these missteps are usually rooted in good intentions—but they ultimately undermine the very outcomes these programs are meant to achieve.
Following are the five most common mistakes I see when institutions launch or attempt to sustain leadership programming.
1. Trying to Do Too Much
In an effort to be comprehensive, institutions often try to cover as much ground as possible. In their attempts to be rigorous, programs end up overloading participants. I routinely see programs that attempt to front-load the entirety of leadership into a single experience—complete with competency models listing a dozen or more skills, multi-semester projects, and stacks of readings.
The intention is admirable. Leadership is complex, so the program should reflect that complexity. But complexity is not the same thing as effectiveness. When everything is included, very little actually sticks.
Leadership is learned through practice and over time. You cannot front-load everything a leader needs to know or do by simply handing over information as a solution. No one becomes an effective department chair, Dean, or director because they once completed a comprehensive leadership curriculum.
The most effective programs are focused and disciplined. They center a small number of proven tools and frameworks—approaches that leaders can use immediately to run more effective meetings, give meaningful feedback, and resolve conflict productively. These programs help leaders to do their jobs better the very next day while also encouraging habits of intentional practice that develop over time.
2. Fitting Leadership Development in with Everything Else on the Plate
Most academic leadership programs live in the offices of faculty affairs—if an institution is lucky enough to have such an office at all. Many institutions, including large research intensives, still don’t.
Even where these offices exist, leadership development is rarely the top priority. Faculty affairs leaders typically manage expansive portfolios that include promotion and tenure, faculty hiring, onboarding and orientation, accreditation support, personnel issues, compliance requirements, and a long list of other mission-critical responsibilities.
Leadership development is often squeezed in wherever it can fit. Faculty affairs leaders—who are frequently deeply committed to this work—do what they can with the time and resources available. They build programs themselves, rely on one-off sessions, and stretch already-limited capacity in admirable ways.
But limited bandwidth can become a structural constraint. Programs lack coherence and continuity. Instead of a systematic approach to building leadership capacity, institutions end up with a collection of disconnected topics and isolated sessions. Participation is limited, leaving many leaders to “figure it out” on their own.
Leadership development struggles when it is treated as an add-on rather than as core institutional work. If leadership quality shapes culture, retention, equity, and results—and it does—then developing leaders cannot live perpetually in the margins of someone’s job description.
3. Focusing Only on the “Hard Skills”
When leadership programming is offered, it rarely emphasizes the skills that most clearly differentiate effective leadership from ineffective leadership. Instead, programs too often focus on minimizing risk—on legal issues, HR policies, annual evaluations, budgeting basics, and procedural compliance.
These topics matter. Leaders need to understand them. But they rarely address what actually makes leadership difficult.
What’s often missing are the sustained opportunities to build the skills leaders struggle with most, such as:
- Deepening self-awareness
- Building habits of reflection
- Giving and receiving feedback
- Managing and resolving conflict
- Leading peers and former peers
- Running effective meetings
- Addressing disruptive behavior
- Navigating power, identity, and influence
It’s understandable that there’s so much focus on hard skills. Institutions want to protect themselves and ensure that their leaders don’t make costly mistakes. But by sidelining these “soft” skills, programs neglect the very capacities that shape daily leadership experiences. They are the skills that determine whether leaders build trust or erode it. Whether teams feel energized or exhausted. Whether issues are addressed early or are allowed to fester.
Ironically, these so-called soft skills drive the hardest outcomes: morale, engagement, retention, collaboration, and performance. They are also the areas where leaders feel least prepared—and most anxious.
4. Teaching Leadership Instead of Facilitating Leadership Experiences
Too many leadership programs are delivered in the same way we teach academic content: didactically. As slides. Lectures. Panels. Experts at the front of the room.
The intention here is efficiency. Institutions want to share information quickly and expose participants to expertise. But leadership is an action, not just a body of knowledge. You don’t learn leadership by hearing about it; you learn by practicing it, reflecting on that practice, and getting feedback from others.
In effective leadership development, the facilitator is not a traditional teacher so much as the architect of an experience. Their role is to create conditions where participants can practice difficult conversations, work through realistic scenarios, receive feedback, and make sense of what just happened.
When programs default to lecture formats, they implicitly treat leadership as something leaders need to know rather than as something they need to do. If leadership is experiential by nature, then leadership development must be experiential as well. Participants need opportunities to learn about themselves, try new behaviors, and work differently with others.
5. Overemphasizing Theories and Stories
Finally, many programs lean too heavily in one of two directions: theory or storytelling.
Some programs rely on faculty whose primary area of research is leadership. These programs are often thoughtful and intellectually rich, but they can become overly theoretical. Facilitators may be experts on leadership in the abstract, but without having navigated the messy realities of actually leading at senior levels.
Other programs may rely heavily on panels of institutional leaders. These sessions can be engaging and even entertaining, but when leaders are not students of leadership, participants mostly hear stories. Stories can inspire, but without accompanying principles, frameworks, or tools, the learning is limited.
Both of these approaches are well-intentioned. Institutions want credibility, expertise, and relevance. But theory without application and stories without structure limit impact.
The most effective facilitators are both students and practitioners of leadership. They understand why leadership works the way it does and can translate experience into insight. They relate to participants’ challenges while also offering concrete tools, frameworks, and strategies that leaders can apply immediately.
Learning from Our Experience
Leadership development doesn’t have to be overly complicated or resource intensive. But to truly make a difference, programs must be intentionally designed and adequately resourced. Higher education is a people-driven enterprise, and leadership development offers tremendous leverage—relatively small investments can produce huge returns.
These experiences are what led us to design our two-day workshop on building leadership development programs in higher education, and to convene leaders from across the institution who are all grappling with the same challenge: developing the leaders higher education needs to thrive in the future.
Whether or not you ever attend that workshop, my hope is this: that we stop mistaking good intentions for good design—and start building leadership programs that genuinely change how leadership is practiced where it matters most.
