Higher education employees want more than ever. Institutions are delivering less than they think.
Something significant is happening in higher education, and it shows up clearly in the data.
For the seventh consecutive time, we surveyed nearly 2,000 higher education professionals, including faculty, staff, administrators, and senior leaders, on professional development, leadership, job satisfaction, and engagement.
Year after year, the findings tell a consistent story. This year, one chapter stands out: 84.9% of employees said they were at least moderately interested in additional leadership development, up from 75% in 2023. This ten-point swing in just two years reflects a meaningful shift in employee sentiment, one the sector would be wise to take seriously.
A Gap With Real Consequences
It would be easy to treat this as a satisfaction gap, a case of employees wanting more than institutions can realistically provide. But the data suggests something more consequential is at play.
In this year’s survey, we included a new question asking employees to rate their institution’s effectiveness at developing leaders. We expected it to correlate with satisfaction. But it does more than just that. The data found that effective leadership development didn’t just improve job satisfaction (r = .52, a positive relationship). It also reduced burnout (r = -.39, a moderate negative relationship) and increased employees’ likelihood of staying (r = .31, a moderate positive relationship).
Taken together, the data makes a compelling case that effective leadership development is a necessity, not just a “nice-to-have”. We found that when employees trust their institution’s development process, job satisfaction climbs while burnout drops. In fact, these are among the strongest relationships we’ve seen in five years of research, directly impacting an employee’s intent to stay.
“Having a leadership development program is not the same as having one that works. Employees know the difference.”
Higher education employees are increasingly tying their decision to stay, or to leave, to whether their institution invests in them. In 2019, the mean score for professional development influencing retention was 2.70 out of 5. By 2025, it reached 3.13. This is not a pandemic-era anomaly; it is a structural change in workforce expectations.
That said, our data shows that only 6% of employees say their institution is “very effective” at developing leaders, while 1 in 3 rate their institution as ineffective. And while less than half of respondents said their institution had an internal leadership development program, nearly 20% of respondents weren’t sure whether their institution offered any leadership development at all. And only 32.6% of employees said their institution’s efforts were effective.
The demand for leadership development is specific. When asked which skills they most wanted to see in leaders and develop themselves, employees pointed consistently to the human fundamentals of leadership:
- Clear Communication: Direct, inspiring communication that helps employees understand where they fit and why their work matters.
- Trust Building: The ability to earn and maintain trust across the organization.
- Vision Alignment: Articulating a vision and connecting individual work to the institutional direction.
What was notably absent from the top of the list: data fluency, political skill, creativity, even the ability to stay calm under pressure. Employees are not looking for leaders who can navigate complexity. They’re looking for leaders who can tell them where they’re going and make them feel like it matters.
These are learnable skills. They’re also skills that don’t develop in isolation. They require practice, feedback, and exposure to frameworks and peers outside one’s own institution, which is exactly the kind of structured development that too few institutions are currently investing in for current or future managers.
The Manager Paradox
There is an additional layer to this story that deserves attention. When we compared managers to non-managers, a paradox emerged.
Managers were more satisfied, more engaged, more connected to their institution’s culture of learning, and more interested in pursuing further leadership development training. They had higher confidence in their own skills and a stronger sense of belonging at work. By almost every measure, managers were more optimistic than the people they managed.
Managers were also significantly more likely to overrate their own effectiveness as leaders. How large is that gap, and what drives it? We examine that question directly in the final piece in this series.
This is not hypocrisy. It is a lapse in self-awareness. It’s also the natural consequence of leading without mirrors. Managers who are not receiving meaningful feedback, who are not engaged in regular structured reflection, and who are not connected to a broader community of leadership practice, have no reliable mechanism for closing the gap between how they think they’re leading and how they’re actually experienced.
Closing the Gap
The data points to a clear conclusion: institutions that invest meaningfully in leadership development, and communicate that investment in ways employees can see and feel, tend to have higher-performing cultures, more satisfied employees, and better retention. Institutions that have not yet made this investment often find the costs showing up in turnover, burnout, and a gradual erosion of employee confidence.
The good news is that the path forward is not complicated. Our research also shows that leadership development does not need to be elaborate to be effective. Employees with any written professional development plan, even an informal one, reported higher job satisfaction and lower turnover than those with no plan at all. The act of structured, intentional attention to development matters more than comprehensive programming.
The most urgent need in higher education right now is leadership development programs with intentionality. That includes more leaders who take their own development seriously, and more institutions that create the conditions for that to happen: the time, the resources, the culture, and the accountability.
Employees have been clear about what they need. Higher education institutions have the values, the mission, and the talent to deliver it. The question is whether they will make the investment.
Next in this series, we look at where that gap is showing up most visibly: in the steady erosion of employee trust across higher education institutions.