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Leadership Insights
If you lead a team in higher education right now, there’s a reasonable chance you’ve built something real. People show up, collaborate, cover for each other, and extend you the benefit of the doubt when things get hard. That kind of unit-level trust is genuinely difficult to build, and it matters.
But our 2025 Professional Development Survey suggests that it has a ceiling, and that ceiling is the institution above you.
The data is striking: While half of respondents reported high or very high trust within their immediate units, trust in the institution as a whole averaged a full point lower on a five-point scale. That gap isn’t a rounding error. It’s a structural feature of how people experience leadership in higher ed right now.
And here’s what makes it consequential for you specifically: The survey found that institutional trust is a stronger predictor of whether someone will look for other work than trust in their immediate supervisor. In other words, the loyalty your team has for you can absorb a lot, but it cannot fully compensate for eroded confidence in the institution’s direction.
Your team’s trust in you is protecting them, and you, from a harder reality. The question that follows is, how long will that protection hold?
The Trust Translator Role That Nobody Assigned You
Most leaders in higher ed don’t control institutional messaging. You didn’t set the strategic plan. You may not have been in the room when the difficult budget decisions were made. And yet your team is looking to you to make sense of it all—not because you have the answers, but because you’re the closest credible authority they have.
This is what we’d call the trust translator role. It doesn’t mean spinning institutional decisions or performing enthusiasm you don’t feel. It means doing the harder thing: helping your team find a coherent line of sight between their daily work and the institution’s direction, even when that direction feels uncertain or incomplete.
When leaders skip this work—when they stay silent about institutional context, or deflect questions upward without engaging them, the trust gap widens. Not because anything bad happened, necessarily, but because the absence of interpretation gets filled by assumption, and assumption under stress tends toward the negative.
What Translation Actually Looks Like
This isn’t about holding town halls or sending all-staff emails. It’s usually quieter than that.
Instead, it looks like taking five minutes at the start of a team meeting to name something happening at the institutional level, where you explain honestly how you see it connecting to your unit’s work. It looks like saying “I don’t know yet, but here’s what I do know,” rather than waiting until you have a complete answer. It looks like asking your team what they’re hearing and what questions they’re carrying, and then actually following up.
The goal isn’t to resolve the uncertainty. You can’t. The goal is to make sure your team knows you’re willing to sit in it with them rather than pretend it isn’t there.
Leaders who do this consistently tend to build something harder to measure but more durable than unit-level trust: They build the sense that leadership, at least at this level, is being honest with them. That perception travels upward over time. It doesn’t close the institutional trust gap on its own, but it stops the gap from widening on your watch.
Pause & Reflect
Think about the last significant institutional decision that affected your team: a budget change, a restructuring, a new policy directive. Did you actively help your team to interpret it, or did you mostly pass along the information and move on? What would it have looked like to translate rather than just transmit?
Pro Tip: Open Sophia in your Academic Impressions account and try this prompt: “Help me prepare for a team conversation about [institutional change or challenge]. I want to be honest about uncertainty without undermining confidence in the institution.” She can help you to find the language before the meeting.
Want to see the full data? Read the complete findings in the 2025 Academic Impressions Professional Development Survey.