Archives: Leadership Insights

Most senior leaders in higher ed will tell you they believe that everyone can lead. Ask them in a one-on-one, at a retreat, in an all-hands. They’ll mean it.

Many institutions have a beautifully constructed strategic plan. It contains named priorities, articulated values, and goals organized into multi-year arcs. It was produced through an authentic process, with committees convened, stakeholders consulted, and leadership aligned.

You probably know this department. Maybe you’ve led it. Maybe you’ve watched it from the safety of another unit. Or maybe you’re in the middle of it right now.

A demanding period doesn’t have to end in exhaustion alone. What a team carries out of it, whether that’s strain or a stronger baseline, depends less on the period itself and more on what a leader does once the pressure starts to ease.

Monday’s question was where to start, asking “Is this disagreement, or is this depletion?” Today is about what to do once you have an answer.

Treating a capacity-driven reaction like a disagreement usually escalates it, since there’s no real disagreement to resolve underneath. Treating a genuine disagreement like it’s just fatigue can leave a real issue unaddressed, where it tends to resurface later in a sharper form. Getting the read right matters, and so does what happens next

If friction has been landing differently on your team lately, you’re not imagining it.

When a team runs at a demanding pace for an extended stretch, the threshold for friction to surface gets lower. Perhaps a colleague who’s usually easy to work with recently pushed back sharply over a schedule change during a one-on-one. In a calmer month, that exchange might have taken two minutes over email. This time, however, it took the rest of the meeting to work through. The disagreement itself hadn’t changed much. What had changed was how much room there was to address it.

Moving out of siloed leadership doesn’t require a structural overhaul or a campus-wide initiative. It starts smaller than that.

The common assumption about siloed leaders is that they’re “politically” motivated. Guarding resources. Protecting headcount. Playing an institutional long game.

The unit runs well. Deliverables are strong. The team is loyal and capable.

And yet, across campus, no one quite knows what they’re actually doing.

This week, we’ve covered two ways to delegate when you don’t have a team to delegate to. Monday, that meant renegotiating with the person who assigned the work or trading with a peer instead of quietly absorbing the cost yourself. Wednesday, that meant building small structures—a template, a standing slot, a stated default—so that the same request stops costing you something new every time it lands.