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Saying nothing to a peer who isn’t following through doesn’t communicate kindness; it communicates that you don’t expect much from them.
A colleague on a committee hasn’t done the piece they agreed to do. A Co-Chair on a cross-functional project keeps missing deadlines without saying why. A fellow Dean isn’t following through on a commitment the two of you made together in front of other people. You notice. And you’re bothered by it. But you say nothing, because saying something feels disproportionately hard given what’s actually at stake.
It’s worth naming plainly: Holding a peer accountable is genuinely harder than holding a direct report accountable. This isn’t a failure of nerve. It’s a structural reality. With a direct report, you have tools that create a natural path forward: formal authority, a performance process, and role clarity that makes it obvious whose job it is to raise the issue. With a peer, none of those tools exist. You can’t performance-manage a colleague. There’s no structure that obligates them to respond to you. Whatever you’re going to do here, you have to do it without the scaffolding that makes accountability conversations easier everywhere else.
Higher ed raises the stakes further. In most institutions, relationships are long. Institutional memory is long. The colleague you’d need to confront today is someone you may sit across from in meetings for the next fifteen years. That committee Co-Chair might be reviewing your program in a future accreditation cycle. That fellow Dean might be your closest ally on a budget fight next year. The calculation isn’t just “How do I raise this?” It’s “How do I raise this in a way that doesn’t cost me something I’ll need later?” That calculation isn’t paranoid, it’s how higher ed actually works—and it’s part of why so many leaders default to silence instead of to a direct conversation.
The discomfort you feel here isn’t a signal that you’re doing something wrong. It’s a signal that you’re in a genuinely harder category of conversation than the ones you’ve been trained for.
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