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Carrying your own doubt about leadership above you, while watching your team feel the same thing, is genuinely hard—and both can be true at once.
If you trust the people on your team more than you trust the leadership above you, you’re not alone, and you’re not being unreasonable. Our 2025 Professional Development Survey found something worth naming plainly: that trust in immediate managers across higher ed tends to hold up reasonably well, but trust in senior institutional leadership does not. That gap isn’t a minor data point—it’s one of the clearest predictors in the survey of whether people stay or leave.
This isn’t about validating cynicism. It’s about naming something a lot of leaders are already living with privately, often without permission to say it out loud. If you’ve felt that gap yourself, that’s not a character flaw or a failure of institutional loyalty. It’s a widely shared experience, and the data backs that up.
In other words, you’re holding two things at once. You are, right now, possibly someone who has your own eroded trust in the leadership above you. You are also, quite possibly, someone whose team is experiencing that same erosion—maybe more acutely than you are—because they have even less visibility into the reasoning behind decisions than you do. Both of those things can be true at the same time, and carrying both is genuinely hard. This week isn’t going to resolve that tension—it’s going to help you locate where you actually stand before asking you to do anything about it.
Two Traps
When trust in leadership above you erodes, there are two easy directions to choose, and both will cost you something.
One choice is to perform an enthusiasm you don’t actually feel, showing up energized about a direction you privately doubt. Your team sees through that faster than you’d like to think.
The other is quietly signaling your own skepticism—perhaps with a raised eyebrow in a meeting or a comment that lets your team know that you’re not fully on board either. That might feel honest in the moment, but it accelerates your team’s disengagement, because now they’ve lost confidence in the person closest to them too.
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