Archives: Leadership Insights

There’s a version of kindness that protects people from discomfort in the short term yet leaves them worse off in the long run.

Softened feedback is one of its most common forms in leadership.

You said yes to the committee request you didn’t have the bandwidth for. You softened the feedback until it lost its point. You let the decision sit another week because raising it felt risky.

None of this felt like a leadership failure in the moment. It felt like being considerate. Keeping things smooth. Preserving a relationship that matters.

Our 2025 Professional Development Survey asked respondents to rate leadership competence across multiple skill areas: their own, their unit leaders’, and those of their senior leaders. The results followed a predictable pattern: people rated themselves highest, their direct supervisors somewhat lower, and senior leadership lower still.

That part isn’t surprising. What’s worth paying attention to is which competencies showed the largest gaps.

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.

Many leadership programs fail because they’re built around assumptions of what leadership should look like, rather than what specific leaders actually need.

When we surveyed higher education professionals about the qualities they most value in a leader, three rose to the top: effective communication, building trust, and vision and strategic thinking. These aren’t abstract ideals; they’re the skills people are watching for in their day-to-day experience of being led. A program that doesn’t address them is solving the wrong problem.

Leadership development isn’t invisible. Its absence is felt by everyone on campus.

Our 2025 data bears this out: Only 6% of employees say that their institution is very effective at developing leaders. Thirty percent say their institution is outright ineffective. When faculty and staff lack access to leadership training, they’re less equipped to navigate complex challenges or to guide their teams through change. And because this plays out in real meetings, real decisions, and real interactions, people notice.

Ask most higher ed leaders whether professional development matters to their faculty and staff, and they’ll say yes without hesitation. Ask whether their people know what’s actually available to them, however, and the conversation gets quieter.

That’s the gap surfaced by our 2025 Professional Development Survey. Currently, 84.9% of employees express moderate to high interest in leadership development—up from 75% in 2023. That’s a significant and growing mandate. But 20% of employees don’t know whether their institution even has a leadership development program, and an additional 5.4% know a program exists but believe it isn’t available to them.

Leadership development culture on a team is rarely built through policy, it’s built through observation. Your team members are watching what you prioritize, what you protect on your calendar, what you talk about with enthusiasm, and what you treat as an afterthought. And one of the things they’re watching most closely—often without consciously registering it—is what you do with your own growth.
When leaders actively invest in their own professional development, something measurable happens: There’s a 37% drop in the number of team members who are likely to seek work elsewhere. Not because the leader announced a new development initiative. Not because they rolled out a formal program. But simply because they modeled that growth is something real leaders do—not something they assign to others while standing still themselves.

Most leaders who say they have regular development conversations with their teams are actually having performance conversations wearing a growth label. The agenda looks similar on the surface: a one-on-one, some questions about how things are going, maybe a discussion about goals. But underneath, the orientation is backward-looking and evaluative rather than forward-looking and generative.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. A growth conversation isn’t a softer version of a performance review. It’s a fundamentally different kind of interaction—one where your job isn’t to assess or advise, but to engage and listen.

There’s a belief quietly circulating among higher ed leaders that goes something like this: If I can’t offer my people a promotion, there’s not much point in having a development conversation.
It’s understandable. Institutional budgets are tighter. Headcount is flat or shrinking. Traditional advancement pathways that used to give these conversations a clear destination have narrowed or disappeared entirely. If growth means moving up—and moving up isn’t an option—why raise expectations you can’t meet?