Archives: Leadership Insights

Think about the last recurring meeting you attended: the Tuesday check-in, the weekly huddle, the standing committee that’s been on your calendar for years.

Now picture the room. Who talked first? Who took notes and said nothing? Who agreed to the plan out loud, but then found you in the hallway an hour later to say what they actually thought?

On Wednesday, we named the gap: that conference ideas don’t fail because leaders forget them. They fail because no one takes the extra step of adapting them to fit the specific team, culture, and constraints back home.

You spent three days at a conference or workshop. You took notes. You had the kind of conversations that made you rethink how your team could work. You came home energized.

This week closes with the question underneath everything else it has covered: What does it mean to lead with integrity when you genuinely disagree with the direction your institution is heading? There’s no clean answer here, and we won’t pretend otherwise. But there is a way to think through it honestly, and that’s worth more than a tidy resolution would be.

Last time, we named something that a lot of leaders carry privately: eroded trust in the leadership above them, and the difficulty of holding that alongside a team who may be feeling the same erosion—sometimes more acutely. Naming it matters. But naming it isn’t the same as doing something useful with it, and this is where the week turns practical.

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.

At some point, every peer accountability situation raises a harder question than “How do I raise this?” Which is, “At what point does continued pressure do more damage to the relationship and to the work than the original gap ever did?”

Restating what the group actually agreed to, out loud, often does more work than a direct confrontation ever could. On Monday, we named the discomfort you feel with peer accountability. This is the practical core of the week, and it starts from a premise that’s worth saying out loud because it’s easy to forget mid-frustration: You cannot make a peer do anything. No amount of clarity, directness, or good framing changes that. What you can do is be clear, be direct, and create conditions where not following through becomes more visible and harder to quietly sustain. That’s a smaller promise than “fix this,” but it’s a real one, and it’s the one that’s actually available to you. Three moves tend to work, and none of them require positional power to execute. Naming the shared commitment explicitly. When a peer hasn’t followed through, the instinct is often to let it pass once, then twice, hoping that it corrects itself or that you’re misreading it. A more useful move is to restate what the group actually agreed to, out loud, in a way that makes it a shared reference point rather than a personal accusation. In a committee setting, that might sound […]

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.

This week, we’ve explored how leader experience isn’t tied to how employees perceive their leader’s support of their professional development. That’s significant because, as our latest Professional Development Survey exposed, many leaders in higher education are operating with five years or less experience in their roles.