Read Time:
Decide that your job is to make sure the people above you have the best available information before a decision is finalized.
Most higher ed leaders have experienced this moment: You’re in a meeting with your Dean, your VP, or your Provost. A decision is being shaped. You see a problem with it — a gap in the data, a consequence that’s being overlooked, a premise that doesn’t hold. And you say nothing.
Not because you don’t care. But because the decision happens so fast you barely notice it: “Is this the right time? Will I seem difficult? Is this my call to make?” By the time you’ve finished asking, the moment is gone.
This is how institutional mistakes get made — not through bad leadership at the top, but through capable leaders below who stayed quiet.
The cost of silence is real. When mid-level leaders don’t push back, senior leaders make decisions without the most accurate information available. Resources get misallocated. Initiatives land without buy-in. And the leaders who stayed quiet? They spend the next six months implementing something they already knew was flawed.
Silence isn’t neutral. It’s a choice that has consequences for the institution, and for how seriously you’re taken over time.
Reframe What Pushback Is
The leaders who are most effective at disagreeing upward don’t think of it as conflict. They think of it as contribution. They’ve decided that their job is to make sure the people above them have the best available information before a decision is finalized. That’s not insubordination. That’s stewardship.
This reframe matters because it changes the internal register — you’re not challenging authority. You’re doing your job.
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