Read Time:
Stop transmitting institutional decisions—start translating them.
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.
The data is striking: While half of respondents reported high or very high trust within their immediate units, trust in the institution as a whole averaged a full point lower on a five-point scale. That gap isn’t a rounding error. It’s a structural feature of how people experience leadership in higher ed right now.
And here’s what makes it consequential for you specifically: The survey found that institutional trust is a stronger predictor of whether someone will look for other work than trust in their immediate supervisor. In other words, the loyalty your team has for you can absorb a lot, but it cannot fully compensate for eroded confidence in the institution’s direction.
Your team’s trust in you is protecting them, and you, from a harder reality. The question that follows is, how long will that protection hold?
The Trust Translator Role That Nobody Assigned You
Most leaders in higher ed don’t control institutional messaging. You didn’t set the strategic plan. You may not have been in the room when the difficult budget decisions were made. And yet your team is looking to you to make sense of it all—not because you have the answers, but because you’re the closest credible authority they have.
This is what we’d call the trust translator role. It doesn’t mean spinning institutional decisions or performing enthusiasm you don’t feel. It means doing the harder thing: helping your team find a coherent line of sight between their daily work and the institution’s direction, even when that direction feels uncertain or incomplete.
When leaders skip this work—when they stay silent about institutional context, or deflect questions upward without engaging them, the trust gap widens. Not because anything bad happened, necessarily, but because the absence of interpretation gets filled by assumption, and assumption under stress tends toward the negative.
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