Higher education’s central purpose is to help students learn, grow, and develop. We prepare students to think critically, engage with complexity, innovate in the face of uncertainty, and embrace new possibilities for a better future. We have themes at graduation: BOLD, innovation, kindness, and hope. Learning, growth, and development are not just values in higher education. They are the entire point.
And yet when it comes to its own leaders and leadership, higher education takes the opposite approach.
This is the Learning Paradox. It sits alongside two others worth naming. The Promotion Paradox: the capacities that earned the promotion are not the capacities the new role requires. The Expertise Paradox: the deep knowledge that made leaders exceptional before can now become an obstacle to leading well. The Learning Paradox is the third leg of this stool undermining higher education leadership: higher education simply does not invest in the learning and growth of its leaders.
We proudly spend years, or even a decade, developing a physicist, a literary scholar, or a student affairs administrator. We invest in and require multiple degrees, mentorship, supervised practice, and ongoing professional development. Then we promote that person into a senior leadership role and expect them to succeed with almost no investment in their growth, support for their development, or commitment to their learning as a leader. We spend years preparing someone to teach in the college of natural sciences and almost no time preparing them to lead it.
Higher education also claims to prepare students for a life of innovation, radical reimagining, and willingness to boldly shape the future, yet we often want higher education leaders to do none of this. We laud faculty exploring the cutting edge of data, practice, and innovation, yet we expect higher education leaders to maintain a status quo that has been outdated for decades. The contradiction is striking: we are committed to preparing students to change the world, but rarely trust our own leaders to change the institution.
The hiring practices reflect the same fixed mindset. When a leadership vacancy opens, institutions look for a hero from within or a savior from somewhere else. The assumption is that the right person already has what it takes. Development is an afterthought at best. Too often, rather than investing in leaders’ growth and development, we evaluate whether we hired the right person. If not, we let them go and invest in another expensive, time-consuming search, or worse yet, we don’t. The institution that champions growth for its students rarely asks what growth it owes its leaders.
At Evolve, we are ready to invest in your leadership. We help smart, capable, and committed individuals take their leadership to the next level. We invest in your learning, support your growth, and are committed to your development. We do this through individual and group coaching as well as an intentional, curated, and concise curriculum designed for each level of higher education senior leadership. If you are ready to invest in your leadership or your leadership team, let’s connect.
