You were good at your last job. People noticed your success and appreciated all you had to offer. You were promoted. And now something feels off.
Not catastrophically. You’re hard-working, dedicated, and busier than ever. Yet there is a friction you cannot quite name. You are working so hard and just barely staying afloat. The tools that used to serve you so well no longer seem to be serving you. You wonder if you should have stayed in the last role. You wouldn’t be the first senior leader to feel that way and that feeling is pointing at something real.
There are three paradoxes embedded in senior higher education leadership that rarely get named directly, quietly draining energy, slowing momentum, and keeping smart, dedicated leaders busy without moving their institutions forward.
The Promotion Paradox
The capacities that made you successful in your last role are not the capacities that will make you successful in this one. A promotion into senior leadership isn’t a larger version of what came before. It’s fundamentally different work. And most senior leaders are operating, at least partially, from the playbook that earned them the promotion. It’s familiar. It feels productive. And it quietly prevents them from developing the new capacities that will make them successful in the new role.
The Expertise Paradox
You spent a decade or two developing expertise in your academic discipline or administrative function. That expertise helps you be excellent and earns you credibility and trust. But senior leadership requires a different expertise, leading through uncertainty, navigating complexity and the unknown, and exercising influence where you have responsibility but not authority. None of that came with your discipline or functional area. It has to be built. And higher education tends to assume it arrives automatically with the new title, which is one of the most costly assumptions we make.
The Learning Paradox
Higher education’s central purpose is learning, growth, and development. And yet it invests almost nothing in developing its own senior leaders. The dominant approach is selection, not development. Find the right person and hope they arrive fully formed. We prefer to evaluate and judge rather than invest in and develop.
When development does occur, it often misses the mark. Conferences are great for connecting with colleagues and commiserating over a beverage, but they are not designed to advance your craft at the senior level. Generic solutions from consultants who don’t understand higher education do more harm than good. Telling a new provost to lead like a startup CEO fails to account for higher education’s culture, context, and purpose. Individual coaching develops the leader without developing the team, the organization, or the institution.
These three paradoxes compound. A leader over-relying on old expertise, without the capacities their role requires, and without meaningful developmental support, is working harder than ever while seeing results dwindle.
This is the problem Evolve was built to address. My colleagues Brian Arao, Dawn Lee, and I created Evolve specifically for senior higher education leaders. Each of us has spent decades in higher education leadership roles and holds a terminal degree in higher education. Leading in higher education is our expertise. Evolve is designed from the ground up so that our coaching journeys build the internal capacity senior leadership actually requires for individual leaders and for leadership teams.
If you recognize yourself in any of these paradoxes and are ready to invest in your development, I’d welcome a conversation.
