There is a tendency to experience the challenges we face as evidence that something has gone wrong with ourselves, our teams, our institutions, even our times.
We wait for things to pass. We may blame ourselves for not anticipating, fixing, or avoiding these issues. We may blame others. We imagine other campuses where the problems are smaller, the politics are cleaner, or the resources are more adequate. We wonder if we chose the wrong moment, the wrong institution, or the wrong path.
But what if none of that is true?
The leaders we work with in Evolve often arrive beleaguered by the challenges in their unique context and discover, sometimes both affirming relief and frustrated recognition, that others across very different institutions are navigating similar challenges of enrollment pressures, fractured trust, reorganization that does not align with espoused values, technology that moves faster than policy, and people being asked of them more than they have been prepared for.
You are not a failure. Your institution is not uniquely broken. The challenges you are carrying are real and as unique as they are, they are often broadly shared. What if this wasn’t a failure of leadership, yours or others, but a call to your leadership?
We talk about the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) world with a tone of frustration and exhaustion. However, if the world were stable, certain, simple, and clear, we wouldn’t need your leadership. If students always did what was asked of them the way we expected, we wouldn’t need student affairs professionals. If institutions could operate on their own, we wouldn’t need staff. If higher education were a simple enterprise, we wouldn’t need leaders like you.
These challenges push us to innovation, creativity, and new ways of being that are more effective, more efficient, more inclusive, and better serve the students of today and the communities of the future. The challenges are not obstacles to the work; they are a call to lead with and through the storm.
So embrace your challenges, they are both shared by others and unique to you. This is why we need your expertise, dedication, creativity, and leadership. If you can stay rooted, you can lead with and through any storm, rather than be consumed by it.
If you are ready to stop waiting for things to settle and start building the capacity to lead through them, we would love to have you in the room with us.
