Senior leadership teams are almost always in flux.
With so many challenges hitting higher education at once, the stability we once assumed at the cabinet level is mostly gone. Most senior teams now see turnover every year, sometimes more. One leader retires and opens a seat. Another moves on to a new role at a new institution. A new person joins from the outside. Someone internal steps up into the role that opened. Even a couple of changes can leave you with an entirely different team dynamic, or at least the potential for one.
Unfortunately, most presidents and chancellors don’t take the time to invest in their most senior leaders, let alone their leadership teams. This is a huge missed opportunity. They might manage a VP, send them to a conference, and supervise their portfolio and performance. And they leave the dynamics of the team itself untended, as if a group of talented individuals will simply add up to a strong team on its own. It doesn’t work that way.
A senior leadership team is responsible for hundreds and thousands of faculty, staff, and administrators. The impact a cabinet has when it gets this right is enormous. Setting a clear and collective sense of purpose and direction. Creating aligned action. Communicating clearly. Setting the culture. Reinforcing the values that matter most, day in and day out, in service of that shared purpose.
The impact when it goes the other way is just as significant, if not more so.
When senior leaders compete with one another instead of collaborating, they don’t just fail to advance the institution’s purpose. They actively undermine it. When leaders see their primary job as defending their own fiefdom, that doesn’t serve the institution, the students, or the communities the institution exists to serve. When a leader’s real focus is their own next move, the bigger and better role somewhere else, they’re leading for themselves and not for the collective. And when a leader operates from ego, fear, or scarcity, that gets reinforced throughout the organization and magnified, amplified far beyond that one person.
No leader is perfect. No leadership team is perfect. Chasing that is a trap. But if we can come together, as leaders and as teams, to advance the common good of our institutions and the communities we serve, that’s the kind of leadership this moment is asking of us.
If you’re stepping into a changed cabinet or watching a strong group of leaders struggle to function as a team, this is exactly the work we do with intact leadership teams at the Evolve Institute. If that’s where you are, I’m glad to talk it through with you.
