- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
February 7, 2026
Read Time - 4 minutes
"Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage." ~ Patrick Lencioni
Your university just spent $2 million on a marketing campaign.
The campaign brought students through the door. But they were met by burnt-out staff who couldn't help them and sent them to other offices on campus.
The campaign promised a "transformative education." But students encountered faculty who didn't know anything happening outside their own department.
The campaign showcased "career-ready graduates." But students found administrators who didn't know how curriculum was connected to the workforce.
Marketing gets people to show up. Leadership determines whether they stay.
We pour resources into things that look strategic—new programs, facility upgrades, rebrands—but we underinvest in the one thing that determines whether any of it works: developing leaders.
Weak leaders create weak institutions. Strong leaders create strong institutions.
And if you're a campus leader who hasn't invested in developing your people, you can't complain about weak execution. You're the bottleneck.
WHY WE KEEP MISSING THE OBVIOUS
Walk onto almost any campus and you'll see the pattern:
Marketing campaigns change, but the front-line service stays the same.
Reorganizations shuffle the org chart, but decision-making habits don't change.
Mission statements get rewritten, but culture doesn't shift.
Technology gets upgraded, but leadership capacity doesn't.
We keep investing in visible changes while ignoring the invisible one that matters most: the people making a thousand decisions every day.
Leadership development feels too slow, too intangible, too hard to measure. So we choose the shiny option—the one we can point to in the next campus meeting.
What's missing is this: your institution's capacity equals your leaders' capacity. You can't reorganize your way past that.
Leadership Is Not Just the President’s Job
When people picture "university leadership," they think presidents and provosts. But most leadership happens somewhere else entirely.
Research suggests that up to 80% of institutional decisions happen at the middle management level—through department chairs, program directors, and area coordinators. These are the people shaping workloads, designing programs, advising students, building schedules, and deciding which partnerships to pursue.
Most were promoted because they were excellent researchers or teachers. Almost none were trained to manage people, resolve conflict, or steward budgets. And yet we expect them to execute the strategic plan, improve culture, and deliver results—without ever teaching them how.
Failing to develop this layer of leadership is like building a beautiful library on an unfinished foundation. Eventually, something breaks.
WHAT DEVELOPED LEADERS DELIVER
When institutions invest in developing leaders—not just executives, but chairs, directors, and emerging faculty—the returns show up everywhere.
They engage and retain people. Gallup found that 70% of employee engagement variance comes from the manager. Engaged teams deliver 23% higher profitability, 18% higher productivity, and up to 43% lower turnover. A decade-long study of 15,000+ faculty and staff confirmed it: leadership support for development was the top predictor of job satisfaction, and dissatisfied employees were 67% more likely to leave within a year.
Translation: when you develop your chairs and directors, you keep your best people.
They drive institutional performance. A meta-analysis of 113 studies over 25 years found that leadership quality directly improves outcomes at individual, team, and organizational levels. For universities, that means stronger collaboration, more effective execution of strategic priorities, and better results across the board.
Your strategic plan is only as good as the leaders executing it.
They build the leadership pipeline. Faculty who receive early mentoring report four times greater job satisfaction, are less likely to stagnate, and are more likely to mentor others—multiplying leadership capacity across generations (NCFDD). Without a pipeline, leadership transitions disrupt the institution. With one, they strengthen it.
Simply put: every dollar spent developing leaders pays dividends across enrollment, retention, culture, and student success.
WHY LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT DOESN'T HAPPEN
If developing leaders is so powerful, why don't more institutions do it?
Because it's hard to defend in a budget meeting.
Leadership development takes time—it's ongoing work, not a two-day workshop. It feels intangible—you can't point to a building or a shiny new program. It challenges culture—real development requires people to confront ingrained habits and behaviors. And it lacks a clear owner—too often, no one is explicitly tasked with it.
So it gets pushed aside for investments that are easier to explain: another marketing push, a new academic program, a facility renovation. However, your institution's capacity equals your leaders' capacity. Avoiding the work doesn't make the need go away—it just ensures the gap keeps widening.
BUILDING A CULTURE OF LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Leadership development isn't a workshop—it's the ongoing work of equipping people to influence, decide, and move the institution forward.
Here's where to start:
Broaden who you call a leader. Don't limit development to people with "Dean" or "Director" in their title. Include department chairs, program coordinators, and staff supervisors—anyone making decisions that shape the student experience or institutional culture.
Create structures for peer learning. Pair new chairs with experienced ones. Launch a cohort for mid-level leaders that meets monthly—not for compliance training, but for coaching on real problems. Give people a place to learn from each other's challenges, not just their own.
Measure what matters, not what's easy. Don't count workshop hours. Track engagement scores, retention rates, and whether leaders are building capacity in others. Leadership development works when it changes behavior—not when it fills a calendar.
At its best, leadership development equips people to think strategically, act decisively, and grow the leaders around them.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Universities spend millions on marketing, facilities, and technology. But without developed leaders, those investments fall short.
Leadership development isn't just another initiative—it's the one investment that multiplies the impact of every other effort. It strengthens culture, improves retention, sharpens execution, and builds the capacity your institution needs to navigate what's ahead.
Here's the paradox: when you invest in developing leaders, you reach your goals faster—because your team is stronger.
It is how good institutions become great ones. And great institutions? They're built by leaders who had someone invest in them first.
Try This Before Friday
Identify your "hidden leaders"—people who regularly influence decisions but don't have formal leadership titles. Pick one and schedule a 20-minute conversation this week about a leadership challenge they're currently navigating. Listen for what support they need and invest back into them.
That's it for today. Thanks for reading.
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