- May 16
- 6 min read
May 16, 2026
Read Time - 4 minutes
"The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining." ~ John F. Kennedy
Last Tuesday, I led a session on campus culture — feedback, conflict, and change. Ninety-seven academic leaders registered from different institutions, different roles, different levels of the org chart — all working to shape the culture within their own walls.
The Q&A and post-event feedback found common ground around another topic: managing up — and what it costs you when you're caught in the middle. Follow it far enough and the personal undertone becomes this:
How do I lead people through loss without losing their trust in me?
Most leaders treat it as a communication problem. I don't think it is.
Higher ed is contracting. Programs cut. Budgets reduced. Roles eliminated. Most of us have been watching it build on the edges for a few years; now it's sitting in the middle of the room.
When we read about these pressures, the focus is almost always on presidents, provosts, and boards. They're the face of the decisions. What rarely gets named is the squeeze that falls on everyone else in the leadership chain: carrying decisions from above that they didn't make, didn't choose, and in some cases genuinely don't agree with, while also being the ones their teams are looking to for stability, clarity, and some reasonable version of "we're going to be okay." And most are carrying that weight in isolation, without realizing how many others across different institutions are carrying it too.
That's a hard place to stand. And most of the guidance these leaders reach for points toward communication — what to say, how to frame it, how to show up steady. That matters. But it's not where the real problem lives.
Similar Pressures. Different Outcomes.
I saw this play out firsthand. During the early days of COVID, my institution centralized every PPE and equipment decision through a very small team. Three people became the bottleneck for resource allocation across an entire 20,000-person campus. The intent made sense. But what it created was an information vacuum that nobody below them was equipped to fill.
Deans and chairs were among the last to know anything. Were certain units getting preferential treatment? Were layoffs coming? Nobody could confirm or deny any of it — because the people making decisions weren't communicating down, and the people closest to the ground had nothing to pass on.
What filled the vacuum was anxiety. And what most of us did with it was what people in that position often do: we processed it laterally. We called each other. We complained about the process. We absorbed the pressure without moving it anywhere useful. The instinct to reach for each other was right. What we were missing was something constructive to bring to those conversations.
The institution had no shared understanding of who owned what, who could speak to what, or how decisions would flow under pressure. So when pressure came, it did what we see too often: it locked everything down.
The leaders who navigate these moments differently didn't figure it out in the crisis. They built something before it arrived. Kevin McClure, a professor of higher education at UNC Wilmington, put it plainly in a 2025 Inside Higher Ed interview: "There is the need for some internal trust-building right now as a crucial defense mechanism if we are going to make it through the next couple of years."
Case in point: This past year, I watched a close friend, a senior leader I've known well and worked directly with his team, navigate this exact situation. His administration announced budget cuts early in the fall that ended up significantly larger than initially communicated. Employee benefits were also slashed in ways that caught the campus off guard. He found out about the full scope a few days before the public announcement, the same timeline as his peers.
What followed looked different across campus. Several of his colleagues were immediately on the defensive, managing fallout between their units and upper administration without a plan or the relational equity to absorb the shock. These were good leaders. They just hadn't built the kind of trust that distributes the weight. When the shock arrived, they were carrying it alone.
The faculty and staff in my friend's unit weren't happy. There was no version of this that felt good. But they were more open, more adaptable, and more willing to stay in the conversation rather than retreating into resentment. The reason had very little to do with what he said the day of the announcement. It had everything to do with the trust he had built over time, the team structures he had put in place to manage the backchanneling and the anxiety, and the communication rhythms that had established him as someone who told the truth and didn't lose his footing under pressure.
None of that made the bad news good. But it did make the leader's response to bad news credible.
My friend had years to build that. Not everyone does.
What's Still Available To You
Some of you still have runway to build before the pressure arrives. For others, the hard news has already arrived. These moves won't replace what takes time to build — but they're what's available to you right now, wherever you are:
Own the why. The instinct many leaders reach for is distance: "I didn't like this either, but this came from above." That kills your authority and leaves your team feeling abandoned. Even when you disagree with the decision, understand the reasoning well enough to explain the why, and not just the what. What constraints led here? What broader pressures shaped it? Shifting the frame from bad leadership to navigating reality keeps the conversation grounded.
Disagree and commit. You can advocate hard behind closed doors. Once the decision is made, however, it's best to represent that choice and not pretend we agreed. Be direct: "I pushed for a different path because of [X], but the decision was made to address [Z]. My focus now is making sure we work through this in a way that protects this team." Your people need to know you fought for them and that you're still leading, not just reacting. And your boss needs to see that you can disagree without undermining — that's how you build trust in both directions.
Control the how. You may not have owned the decision, but you likely have a say in how it's implemented. Give your team something to work with: the what is settled, but how we move through it is ours to decide. Returning agency over execution, even within a constrained situation, restores something. It reminds your team that their leader isn't just a pass-through for bad news.
The Bottom Line
Being the messenger of decisions you didn't make, while holding your team's trust and keeping your community intact, is hard. I've spoken with leaders across many institutions the past few months, and the sentiment is consistent: campus anxieties are high and not a lot of grace is being extended to the people standing at the front of hard decisions.
Moments like this can make some of the most talented and capable leaders stumble. If you feel like you're one of them, extend yourself some of that grace. When we go through hard times we sometimes question our own talents and gifts. But they are still there. Just like we tell our students: these moments are snapshots, not verdicts. As long as we're paying attention, we can learn and grow through them.
And no one does that learning alone. The leaders who navigate these seasons best find others carrying the same weight and think through it together. That matters more right now than it has in a long time.
Until next week.
P.S. The closing thought in this issue wasn't accidental. No one figures this out alone, and the leaders who navigate these seasons best don't try to. A small coaching cohort for academic leaders called The Designed Leader, now in its third run, runs over eight weeks this summer to build together what's hard to build in isolation: the trust, the communication rhythms, and the clarity about what you own, so you can protect time for the work that matters most to you. June cohort, capped at 10 leaders. Learn more and apply →
Have something specific you're working through? Reply and tell me what you're navigating. I read every one.
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