- 11 hours ago
- 6 min read
March 14, 2026
Read Time - 3.5 minutes
“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others." ~ Jack Welch
It was supposed to be a routine check-in.
Three years in. Solid performer. The kind of staff member who makes your unit better just by showing up every day with care and competence.
But what she opened the meeting with stopped me cold: "I love working here. But I don't see a future."
She wasn't being dramatic. She was being honest. And she was right.
Small team. Flat org chart. No upward mobility on the horizon. On most campuses, that's not a leadership failure — it's structural reality. But sitting across from her, I felt the weight of it anyway.
I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since.
The Leadership Takeaway
Here's what most of us were never taught: retention is not primarily about promotions. According to CUPA-HR's 2025 Higher Education Employee Retention Survey, fewer than 10% of higher ed employees received a promotion in the past year — yet that same research shows that feeling valued, having a sense of belonging, and having access to development opportunities are far stronger predictors of whether someone stays than compensation alone.
That's a gap most of us can actually close — with intentionality. But I want to push this further, because I think we've been asking the wrong question. We tend to frame retention as success and departure as failure. I don't see it that way anymore. I'll take two or three years with an A player over five years with a B or C player every single time. The goal shouldn't be to keep our best people forever. The goal is to develop them so fully that wherever they go next, they're better for having worked with us — and our team is better for having stretched alongside them. That's an obligation, not a perk. Every person on your team — from the new assistant chair still finding their footing to the administrative assistant who has quietly become the institutional memory of your entire operation — has the potential to become a genuine expert in their domain. But that only happens if someone invests in them. Without that investment, we're not leading people. We're just assigning tasks and hoping they stay long enough to complete them. The units that thrive over time aren't the ones that hoard talent. They're the ones that grow it. And the leaders behind those units understand something the org chart doesn't show: development isn't a retention strategy. It's a leadership responsibility. The offer that earns people's best work — whether they stay or not — isn't usually a bigger title. It's something simpler and rarer: a leader who genuinely sees them, invests in them, and helps them grow into more than the job description ever anticipated.
What That Actually Looks Like
1.) Know your people — and know where they want to go.
You can't develop someone you don't actually know. That sounds obvious, but most career conversations in higher ed happen once a year inside a performance review — which means they're happening inside the wrong container entirely. A review is about the past. Development is about the future. And it shouldn't wait for annual review season to happen.
Start treating career conversations as a running thread in your regular one-on-ones. Not a formal agenda item — just a question you return to. What are they trying to build? What kind of work energizes them? Where do they want to be/What do they want to be able to do in three years, on this campus or somewhere else? When you know the answers, you can start connecting the dots between what they want and what you actually have to offer. When you don't, you're guessing — and usually guessing wrong.
2.) Offer stretch opportunities — and don't wait for the perfect one.
Stretch assignments build skills and confidence, and they don't need to be dramatic. Leading one segment of a departmental retreat. Representing your unit on a cross-campus task force. Taking point on a new initiative. Participating in a search committee for the first time.
These low-stakes opportunities are where growth actually happens — in real conditions, with you close enough to catch someone if they stumble. The goal isn't to pile more onto your highest performers. It's to offer targeted opportunities that align with where they want to go.
Small stretches often lead to bigger ones. Don't hold out for the perfect assignment. Start somewhere.
3.) Invest in their professional growth, and mean it.
Advocating for conferences, leadership workshops, and campus development programs is table stakes. Go further. Nearly every functional area in higher ed has its own professional organization — academic advisors, business officers, executive assistants, student affairs professionals, institutional researchers. Most staff don't know these networks exist until someone points them there—do that.
And consider encouraging your team to look outside higher ed entirely. Some of the sharpest operational thinking I've seen walk through my door came from someone who had just attended a conference in the corporate or non-profit version of their field. A fresh perspective can do more than a familiar one.
4.) Celebrate the growth — even when it leads somewhere else.
The staff member I mentioned at the beginning? She wanted to move into managing student advising teams. So we found opportunities for her to supervise student workers and manage small projects that required coordinating across units. Nine months later, she took a supervisory role at another institution. It paid more than we could have offered. She was closer to family. And there was a real path upward waiting for her.
I celebrated it.
This is the part that trips up a lot of leaders. We hear "invest in people" and think it means "invest so they stay."
That's understandable — losing a strong performer is genuinely hard, especially when you're already stretched thin. But that framing puts your needs at the center of someone else's development, and people feel that.
According to a 2021 Harvard Business Review study, the single greatest variable in talent mobility isn't HR programming, institutional policy, or salary bands — it's individual managers—That's you! Which means the way you show up in those one-on-ones, the stretch you offer, the connections you make on someone's behalf — all of it compounds in ways you may never fully see.
When your A player leaves more capable than they arrived, that's not a loss. That's the whole point. And the people who stayed and watched you invest in her? They noticed. That's how you build a culture where people bring their best work, whether they're with you for two years or ten.
The Bottom Line
On her last day, that staff member stopped by my office and said she couldn't have gotten that job without the experiences we'd built together. I don't think she knew what that meant to me. Honestly, I'm not sure I fully knew in that moment either. But I've thought about it a lot since. That's the part of leadership they don't put in the job description. Not the budget cycles or the faculty meetings or the enrollment reports — the moment when someone you invested in walks out the door more capable, more confident, and more ready than when they walked in. And they know it. And you know it. You may not be able to promise a promotion. You can't control the org chart, the budget, or whether the right vacancy opens at the right time. But you can control whether the people on your team know you see them — not as positions to be filled, but as people worth developing. That's what retention runs on. Not titles—Trust. And here's what I've found: when people trust that their supervisor is genuinely in their corner, they don't just stay longer. They show up differently. They take more initiative. They invest in the team the way you invested in them. The culture starts to feed itself. You may lose your A players eventually. Probably sooner than you'd like. But if you do it right, you'll have built something that outlasts them — a team that knows what good leadership feels like, and expects it. And that's worth more than any title you could have offered.
Try This Before Friday
Pick one person on your team. Someone you consider a solid contributor — but someone whose career goals you honestly couldn't articulate right now if asked.
Send them a two-sentence message this week: "I want to make sure I know what growth areas you're interested in and whether there are experiences or opportunities I could be helping you access that I'm not. Can we spend 15 minutes in our next one-on-one talking about that?”
It doesn't need to be prepare. No formal agenda needed. Just open the door.
The conversation itself is the investment. And if it feels overdue, that's useful information too.
That's all for now. See you next week..
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