Developing Leadership Skills Across Faculty and Administrative Teams

Universities do not have a shortage of intelligent people. What they frequently lack is a structured way to develop those people into effective leaders once the nature of their work changes.

The pattern is familiar to most HR directors and academic administrators. A respected faculty member takes on the role of department chair. An associate dean steps into a dean role. An assistant provost absorbs system-wide responsibilities. The title changes, expectations expand, and the institution treats that shift as the transition itself. What is frequently missing is the leadership development that would help the individual succeed in the new role.

The result shows up gradually. Communication between departments becomes inconsistent. Decisions that require cross-functional input stall, or teams make them unilaterally. Faculty and administrative leaders operate in parallel rather than together. The friction is real. Yet leaders rarely trace it back to its root cause: capable and committed people who have not been prepared for the relational and organizational demands of their roles.

This piece focuses on what structured leadership development actually looks like in higher education. It also examines why it functions differently from coaching an individual through a role transition. Where coaching develops the leader, development programs develop the institution.

Why Leadership Development in Higher Education Requires Its Own Approach

Academic institutions are not structured the way most leadership development programs assume. Authority spreads across many roles rather than concentrating at the top. Faculty governance operates on its own timeline. As a result, decisions that would take days in a corporate setting can require months of consultation, committee review, and stakeholder alignment in a university context.

Leadership in this higher education depends less on positional authority and more on the ability to build credibility, navigate competing interests, and communicate across audiences. A provost speaking to the faculty senate is doing fundamentally different work than when presenting to the board of trustees or responding to a student affairs crisis. The role demands range, and range is developed, not inherited.

Generic leadership programs built for corporate environments tend to miss this reality. They assume hierarchy, clear accountability structures, and leaders who can direct rather than persuade. Development programs designed for higher education, by contrast, start from a different premise: leadership here is largely relational, and influence is the primary lever for change.

Core Skills That Strengthen Academic Leadership Teams

Effective leadership development in higher education focuses on a specific set of capabilities that drive performance across faculty and administrative teams. These are skills that improve through guided practice and feedback, not abstract competencies assessed once and filed away.

Communication Across Different Audiences

Academic leaders regularly communicate the same institutional decision to audiences with very different perspectives, stakes, and levels of trust. Tenured faculty, junior staff, external partners, students, and governing boards all need different things from the same message. Strong development programs help leaders think about audience before content. They also practice adapting their communication style without sacrificing clarity or credibility in the process.

Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Siloed departments are one of the most consistent sources of institutional friction in higher education. Development programs that put leaders from different functions into shared learning experiences begin to break down the assumptions that sustain those silos. When leaders work through real challenges together (academic, financial, operational), they develop shared language and mutual understanding. Those relationships often outlast the program itself, improving collaboration long after formal development concludes.

Decision-Making Under Ambiguity

Most significant decisions in higher education involve incomplete information, competing priorities, and stakeholders who will evaluate the outcome differently depending on what they were hoping for. Development programs that use realistic scenarios from academic environments help leaders practice making sound judgments under those conditions. Over time, this prevents leaders from discovering their decision-making gaps in the middle of a tenure dispute or a budget reallocation.

Conflict Navigation

Conflict in academic institutions often goes underground rather than getting addressed directly. Faculty disagreements calcify. Interdepartmental tensions persist across leadership transitions. Development programs grounded in behavioral science help leaders understand what drives conflict beneath the surface. They also help leaders address it in ways that preserve relationships and move the work forward.

Organizational Awareness

The most effective academic leaders understand how their institution actually works. They recognize informal power structures, historical fault lines, and decisions that carry symbolic weight beyond their practical implications. While experience builds this awareness over time, development programs that explicitly teach leaders how to read organizational dynamics can accelerate it significantly.

What Makes Development Programs Effective in This Context

The difference between leadership programs that produce lasting impact and those that generate positive evaluations but little change usually comes down to design.

Effective higher education programs connect behavioral science to the actual situations leaders face on campus. Participants work through the dynamics of shared governance, the communication challenges of leading former peers, and the organizational pressures specific to academic environments, rather than generic case studies drawn from unrelated industries.

Effective programs also prioritize practice over presentation. Leaders do not develop judgment by listening to lectures about judgment. Instead, they develop it by working through difficult scenarios and receiving structured feedback. That reflection on how their instincts and habits affect the people around them is where behavioral change begins.

Finally, programs designed for higher education account for the pace and constraints of academic work. A department chair does not have the same schedule as a corporate director might have. Leaders use development that respects the rhythm of the academic calendar and fits into real schedules. They disengage from programs that do not.

Connecting Development to a Broader Leadership System

Leadership development programs are most effective when they are part of a connected approach rather than a standalone initiative. In practice, that means institutions thinking about three phases of the leadership journey together.

Readiness and selection. Before investing in development, institutions benefit from a clear picture of where that leader is starting from. Leadership assessments provide structured insight into communication patterns, decision-making tendencies, and interpersonal dynamics. These insights inform both selection decisions and development priorities, allowing institutions to match people with experiences that address actual gaps rather than assumed ones.

Targeted development. Once a baseline exists, institutions can design programs to build capability in the areas that matter most for the specific role and context. This is where leaders develop core skills described through practice, feedback, and structured reflection.

Ongoing support. Skills developed in a program need reinforcement once leaders return to the pressures of their actual roles. Coaching provides that reinforcement. It connects what a leader learned in a development program to the specific challenges they face on a given Tuesday afternoon. That is where the real work of leadership happens.

When these three phases work together, they build something more durable than a single training initiative. They build a leadership system that develops people consistently over time. In turn, that reduces the variability in leadership quality that drives institutional friction.

A Practical Starting Point

Institutions that want to strengthen leadership across faculty and administrative teams do not need to overhaul everything at once. A useful starting question is simpler: where is the most significant leadership gap right now? Is it a gap in individual capability, team dynamics, or institutional systems?

The answer shapes the approach. Individual capability gaps call for coaching. Team dynamics issues call for development programs that bring the right people into shared learning. Systemic issues, on the other hand, call for consulting support that examines how leadership, structure, and culture interact and where alignment interact.

CMA Global works with academic institutions across all three levels—individual leaders, leadership teams, and institutional systems. Grounded in behavioral science and informed by the realities of higher education, our work helps institutions build leadership capability where it actually breaks down.