Naming What You’ve Been Carrying Privately
Carrying your own doubt about leadership above you, while watching your team feel the same thing, is genuinely hard—and both can be true at once. If you trust the people on your team more than you trust the leadership above you, you’re not alone, and you’re not being unreasonable. Our 2025 Professional Development Survey found something worth naming plainly: that trust in immediate managers across higher ed tends to hold up reasonably well, but trust in senior institutional leadership does not. That gap isn’t a minor data point—it’s one of the clearest predictors in the survey of whether people stay or leave. This isn’t about validating cynicism. It’s about naming something a lot of leaders are already living with privately, often without permission to say it out loud. If you’ve felt that gap yourself, that’s not a character flaw or a failure of institutional loyalty. It’s a widely shared experience, and the data backs that up. In other words, you’re holding two things at once. You are, right now, possibly someone who has your own eroded trust in the leadership above you. You are also, quite possibly, someone whose team is experiencing that same erosion—maybe more acutely than you are—because […]