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 they have even less visibility into the reasoning behind decisions than you do. Both of those things can be true at the same time, and carrying both is genuinely hard. This week isn’t going to resolve that tension—it’s going to help you locate where you actually stand before asking you to do anything about it.
Two Traps
When trust in leadership above you erodes, there are two easy directions to choose, and both will cost you something.
One choice is to perform an enthusiasm you don’t actually feel, showing up energized about a direction you privately doubt. Your team sees through that faster than you’d like to think.
The other is quietly signaling your own skepticism—perhaps with a raised eyebrow in a meeting or a comment that lets your team know that you’re not fully on board either. That might feel honest in the moment, but it accelerates your team’s disengagement, because now they’ve lost confidence in the person closest to them too.
What Your Team Is Learning from You
The leader living through this tension is also modeling, whether intentionally or not, what it looks like to stay professionally engaged inside an imperfect institution. Higher ed has always had imperfect institutions. It probably always will. The leaders who navigate that with integrity—who don’t pretend everything is fine, who don’t perform disengagement either, and who don’t quietly give up—are the ones their teams remember and choose to follow, long after the specific decision that frustrated everyone has been forgotten.
Higher ed’s underlying values, access, inquiry, and human development are worth leading for—even when the institutions that house those values are frustrating you in a given season. Skepticism about the institution is not the same as cynicism about the mission. Holding onto that distinction is what makes it possible to keep leading well, even now.
Pause & Reflect
Articulate, specifically for your situation right now—and not in the abstract—what leading with integrity looks like given what you’re actually navigating.
Try this in Sophia:
“Help me articulate what leading with integrity looks like specifically for me right now, given the actual situation I’m in, and not in the abstract.”