By Lisa M. Rudgers, Julie A. Peterson, and Steve Kloehn

Peterson Rudgers Group is celebrating a major milestone. Just over 10 years ago, we hung out our consulting shingle with an aim to support leaders working in higher education and other mission-driven enterprises. We had spent decades in-house as higher ed leaders ourselves, and we shared an unshakeable belief in higher education’s tremendous societal impact. And yet, though we couldn’t have predicted it back at the farmhouse table in northern Michigan where we first designed PRG’s business plan, the 10 years that followed have been the most volatile and disruptive in the history of American higher education.

Lisa M. Rudgers

This decade? It’s been a lot. A pandemic. A national racial reckoning. The long-predicted enrollment cliff. Structural deficits that no longer yield to the old fixes. Culture wars, legal battles, disrupted federal research funding, barriers to international students and a steady erosion of public confidence in the enterprise itself. Conflicts on campus and in front of Congress.

Through it all, we have seen leaders tested to their core. External stakeholders — from elected officials to prospective students and families to the tax-paying public — are demanding change. Meanwhile, faculty and staff are fearful of what change will mean to the quality of their work and scholarship, and concerned that deep change may adversely affect the very mission of the institution.

Yet we engage our work with optimism and hope. That optimism is driven by college presidents, provosts and leadership teams who have shown extraordinary resilience, creativity and commitment in the face of these challenges. Drawing on our experiences with effective leaders across the country and our roles as expert advisors and counselors, we offer a few best practices for leading in this moment.

Julie A. Peterson

The leader’s ability to develop and communicate a clear, inspiring and inclusive vision — instead of, or in complement to, a problem statement — is essential. A “red light” without a “green light” does not motivate people over the long haul. Change driven primarily by fleeing a threat is exhausting, and it produces resistance and burnout rather than movement or momentum. Fear will certainly get people’s attention, and it may create a sense of urgency. But sustained over time, it is more likely to paralyze a community than to mobilize one. A leader’s job is to set an inspiring course and move the whole community in that direction. What is the positive outcome we are aiming for in the change we want to drive? Great leaders help people see that better future, show them they have a place in it, and invite everyone to create that future together.

In existential times, executive teams must function at the very highest level. Higher education is a talent business. Big endowments, beautiful buildings and blue-chip reputations all fall into disrepair without a strong leadership team to move them forward. The reverse is also true: a talented team working well together can accomplish something akin to the miraculous in a surprisingly short time. As the sector’s challenges have increased in scale and intensity, it has become ever more critical to build a strong, skilled and complementary senior team and to cultivate an “institutionalist” culture within it. By that we mean there is an expectation that the team will work together toward shared goals, not divisional or individual goals alone. Also, the team should be clear about its guiding principles: how team members will work together and show up for each other. Low-functioning teams can break when the going gets tough, but an executive team that is highly skilled and collaborative can help to build institutional resilience and renewal.

Steve Kloehn

The academy needs to change substantially in ways that it is not adept at, but there are proven change models that can help.  Change has never come easily to colleges and universities, and rapid change is entirely outside our institutional DNA. The good news is that leading through change is not magic. It is a learned skill, well studied and systematized. There are many schools of change management, and we have found John Kotter’s 8-Step Model especially useful in our work with higher ed leaders. Three of his points deserve more attention than they get:

• Kotter insists on winning both heads and hearts. If you grew up in the academy, you were trained to win arguments, and a great many leaders believe in their souls that once they win the argument, everyone will follow. They will not. Having the facts is necessary and insufficient. Every time you communicate, ask people to join you in something important and appeal to their emotions as well as their logic. What matters most is the “why.” If a change is not advancing the mission, it is not worth doing, and if it is advancing the mission, say so explicitly and with compelling storytelling. Do not assume anyone will connect those dots on your behalf.
• Leaders who struggle to make change under-communicate their vision by a factor of 10. You have not said it too many times; you have almost certainly said it too few.
• As the change process gets underway, identifying early wins and celebrating them can help generate momentum for more and greater change. Research shows that one of the greatest motivators in the workplace is progress toward a worthy goal.

Financial pressures are accelerating, but mission-focused strategy is key. Across-the-board cuts only drive toward mediocrity. Boards are anxious in 2026, and their questions are pointed: What are you doing to control costs, and by what date will the budget be in the black? What parts of the organization are no longer fulfilling a current need? Where do we have “sludge” and redundancy? Where is the dashboard of metrics we should be tracking? These are all critical questions, but building institutional resilience is not only about cost cutting and efficiency measures. Key strategic investments and redesign in areas of strength and innovation are equally important. It’s a “both and.”

Where are the new programs, markets and revenue sources — based on our existing assets — that will strengthen the university’s mission and value proposition? How can our schools, colleges and administrative units work together more collaboratively in ways that are more than the sum of their parts? These are not challenges university leadership teams can solve on their own. Leaders must meaningfully engage stakeholders from across the enterprise in program redesign, prioritization and strategy development. Even though the community may feel it is more equitable to cut X percent a year across the board each year in the face of stagnating state budgets, necessary tuition restraint and decreasing federal support, in the end it will only be “less” rather than stronger and ever more mission focused.

The president’s healthy relationship with the board is more important than ever before. In a period of this much uncertainty, the relationship between a president and the governing board is more consequential than ever. Without a strong, supportive board behind them, presidential tenures are rocky and, sometimes, failures. As with every important relationship, it takes time, effort and intentionality. A few ways we’ve seen good leaders work most effectively with their boards: informing and engaging the board, rather than “managing” it; real deliberation and dialogue time in meetings rather than show-and-tell; and educating trustees sufficiently about ambient conditions, institutional trends and academic decision processes. Engaging board members in active discussion around meaningful questions and decisions is critical, as is positioning those conversations at the right altitude: What are the governance questions at play? Systems and structures can help, too. Leadership teams can carefully consider how to staff effectively for board support, design effective meeting agendas and communicate effectively with board members between meetings.

Shared governance is an asset, not an obstacle. We believe higher ed leadership teams are well served to develop strong and authentic relationships with faculty governance bodies. There’s no denying there are often challenges among academic and administrative leadership team mandates and the shared governance model: It takes additional time, it means a layered approach to final decision making, and there can be a lack of clarity or shared understanding about decision rights. We get it. But faculty governance bodies are a testing ground for ideas, and their members are usually elected by peers precisely because they care and are willing to do the work. Having a productive relationship means one-on-one time as well as attendance at formal meetings, patient listening, and a genuine willingness to address legitimate concerns. The payoff: faculty representatives have influence with their colleagues that no administrator can manufacture. Bringing a major initiative to the appropriate body for an advisory endorsement, even when that body holds no formal authority over the matter, builds the foundation you will need for implementation and helps you avoid time-sucking detours. Working with shared governance costs time. Working around it costs more.

Great leaders exhibit moral courage. Decide what you stand for before the crisis arrives. We have watched a great many leaders try to navigate the narrow channel between the shoals by taking the political temperature and steering accordingly. It almost never works. It is not possible to make everyone happy, and the attempt reads as exactly what it is. The more durable approach is to know your institution’s priorities, values and principles, be able to argue clearly why they are worth defending, and shore up support among trustees, faculty leaders, donors and other key partners before you need it. A courageous stand accompanied by a clear and consistent rationale can earn respect even from those who disagree. The hard part is that values can often be in conflict, and the trade-offs differ by institution. Those conflicts are far easier to think through in advance than in the middle of a crisis, and the leaders who have done that thinking are visibly steadier when the moment comes.

What has not changed, and will not, is the mission. Historian and author James Tobin once described a university as “the purpose made permanent.” Amid all the disruption of the last decade, we believe the most essential thing any of us can do is stay focused on higher education’s “why”: knowledge, understanding, opportunity and social mobility, and service for the public good. When the mission stays in focus, decisions and direction do too.