Holding the Parts and the Whole: A Systems Approach to Leading When Trust is Broken

Sep 28, 2026 | Higher Education and Research

Cecillia Garza Madden

Cecillia Garza Madden

Manager

Higher education institutions are navigating structural, financial, and political disruption with structures and habits intended for stable times. Parents question the value of a college degree. Legislatures scrutinize budgets. Alumni wonder if their institutions still matter. Universities are caught in a fight over their own legitimacy as places where competing viewpoints get taken seriously. They’re attacked from the right as ideologically closed, and from the left as increasingly succumbing to political mandates over what can be taught. The numbers back up the anecdotes: Gallup’s 2026 survey with the Lumina Foundation found public confidence in higher education at 38%, down from 42% the year before, with cost, politicization, and doubts about job-relevant skills cited as the leading reasons. Nearly half of adults now believe AI will make college degrees less important over the next five years. How do you lead institutions built for a different era through a crisis that demands new approaches?

Traditional organizational leadership advice is useful; however, universities and their unique structures make traditional advice difficult to apply.

What Makes Universities’ Decision-Making Structure Different

Universities are what organizational theorists call “loosely coupled systems.” Individual parts—departments, schools, research centers— operate with remarkable autonomy. A physicist might feel more connected to her discipline than her institution. Faculty have research agendas, tenure protections, and external networks that rival the university’s claims on their loyalty.

This loose coupling creates adaptability and enables the intellectual freedom that makes universities distinctive. What some would see as an essential characteristic of higher ed institutions, can actually be a challenge for leaders trying to lead through disruption as a unified team.

In a “tightly-coupled” or more hierarchical organization, change flows quickly throughout the system. In contrast, in a loosely-coupled university, when a president sets direction, it doesn’t cascade automatically. Resource allocation is often decentralized, with departments operating as fiefdoms. A department chair negotiating curriculum may have faculty with consulting practices, research grants they’ll take elsewhere, and professional identities that don’t bend to institutional direction.

There are persistent tensions between faculty and administration. Both often see their work as a calling toward a greater good and misconstrue that the other is too narrowly or even self-focused. And both approach each other as barriers: faculty can see the administration as a constraint and administrators can experience faculty as resistant. Each side feels misunderstood. When mistrust runs deep, even good ideas get caught in the crossfire.

Add in decades of subunits, departments within schools, centers within departments, special initiatives layered on existing structures, each with its own version of these tensions, each resolved differently, each protecting fiercely what it built. The challenge facing higher ed leaders today is this loosely-coupled, federated system is now compressed, facing tremendous resource scarcity and declining public trust.

 The New Pressures

The historic context of universities, where change happened incrementally, with modest resources and moderate time pressure, no longer exists. The 2026 landscape is defined by convergence: a projected enrollment cliff is hitting the Northeast and West hardest, with high school graduating classes expected to shrink by roughly 15–20% in those regions over the coming years, even as the South continues to grow. At the same time, credit rating agencies are forecasting revenue growth that trails cost growth—Moody’s projects about 3.5% revenue growth against 4.4% cost growth for 2026—and hiring freezes are now in place at several Ivy and private R1 institutions. Layer on federal funding disruptions, a new tiered endowment tax, and the elimination of Grad PLUS loans reshaping graduate enrollment, and the resource picture facing most institutions is tighter than it has been in a generation.

Many of these problems cannot be solved by individual units, but do require support from individual units. Curriculum redesign requires coordination across departments. Research partnerships demand business thinking from scholars. These problems are systemic and demand institution-wide champions and a clear, unified leadership response.

These pressures don’t stay contained to balance sheets and enrollment models, they put leaders in front of two audiences at once. Legislators, donors, and the media want reassurance and a clean public narrative; faculty are reading those same public moves for what they reveal about where leadership stands. The response that plays safest externally is often the one that reads as evasive internally, and leaders now have to navigate that gap in real time, not just manage the underlying scarcity.

This creates a paradox: the conditions that protect universities (autonomy, federated structure, strong subunit identity) are the same ones that make change difficult. Under pressure, these forces calcify. Departments protect turf. Administrators become messengers of bad news. Trust erodes. Faculty experience administration as hostile.

 Two Jobs, One System: Holding Both at Once

Facing these intense challenges, leaders can’t choose between stabilizing the system and moving it forward—both have to happen at once, and neither works without the other. Protect the system without directing it, and you get calm paralysis: a well-managed institution that never changes. Direct it without protecting it, and initiatives collide with the mistrust described above and stall. The two-pronged approach below treats these as simultaneous obligations, not sequential steps.

  1. Protecting the System while Building Trust: Establish transparency. In loosely coupled systems, trust is everything. Trust is built by being clear about what you see and where you’re headed—not just by being nice. As you work to protect the institution and make external statements as the political winds demand, take the opportunity to engage and educate faculty along the way.
    • Faculty need to understand your constraints and see that decisions aren’t arbitrary. They need to know you’re tracking rate-limiting factors: tax-exemption threats, shifts in federal funding, and overhead negotiations affecting all units. When people know you’re monitoring these threats, they gain confidence. They collaborate even with bad news because they trust you.
    • Be deliberate about institutional voice. When you respond to federal requests, faculty are watching for what that response says about where your loyalties sit. Silence reads as one thing, a strong public defense reads as another, and a carefully hedged statement can read as both cowardice and prudence depending on who’s watching. Naming your reasoning—not just the decision—is what keeps that reaction from curdling into distrust.
    • Name what you don’t know. When faculty see you genuinely wrestling with problems rather than pretending you’ve solved them, they can take that as an invitation to show up as partners.
    • Assemble a leadership team reflecting your values, with confidence from both faculty and staff. Include respected faculty from a cross-section of schools and solid business managers who understand infrastructure. A divided leadership team creates gaps that faculty will exploit. Without coherence, you won’t have space to lead.
  1. Directing and Developing the System: Find where change can take root. Find allies beyond administration, respected faculty who see the need. Identify emerging innovations already happening in pockets (maybe one school’s chair development program, or another’s redesigned course sequencing) and amplify them across the system. These are laboratories you can learn from.
    • Design meeting structures carefully. Don’t just convene everyone on everything. Think about who needs to be at which table and what perspectives are actually missing.
    • Be strategic about resources. New money, redirected money, money from consolidating what’s no longer working—that’s your leverage in loosely coupled systems. Use it to signal priority and create small wins.
    • Most importantly: articulate a few clear strategic themes and live them consistently. “Faculty engaged in mentoring the next generation.” “Research that connects to real-world problems.” Themes that respect autonomy while providing shared focus. The power of a strategic theme lies in the department’s ability to interpret it locally. A theme about student-centered research doesn’t mean everyone does the same thing. Biology might redesign senior theses differently than economics does, which strengthens policy connections, or English does, which develops community partnerships. Same theme, different implementations. Each unit owns it.

The Work Underneath the Work

Leading under these pressures requires tolerating ambiguity while insisting on focus, including active patience with resistance, setbacks, and the moments you’ve moved too fast, not passive resignation.

It requires the skill of framing complex problems so people can actually work with them, rather than defending them against a 50-page plan. The leaders who do this well tend to reach for a story or a live example over a slide of strategic priorities, because it lets people see how their own work connects to the larger challenge instead of just being told it does.

It also requires holding a room together when the differences in it are real. Faculty and administrators aren’t just failing to see eye to eye — they’re often seeing different things, accurately, from where they sit. The job isn’t to resolve that. It’s to keep the difference from splitting the room while still moving it forward.

Underneath all of it: creating the conditions for people who’ve built this institution, invested in it, staked their careers on it, to think together about what it becomes next. Naming what they’re protecting. Making room to grieve what has to change. Imagining something different without discarding what came before.

This deliberate, patient, relational work honors the autonomy that makes universities what they are, in service of the collaboration they now need to endure.

Where External Partnership Can Help

Naming constraints without blame, holding a divided leadership team together, finding the few strategic themes that will stick—this is skilled facilitation work, and often leadership teams are too close to their own dynamics to accomplish it from the inside.

This is where an external partner earns its place as a tool in your toolbelt to lead through today’s disruptions.

  • Facilitation, not just support. They help a leadership team have the conversation it’s been avoiding—about where trust broke down, about who isn’t at the table, about the theme everyone nods along to but no one has actually defined.
  • Neutrality and credibility. They understand loosely coupled systems—how a research university’s incentive structures differ from a traditional business’s, and how faculty autonomy isn’t insubordination—which changes what’s possible in the room. Without a stake in the department politics, they can ask the question a provost can’t, or say the thing a dean won’t. They are skilled at moving between an administrator’s world and a tenured researcher’s world and translating between them, and they can help leaders build that same fluency.

A consultant or coach isn’t a substitute for the strategic clarity you need to hold the parts and the whole of your loosely coupled system. It’s what makes that clarity survivable to build in the first place—especially when the leadership team is under the kind of pressure this moment is putting on them.

 

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