Thirty years of watching institutions tells me the competent leaders are not the ones who manage to keep disruption at bay. They are the ones who have learned to operate well when disruption is the norm. That observation cuts against most of the conventional leadership advice I encountered when I was coming up, which tended to treat stability as the goal and turbulence as an obstacle to clear thinking. The picture I have arrived at is different, and it especially describes the sector I spend most of my time in.
Consider how “a stable organization” usually gets described in leadership training or in executive-coaching settings. The organization has clear reporting lines. Priorities are known. Roles have been spelled out. Change, when it comes, arrives on a predictable schedule that allows the organization to absorb it. I am not sure I have ever worked inside an institution that actually functioned that way for more than a few weeks at a stretch, and I know I have never led one. The places I have worked have always had unresolved personnel questions, moving budget numbers, policy changes that arrived without notice, student needs that refused to wait, and constituencies with conflicting ideas about what the work is actually for. For a long time I believed this was a temporary condition that I would eventually get on top of, and that the job of leadership was to move the institution back toward the stable state the advice described. I no longer believe that. That description is a fiction. What the conventional account calls stability is better understood as the temporary absence of disruption.
That reframing matters because it changes what counts as competence. If stability is the baseline, then disruption is an interruption, and the leader’s job is to clear the interruption so the work can resume. If disruption is the baseline, then the periods of stability are brief interludes the leader happens to benefit from, and the real job is to operate well inside whatever the institution is actually doing at the moment. Those are different jobs. They produce different priorities, and they call for different habits.
The sector where I have done most of my work, higher education, makes the reframing especially useful, because higher education genuinely does not sit still. Some of the reasons are specific to the sector. Academic institutions are governed jointly by administration and faculty, which is a feature rather than a flaw, and which means that important decisions take longer than they would in a corporate setting. Revenue depends on enrollment, which fluctuates for reasons no institution fully controls. The people being led are trained, professionally, to question what they are told, because that is what makes them good scholars. And the institution itself carries symbolic weight that makes even routine decisions emotionally costly. Any leader who has spent time inside a college or university knows that a “straightforward” budget decision almost never is, because it will activate faculty governance, raise questions about academic freedom, reflect enrollment trends that no one at the table can control, and land on people whose professional identity is tied up in the unit being discussed. That is the normal texture of the work. It is not a crisis.
What I watch capable leaders do wrong, over and over again, is respond to that texture as if it were a crisis. They absorb the pressure personally. They become the node through which every decision must pass. They work harder, stay later, answer more emails, hold more one-on-ones, and convince themselves that their personal stamina is the thing keeping the operation together. From a distance this can look like dedicated leadership. It can even feel, from the inside, like the only responsible response to the complexity. What it actually is, most of the time, is a version of the stability assumption surfacing in the leader’s own behavior. If the baseline is stability, then disruption calls for a surge of personal effort to restore it. If the baseline is disruption, continuous personal surge is not a sustainable response to a condition that will not go away.
The leaders I watch do this well have, almost without exception, stopped believing they can personally absorb the unsteadiness. What they do instead is work on making the team around them capable of functioning without their constant presence. That work is less visible than the heroic version. It rarely looks decisive in the moment. It often looks like a leader who is slower to jump in, who asks the person closest to the work to make the call, who spends meeting time clarifying who decides what rather than making the decisions herself. Visitors to a unit that operates this way sometimes notice a kind of quietness that can be mistaken for disengagement. The leader is not everywhere. The leader does not need to be everywhere. And the unit moves faster than units where the leader is doing heroic work, because nothing is waiting on a single person’s attention.
What is actually happening inside those quieter units is worth describing, because it is the practical version of the argument I am trying to make. People closest to the work know what they are responsible for deciding. They know what kinds of questions need to reach the leader and what kinds can be handled without involving her. Information moves predictably, which means people are not spending their day scanning for rumors or constructing private stories about what the leader must be thinking. Mistakes get captured well enough that the next instance does not repeat them, and successes get noticed too. None of this is glamorous. A lot of it looks like discipline rather than leadership, if you are used to thinking of leadership as a personal quality that certain people radiate. But it is what allows a complex unit to run through a difficult stretch without fracturing.
One thing I notice about my own career, and about the careers of colleagues I watch closely, is that the shift from the first mode to the second is usually involuntary. Most leaders do not wake up one morning and decide they are going to stop being the person through whom everything flows. What happens is a breaking point of some kind. A health scare. A family crisis. An absence that forces the team to operate alone for longer than the leader had planned. In my experience, the return from that kind of absence is where the real learning tends to happen, because you come back and look at how the team actually functioned, and you notice what did and did not require your presence. Almost always, what required your presence was less than you thought. The revelation is not that the team was better off without you. The revelation is that the team was capable of more than your habits of leadership had allowed it to demonstrate.
That revelation is the start of learning a different practice. The word “practice” matters here. What changes is not that the leader has a new insight. What changes is that the leader begins asking a different set of questions on a day-to-day basis. The day-to-day questions shift. What used to be a reflex to ask what needs my attention today becomes a different reflex, which is to ask who is closest to the question and whether that person has what they need to handle it. The attention the leader used to direct toward whether the team was making the right decision tends to redirect, over time, toward whether the team knows how to make the decision without coming back. Questions about her own priorities become questions about whether people have enough shared language to reconcile conflicting priorities on their own. Those shifts accumulate. After a year or two of working that way, a leader has a different relationship with the job.
Something worth naming about what the second mode feels like from the inside, because most of the writing on this subject skips it. The first weeks of operating differently feel wrong. The leader is used to a certain rhythm of interaction with her team, and when she starts asking the person closest to a question to handle it rather than handling it herself, the team is often slower than she would have been. Meetings take longer because a director is working through a decision in real time rather than receiving an answer. Issues that used to close in a day now take three. The leader can feel, in the initial stretch, that the unit is backsliding. The temptation to step back in and restore the old speed is constant, and most leaders relapse at least once before the new pattern establishes. What happens over months, though, is that the team’s autonomous handling gets quicker, the quality of decisions that were previously the leader’s improves because the people making them are closer to the work than she was, and the speed lost in the transition is more than recovered. The leader who sticks with the transition long enough to pass through the awkward middle arrives at a unit that runs faster than the one she previously led, because work is no longer queuing behind her calendar.
I want to be careful not to romanticize this. The work does not get easier. Complex institutions absorb shocks continuously, and leading one is genuinely difficult regardless of how well-developed a leader’s practice is. The specific thing that gets better is the team’s ability to go through a difficult stretch without requiring the leader to absorb the full weight of it. That does not eliminate the weight. It distributes it, which is the only response to continuous disruption that is actually sustainable, because no single human being can indefinitely absorb what a large institution absorbs on an average day.
If I could change one thing about how leadership is taught in higher education, it would be the move from stability as the default condition to disruption as the default condition. Too many of the leaders I work with have absorbed the stability model from conventional training and from corporate-borrowed programs, and they are running a practice designed for a condition that does not describe their work. The result is exhaustion in the leader, caution in the team, and a continuous sense among everyone that they are behind where they should be. Most of that feeling dissolves when the leader stops trying to catch up to a stable state that never actually existed and starts working on the conditions that allow a complex, unstable institution to keep moving under pressure. The stretch itself is not easier. The relationship to the stretch changes.
That is what I would want someone arriving in a leadership role to understand before they arrive. You have not signed on to a job whose normal state is calm. The job is inherently unsteady. The question is not how to make it stop being unsteady. The question is how to lead well inside the unsteadiness, which is a practice you can learn, and which almost no one teaches explicitly, because the field has still not let go of the assumption that stability is the condition leadership is supposed to produce.
DEB