Leadership Development in Higher Education and Nonprofits: Why 2026 Demands a New Approach

Higher education and nonprofit organizations consistently attract individuals deeply committed to their missions. 

However, many institutions struggle to fully realize leadership potential due to uneven investment in professional development, increasing reliance on a small number of high performers, and limited use of candid performance dialogue. Addressing these operational realities is essential to strengthening organizational effectiveness and sustaining long-term impact. 

Why does this moment feel different? 2026 portends a collision of forces that have been building for years. The enrollment cliff for higher education is here. Federal and governmental funding priorities are changing. AI is rewriting job descriptions (literally and figuratively) in real time. And a new generation of workers has arrived with expectations around skill enhancement and career growth that mission-driven organizations are uniquely positioned to meet, provided that they prioritize talent development. 

How Can Mission-Driven Organizations Reframe Hiring to Meet Today’s Leadership Challenges?

Many organizations continue to approach c-suite hiring with an understandable sense of urgency, prioritizing immediate role coverage over long-term leadership fit. However, decades of personnel and leadership research consistently identify clear predictors of leadership effectiveness – insights that are often underutilized in practice.  

Despite this robust evidence base, hiring decisions frequently rely on unstructured interviews and subjective judgment, underscoring an opportunity to adopt more disciplined, research-informed approaches to leadership selection.  

Emotional intelligence is critical for the success of the leader, and for the overall organization. Therefore, the key criteria worth assessing should go beyond technical qualifications: 

• Mission alignment that survives adversity. Anyone can champion a mission during good times. Assessment should reveal how candidates maintain focus when budgets shrink, politics intrude, or stakeholders pull in opposite directions. 
• The capacity to develop others. Leaders who hoard responsibility rather than build capability create organizations that can’t outlast their tenure. This trait requires active probing, not passive assumption. 
• Cultural contribution over cultural fit. The most valuable hires add something the organization lacks, not simply mirror what already exists. Assessment should identify what candidates will bring, not just whether they’ll blend in. 

What Are the Consequences of Unclear Expectations?

Gallup’s 2025 engagement data reveals a troubling baseline: only 47% of employees strongly agree they know what’s expected of them at work. In environments where expectations remain fuzzy, poor performance often reflects unclear direction more than inadequate effort. Before labeling someone a problem, organizations should examine whether they’ve actually told that person what success looks like. 

This clarity problem compounds in mission-driven organizations, where the work itself can feel amorphous. How do you measure impact when outcomes unfold over decades? How do you evaluate a vice president when success depends on external factors beyond anyone’s control? The difficulty of these questions leads many organizations to avoid them entirely, creating environments where everyone assumes they’re doing well until suddenly they’re not. 

The solution isn’t more detailed job descriptions. It’s ongoing conversation about priorities, trade-offs, and what matters most right now. When leaders invest time in defining expectations clearly and updating them as circumstances change, they create the foundation for both accountability and development. Without that foundation, feedback becomes arbitrary and performance management becomes theater. 

What Risks Emerge When Professional Development Declines?

The instinct to cut training budgets during financial stress is understandable, but counterproductive. Gallup research consistently shows that employees with access to development opportunities are 3.6 times more likely to be engaged. Engagement drives retention. Retention reduces replacement costs. The math favors development even when the budget doesn’t seem to. 

McKinsey’s HR Monitor found that employee development remains highly fragmented across most organizations. Performance management, training, and succession planning operate as disconnected systems rather than integrated strategies. Some employees spent as few as six days on training in a year, and only about one-third of critical roles are backed by succession plans. 

But development doesn’t require expensive programs. It requires intentional practice. Stretch assignments that expand capability. Cross-functional exposure that builds perspective. Mentoring relationships that transfer institutional knowledge. Feedback that arrives frequently enough to course-correct, not just annually enough to document. Mission-driven organizations that figure out how to deliver meaningful development experiences for current and potential leaders will have a recruitment advantage that money alone can’t match. 

Why Is Honest Feedback So Rare in Mission-Driven Organizations?

Mission-driven organizations often place a high value on empathy and collegiality, which can make navigating performance challenges particularly complex. When difficult conversations are delayed, performance issues may persist longer than intended, affecting teams and the populations they serve. Consistent, timely feedback – delivered with clarity and respect – is essential, both to support employee improvement and to ensure appropriate transitions when roles are no longer the right fit. 

Gallup research found that only 16% of employees said their last conversation with their manager was extremely meaningful. That number should alarm anyone who cares about organizational effectiveness. When the vast majority of manager interactions fail to resonate, you’ve created an environment where people either guess what’s expected or stop caring whether they meet it. Leaders who pay attention to what their people actually experience, rather than what they assume their people experience, find retention problems more tractable than they expected. 

The solution isn’t cold-blooded termination. It’s honest conversation, delivered consistently and early – and it costs nothing. Regular, specific, actionable feedback allows course correction. It also creates documentation that makes eventual separation defensible if correction proves impossible. 

Organizations that embrace continuous feedback see measurable results. Research on performance management shows that companies providing consistent feedback achieve better retention rates and 39% higher effectiveness in talent attraction compared to those relying on traditional annual reviews. And the employees who receive meaningful weekly feedback? Eighty percent of them report being fully engaged. 

What Are the Organizational Effects of Over-Reliance on High Performers?

The pattern is familiar across higher education and nonprofits: someone proves capable, and they are rewarded with more responsibility. Then more. Then more still. Eventually, the organization’s best people carry workloads designed for teams of three. They become exhausted. They leave. And leadership expresses surprise, even though the outcome wasn’t unpredictable. 

When high performers become organizational shock absorbers, three damaging things happen simultaneously: 

1. Capacity constraints prevent the organization from growing beyond what a handful of overworked people can handle 
2. Knowledge becomes concentrated in heads that are actively planning their exit 
3. The remaining staff watch what competence earns and decide to demonstrate less of it

Breaking this cycle requires the uncomfortable work of redistributing responsibilities before someone collapses under them, and building redundancy before crisis forces it. It also requires examining why certain people accumulate work in the first place. Often, the answer reveals a failure to address underperformance elsewhere in the organization. 

What Will 2026 Demand That Higher Education and Nonprofit Organizations Aren’t Ready For?

The forces reshaping these sectors aren’t waiting for leaders to catch up. Higher education faces demographic decline that enrollment management tactics cannot offset. Nonprofits face funding uncertainty as political priorities change. Both face competition for talent from employers who have spent years learning to accommodate worker expectations. 

Three developments will define leadership requirements in 2026: 

• AI will reformulate operations faster than anyone expects. Deloitte’s higher education analysis suggests that AI could bend the cost curve of administrative work in ways previously unimaginable, but only if institutions invest in upskilling staff. Leaders who leverage AI to enhance collaboration among their team and reduce routine tasks will boost engagement, loyalty, and organizational success. 
• The manager crisis will determine organizational survival. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report found manager engagement dropped to 27% in 2024, down from 30% the prior year. Managers under 35 saw a five-point decline, and women managers dropped seven points. Since managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, this middle-management meltdown has implications for everyone above and below it on the org chart. 
• Gen Z’s expectations will become the baseline. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that 44% of Gen Z have already left a role they felt lacked purpose, and around 40% have rejected assignments or potential employers based on their values. This mobility isn’t disloyalty. It’s growth-hunting. Organizations that provide visible career paths and purpose-driven work retain them. Those that don’t become training grounds for competitors. 

How Can Higher Education and Nonprofit Organizations Build the Talent Systems They Need?

The challenges facing higher education and nonprofit organizations won’t be solved by marginal improvements to existing practices. They require fundamental reconsideration of how these sectors find, develop, and retain leadership talent. 

1. Start with selection. The urgency to fill senior-level positions undermines every subsequent effort. Organizations that invest in proper assessment, whether through structured interviews, validated testing, or simulation-based evaluation, reduce costly mis-hires and model the kind of careful decision-making they expect from the leaders they choose. Define what success looks like before beginning the search, and assess candidates against criteria that actually predict performance. 

2. Continue with development. Professional growth cannot remain the line item that gets cut when budgets tighten. It must be positioned as an investment that determines whether the organization has leaders capable of managing what comes next. This means succession planning that happens before a crisis, not after. It means identifying high-potential talent early and investing in their readiness for roles they don’t yet hold. It means feedback that arrives continuously, not annually. 

3. Address performance honestly. The organizations that do the best in 2026 will be those willing to have difficult conversations about performance while there’s still time to course correct. They’ll set clear expectations and hold people accountable to them. They’ll recognize that carrying underperformers punishes the high performers who pick up the slack, and that avoiding feedback is a form of abandonment, not kindness. 

4. Build better cultures. The organizations that will succeed are those that make excellence sustainable rather than heroic. They distribute responsibility before it crushes their best people. They create transparency before workers demand it. They figure out what matters to their specific employees and deliver it, whether that’s flexibility, recognition, growth opportunities, or simply a manager who pays attention. 

For boards and senior leaders seeking strategies and counsel, external expertise provides the opportunity to take a step back and evaluate your current organizational state. Leadership consulting provides mission-driven organizations with the perspective, structured frameworks, and practical tools needed to strengthen accountability, develop capabilities, and translate institutional values into sustained organizational performance. When it comes time to identify new leaders, executive search isn’t just about finding candidates; it’s also about understanding what a role really requires, assessing candidates against criteria that predict success, and structuring selection processes that yield better decisions.  

The organizations that figure out how to identify, cultivate and retain talent will have an advantage that money can’t buy: leaders who stay, develop, and build something lasting. When leadership development and talent retention are deeply aligned with mission, organizations gain an enduring advantage – the ability to translate purpose into positive performance cultures, and future sustainability. 

About the Authors

Meredith Harper Bonham, PhD is a Director at Stanton Chase Washington, D.C., where she focuses on higher education as part of the firm’s social impact practice. With nearly three decades of experience as a college administrator, she brings deep institutional knowledge to executive talent searches and inclusive recruitment practices. Her career includes serving as Chief of Staff to the President and Secretary to the Board of Trustees at Hamilton College, and as the inaugural Vice President for Student Affairs at Kenyon College, where she successfully overhauled the organizational framework for over 120 staff while advancing a culture of trust and student centered leadership. Meredith holds a PhD in higher education administration from Syracuse University, a master’s in administration, planning, and social policy from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s degree in history from Kenyon College. 

Iris Drayton-Spann is a Managing Director at Stanton Chase Washington, D.C., with extensive experience across for profit, nonprofit, and NGO organizations, specializing in executive placements across all functional areas. Prior to joining Stanton Chase, she served as Vice President of Human Resources and Chief Diversity Officer at WETA, one of the largest producing stations of new content for public television in the United States, where she developed strategic human resources functions and led the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council. A Certified Diversity Executive, Iris has been recognized as one of Mogul’s Top 100 DEI Leaders, CIO Views Magazine’s Top 10 Most Influential D&I Leaders, and received the President’s Award for Service from the Washington D.C. Chapter of the National Black MBA Association in 2024. She holds a master’s from George Washington University and a bachelor’s in communication from Howard University.