Establish a Strong Leadership Team

Behind every well-governed college or university stands not a single leader but a coherent leadership team, and behind that team stands a board that built it deliberately. Institutions rarely fail for lack of talent; they falter when roles blur, when transitions are unplanned, and when the people at the top pull in different directions. Improving governance therefore begins with a hard question: is the leadership architecture of the institution actually strong, or does it merely look strong because current individuals are compensating for structural weakness? This article lays out how a board can establish and sustain a leadership team that outlasts any one person.

Want expert help putting this into practice? Higher Education Governance can guide you through it.

Define the Leadership Architecture First

Before recruiting anyone, a board should map the roles that make up institutional leadership and how they connect. The core relationships are the board chair, the president or chancellor, and the provost, surrounded by the cabinet of vice presidents and the chairs of standing committees. Each role has a distinct sphere: the board chair leads the trustees and manages the board's relationship with the president; the president runs the institution; the provost leads the academic enterprise.

Improving governance means writing these boundaries down rather than leaving them to personality. A clear division of labor prevents the two failures that most often weaken a leadership team: overlap, where two leaders contest the same decision, and gaps, where a critical responsibility belongs to no one. A simple exercise, listing the ten most consequential decisions the institution makes and naming the single accountable owner of each, quickly reveals where the architecture is vague.

Recruit for Complementarity, Not Cloning

Related: Higher Education Governance - Essential Steps for Institutional Success.

A strong team is balanced, not uniform. When boards recruit trustees or advise on senior hires, the instinct is to seek people who resemble the successful incumbents. The better strategy is complementarity: assembling a mix of financial, academic, legal, technological, and community expertise so the team's collective judgment exceeds any individual's.

A skills matrix makes this concrete. List the competencies the institution genuinely needs, mark which are well covered and which are thin, and recruit against the gaps. A worked example: a board that discovered it had five financial experts but no one with deep experience in academic accreditation redirected its next two searches accordingly, and within a year its oversight of program quality visibly improved. The same logic applies to the president's cabinet, where a leader strong in vision benefits from deputies strong in execution. Complementarity also extends to temperament and perspective, not only technical skill; a team that includes people willing to voice dissent guards against the groupthink that quietly sinks otherwise capable leadership groups.

Get the Board Chair and President Relationship Right

The single most important relationship in institutional leadership is between the board chair and the president. When it is candid and well-bounded, the whole system functions; when it is fractious or fused, everything downstream suffers. The chair's job is to lead the board and be the president's principal partner and sounding board, not a shadow chief executive.

Practical habits protect this relationship. The chair and president should meet regularly between board meetings to align on priorities. Communication from other trustees to the administration should generally route through the chair to prevent mixed signals and freelancing. And the board should hold periodic executive sessions without management so trustees can speak candidly, paired with clear feedback to the president afterward so executive session never becomes a source of anxiety or ambush.

Evaluate and Develop Leaders Continuously

See also: Higher Education Governance - Best Practices for Effective Leadership.

A leadership team improves only when its members receive honest feedback against clear expectations. The board's most direct tool is the annual evaluation of the president, anchored to goals set at the start of the year and covering financial health, academic quality, enrollment, advancement, and culture. The evaluation should be criteria-based and forward-looking, producing agreed goals for the year ahead rather than a mere grade.

Development extends beyond the president. Strong boards invest in their own members through onboarding, mentoring, and ongoing education about the institution and the sector. They also encourage the president to develop the cabinet, because a healthy pipeline of internal talent reduces the institution's dependence on external searches. Treating leadership as something to be grown, not merely appointed, is a hallmark of boards that improve steadily rather than lurching from crisis to crisis.

Plan for Succession Before You Need It

Leadership teams are tested most severely at transitions, and the boards that navigate them best are those that planned when no vacancy loomed. Succession planning should cover both the emergency case, who steps in if the president departs suddenly, and the planned case, how a full presidential search will be organized. It should also address the board chair's own succession, since a leadership vacuum at the top of the board can be as destabilizing as one in the administration.

A presidential search is itself a governance stress test. A strong board establishes a representative search committee, defines the leadership profile before reviewing candidates, protects confidentiality, and engages faculty and other stakeholders appropriately without surrendering the board's ultimate authority to hire. Rushed or opaque searches routinely produce mismatched appointments and eroded trust.

Avoid the Common Failure Modes

Even well-intentioned boards weaken their leadership teams in predictable ways. They allow the president and board chair to become so close that oversight lapses, or so distant that the partnership collapses. They recruit for likability rather than needed capability. They defer succession planning until a departure forces a scramble. And they conduct evaluations as formalities, offering praise but never the candid feedback that drives growth.

The antidote to each is discipline made routine: written role definitions reviewed annually, a skills matrix updated before every search, evaluations tied to real criteria, and succession plans revisited each year. Boards seeking to compare their leadership practices against peer institutions can consult resources such as Higher Education Governance, though the work of building a strong team is inescapably local. This guidance is general and not a substitute for legal or professional advice, but the principle holds across every institution: a leadership team is not found, it is constructed, and the board that constructs it well gives its institution the steadiest possible foundation.