From 26-28 November 2025, Higher education and Leadership (HELM) held its regular Foundations of Leadership (FoL) run for Academics and University Managers. Anne Mc Lennan (one of the co-facilitators of HELM has produced in this graphic in an astute summation of the challenges currently facing heads of department, heads of school and the deanery across our universities. At first glance the image appears almost too colourful, yet that is precisely its accuracy. It captures the layered pressures that accumulate in academic middle management: the interpersonal tensions within teams, the resource constraints that frame every decision, the demands of an intensifying workload, and the broader structural currents reshaping the higher education sector. These forces do not act in isolation; they collide, often making leadership feel less like a linear set of duties and more like an ongoing attempt to steer in shifting winds.
The picture distils, with remarkable economy, the core themes that emerged in the earlier conversation: the difficulty of motivating differently situated staff, the mismatch between institutional ambition and available resources, the identity shift required when academics become managers, diminishing public funding and rapidly evolving digital and AI ecosystems. Seen together, these elements map the landscape through which our institutional leaders must travel—not as detached observers, but as those both accountable and vulnerable.
What follows, then, is an unpacking of that diagram: a translation of its visual density into an interpretive account of the challenges articulated by the participants, the contexts that amplify them, and the collective endeavour required to meet them.
One cluster concerns people, and it is no surprise it emerges first. The strain of leading, motivating and managing colleagues sits at the heart of academic middle management, yet it is also the area in which many feel least prepared. There is the chronic tension between long-serving staff, who may be deeply invested in familiar practices, and newer appointments, who arrive with different identities, pedagogical sensibilities and expectations of institutional life. Research in higher education leadership shows that this ‘dual-culture problem’ generates friction not because individuals are obstructive, but because they are differently socialised into what counts as legitimate work, authority and collegiality. The “herding cats” metaphor becomes more than a joke here: the very autonomy that defines academic labour works against consistent motivation, shared direction, and the energy required for change. Many of you noted that persuasion, rather than authority, becomes your daily mode of operation. That persuasive work is slow, relationally demanding and emotionally depleting—yet it is the only means of moving divergent groups forward.
A second cluster sits around resources—financial, human, infrastructural and technological. This was described as an ongoing tension between strategic intent and operational survival. On paper, institutions emphasise vision, growth, digital transformation and long-term positioning. In practice, they are often pulled into perpetual crisis-response: filling gaps, protecting fragile systems, redistributing shrinking budgets, and keeping demoralised teams afloat. In South Africa, the situation is sharpened by the decline in real per-student funding, infrastructural backlogs, and the administrative load associated with compliance regimes. Many reported that this leads to “strategic drift”—the gradual shift away from proactive leadership into reactive management. The work becomes less about execution and more about a kind of institutional triage. The hidden cost is that innovation and developmental work are routinely postponed, not because leaders lack ideas, but because the system forces immediacy over intentionality.
The third cluster is deeply personal: the internal repositioning required when moving from a primarily academic identity to one marked by management and leadership. This is a transition that many describe as both disorienting and isolating. Scholarship on academic leadership often emphasises identity fracture, the moment when a scholar, once valued for disciplinary expertise, must renegotiate their legitimacy in bureaucratic and relational terms. Participants noted that the workload expands, the emotional labour intensifies, and a new kind of accountability emerges. The shift also introduces role conflict. Leaders are expected to champion institutional priorities, yet remain advocates for their staff; they must communicate managerial decisions, yet also buffer their teams. This is cognitively and ethically taxing, and it plays out daily in feelings of guilt, fatigue and the sense of never quite doing enough.
All of these sit inside a deteriorating external environment. Structural inequality shapes student preparedness, staff morale and institutional stability. Public funding continues to decline in real terms. Overlaying this is the rapidly shifting terrain of technology and AI. Many academics feel threatened; many leaders feel outpaced. The pressure to manage digital transformation while also managing cultural anxiety about it is a challenge these leaders identified repeatedly. It is not merely technical; it is existential.
What Anne’s diagram attempts to capture is that these domains do not operate separately. People-management is harder when environments are unequal; resources are harder to protect when teams are fragmented; and personal identity transitions are harder when the system feels unstable. The interplay forms a knot of tensions rather than a set of discrete quests. That is why the metaphor of a boat in rough water resonates. The point is that none are steering alone.
There is a hopeful thread that lies in the collective recognition of these realities. The moment leader’s name the pressures they carry, they begin to relate to one another as a community of practice rather than isolated travellers. Studies of academic leadership development point to this shared sense-making as the single most protective factor for resilience and effectiveness. If Foundations of Leadership achieves anything, it is this: giving shape to the complexity so that the leaders who live inside it can breathe, connect and strategise rather than merely gasp for breath.