In the March 2026 issue of Noteworthy, I argued in this article that the most important work of leadership development is not skill-building but the cultivation of purpose and judgment — the capacity to deliberate wisely about what matters in the service of a meaningful purpose. This type of practical wisdom, sometimes called prudence, cannot be taught directly. It can only be cultivated through practice, guidance and support of wise advisors, mentors, and colleagues, and sustained engagement with problems that resist easy resolution.

The Problems that Don’t Resolve Easily

For many years, AAL has incorporated case-based learning into its professional development programs. In some instances, participants submit cases in response to a request to describe a challenging situation or scenario they face as administrators or faculty members. I reviewed nearly 100 scenarios recently submitted by participants in two AAL programs— the Chairs and Academic Administrators Management Program (CAAMP) and the Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL). Without exception, the scenarios presented problems not easily resolved.

CAAMP participants are experienced leaders — department chairs, program directors, associate deans, and occasionally, deans — people credentialed and promoted by their institutions. Despite their experience, their scenarios describe situations they genuinely do not know how to navigate: reconciling budgetary constraints with a commitment to academic and clinical excellence; fostering a positive and supportive environment amid increasing workloads and decreasing staff numbers; managing the demands of work and personal life. Over two years, the most frequently recurring challenges involve people — underperforming colleagues, resistant faculty, fractured teams, managing relationships with more senior administrators, and communication failures that compound them all.

The ITL participants are primarily early-career faculty — clinicians and scientists who became educators, usually without formal preparation for the role. Their scenarios describe classrooms and simulation labs where engagement is inconsistent, and feedback meets resistance, where learners who are perfectly capable of performing a procedure approach it without the urgency or professional bearing that the setting demands. Some faculty struggle with course assignments outside their areas of training. Others are tasked with redesigning the curriculum where long-serving colleagues are resistant, and students are skeptical.

Both sets of scenarios reveal the same underlying problem at different career stages: accomplished professionals facing situations that their credentials and experience have not fully prepared them for, and doing so largely without the structured support the moment requires. In these situations, what to do is rarely as clear as what not to do. This is not surprising. When challenges involve other people, as they usually do, no single right answer exists. The wisdom of any response can only be judged in time through the consequences that follow.

Learning to Lead

The three curated articles in this issue of Noteworthy approach learning to lead from different angles, and together they form a coherent argument about what it means to develop as a leader and what is required.

Luckman, Gunsalus, and Burbules, writing in Inside Higher Ed, offer the diagnosis. Leadership in higher education is uneven, they argue, because the assumptions underlying how we select and develop leaders are fundamentally flawed. Institutions choose chairs, deans, and provosts primarily on the basis of scholarly credentials, and if leadership development occurs, it arrives after the person has assumed the role — too late for foundational growth. More significantly, the dominant model treats leadership as a heroic individual endeavor rather than a distributed responsibility shared across a unit or an institution. Too often leaders are isolated with problems that require collective, relational capacity to solve, working in institutions that prepared them for their fields, but not for the demands of their leadership roles. They need a different kind of learning.

Adler-Kassner and Gallagher, writing in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, move from diagnosis to description. Drawing on narrative accounts from fifteen senior academic leaders, they identify six learning habits that successful leaders share: metacognition, principled action, theory building, institutional literacy, transfer, and identity negotiation. They argue that adopting a learner’s mindset is not a phase that precedes leadership — it is the orientation that makes leadership possible, and it must be continuously practiced rather than achieved once.

Framing the CAAMP and ITL scenarios through the lens of these learning habits reveals something important: the challenges participants bring are not signs of inadequate preparation or limited capability, but that they are ready for a new kind of learning. The habit of metacognition, the practice of principled action, the capacity to read an institution and transfer hard-won insight from one situation to the next — these are precisely the conditions under which prudence develops. This is wisdom not in the abstract, but in the particular: deliberation and decision-making about this department, this conflict, this moment, worked through alongside advisors, mentors, and colleagues who have or are navigating the same terrain. That is what participants in both programs cultivate, often for the first time in a structured way.

Vigoreaux and Caromile, writing in BMC Proceedings, offer an important orientation to how leaders should view themselves and others. Academics, they note, are thoroughly familiar with the growth mindset framework — they use it to help students embrace challenges, learn from failure, and persist through difficulty. However, they often fail to apply the growth mindset to themselves as they navigate their own professional development and careers. This framework is also relevant to leaders. Obtaining a position is not the end of the learning process. With a growth mindset, accomplished professionals view challenges as opportunities for growth, approaching them with a deliberate learning orientation.

Cultivating Wisdom

Unlike procedural competencies or content knowledge, practical wisdom resists direct assessment. Instruments exist to measure dispositional tendencies associated with wise judgment, such as self-reflection, tolerance of uncertainty, and emotional regulation, but whether a leader actually exercised good judgment in a particular situation is often visible only in retrospect. This does not mean that cultivating wisdom leading to sound judgment is impossible. From the evidence of the three articles in this issue, and from what the CAAMP and ITL scenario data show, several conditions appear to matter:

1. Honest naming of the problem. Leaders who cannot say, “I don’t know how to handle this,” cannot begin to learn from the challenge. The scenarios submitted by CAAMP and ITL participants represent this kind of naming. Institutional leaders who create structured opportunities for others to bring their hardest problems forward to learn from them are doing something most do not.
2. Engagement across institutional boundaries. Luckman and colleagues are direct on this point: the heroic individual model of leadership actively prevents the kind of collective learning that judgment requires. Adler-Kassner and Gallagher’s analysis of successful leaders shows that the habits that matter most — metacognition, transfer, principled action — are developed in dialogue, not in isolation. A department chair working through a challenge with mentors, advisors, colleagues, or peers from other institutions is doing something qualitatively different from a chair reading about managing conflict. The problem is real, the stakes are present, and the learning is situated.
3. Continuity. What the scenario data from CAAMP and ITL suggest — and what Vigoreaux and Caromile argue for early-career faculty — is that the learning orientation has to become habitual, practiced across a career. At its best, leadership learning is designed not to deliver answers but to develop the capacity to find them.

The wisdom that fosters insightful deliberation and sound decision-making is slow to cultivate, difficult to measure, and impossible to certify. Its absence, however, is not hard to recognize. It shows up in every instance of a leader who knows something is wrong but cannot find the path forward.

References

Linda Adler-Kassner and Corrine W. Gallagher, “Learning the Learning Habits of Successful Leaders,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning Vol. 58, No. 1, 21–28, February 13, 2026.

E. A. Luckman, C. K. Gunsalus, et al., “Rethinking Leadership Development in Higher Ed,” Inside Higher Ed, October 24, 2025.

José O. Vigoreaux and Laura A. Caromile, “Maximizing Opportunities for Success as an Early Career STEM Faculty: A Growth Mindset Approach,” BMC Proceedings Vol. 18 (2025).

Author:

N. Karl Haden, PhD

President, AAL