Leading through tension – Advance HE UK

Reflections from our 2025-26 Member Benefit ‘Executives at the Leading Edge’.

Over the past six months, Advance HE’s ‘Executives at the Leading Edge’ series has brought together senior leaders from across the globe to explore some of the most pressing challenges facing the sector: institutional resilience, inclusive leadership, geopolitical uncertainty, AI-enabled transformation and inclusive education. 

While each session focused on a different theme, a striking pattern emerged across the conversations. The challenge facing university leaders today is increasingly about navigating a myriad of tensions as opposed to solving clear problems.   

Participants reflected on the growing complexity of leading institutions at a time of profound disruption. Financial sustainability, commitments to inclusion, academic freedom, institutional responsibility, global ambitions, local civic commitments, technological innovation and shifting national priorities are all shaping the context within which leaders operate. Increasingly, these forces do not sit neatly alongside one another; they interact, overlap and, at times, pull in different directions.  

In some contexts, universities may also find themselves navigating tensions between their institutional values and evolving governmental priorities or policy agendas. These dynamics are exposing underlying assumptions and beliefs, including questions about institutional neutrality and the role of universities in society. Rather than confronting isolated challenges, leaders are often required to hold multiple and, at times, conflicting truths simultaneously, exercising judgement amidst competing values, responsibilities and expectations. 

Historically and represented in traditional leadership models, there is an assumption that greater expertise leads to greater certainty. Yet the experience described by participants suggests something different. Leadership today appears less concerned with control and prediction, and more concerned with judgement, context and the ability to move forward in the context of complexity. 

The conversations repeatedly returned to the importance of moral courage, deep contextual understanding and the capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously. Participants described the need to lead in environments characterised by ambiguity, competing pressures and shifting expectations, all whilst preserving trust, institutional values and personal integrity. 

As one participant observed, the questions facing leaders today are not necessarily unprecedented. What feels different is the extent to which these competing demands now sit in direct tension with one another. 

Across the series, participants returned repeatedly to a small number of enduring questions:  

+ how do we lead when conflicting values, priorities and responsibilities sit in tension with one another?

+ what should a university stand for when neutrality itself is contested?

+ what capabilities will leaders need in a future defined less by certainty and more by complexity? And,

+ how do we remain courageous, reflective and human whilst carrying increasingly difficult institutional responsibilities?

These are questions the Executive Co-Chairs will continue to explore in a longer reflective piece to be published in the autumn.