Who counts as a leader in higher education?

By John Melton, Strategic Partnerships Portfolio Lead / 15 October 2026

Two pieces of research into higher education (HE) leadership published within a few months of each other have left me thinking about a deceptively simple question: 

Who counts as a leader in a university? 

The latest Advance HE and Wonkhe report, Developing mid-level leadership to build capacity for strategic change, explores the experiences of ‘emerging leaders’ during a period of considerable institutional change. It is based on discussions with 35 emerging leaders and 21 senior leaders, alongside a survey completed by 28 emerging leaders. 

It caught my attention because, in July 2026, we published our own research at Strive Higher: Culture, context, complexity: Understanding leadership in higher education. Based on thirteen in-depth interviews with leaders across academic and professional services roles and sector bodies, it approached leadership from a somewhat different angle. 

What I found particularly interesting wasn't where the two reports disagree, but how often they independently arrive at similar places. 

Leadership without authority 

Both studies describe a particular quality of HE leadership: significant responsibility doesn't necessarily come with equivalent formal authority. 

AdvanceHE/ Wonkhe find emerging leaders responsible for operationalising change while decisions may have been taken elsewhere. Senior leaders in their study acknowledge that institutions can place people in important roles and expect them to achieve significant changes largely through influence rather than positional power. 

This could almost have come from our interviews. Our participants talked repeatedly about the gap between formal authority and informal influence. In universities with complex governance arrangements, multiple stakeholder communities and significant local autonomy, getting things done depends heavily on credibility, relationships, communication and political acumen. 

So, maybe, influence without authority shouldn't be seen simply as a difficulty facing middle leaders. It may be one of the defining practices of effective HE leadership. 

The translator in the middle 

Another point of convergence is the role these leaders play between strategy and delivery. 

AdvanceHE/ Wonkhe describe emerging leaders interpreting institutional strategy for their own context while communicating intelligence from the ground back upwards. 

In our research, participants used remarkably similar language. They talked about continually communicating up and down the organisation, translating a message for a CFO in one conversation and for another community in the next. 

That looks increasingly important to me. We often talk about strategy as something that is first developed and then implemented, but between those two activities sits a substantial interpretative task. 

• What does this institutional priority actually mean here? 

• How will different communities understand it? 

• What practical consequences haven't been visible from the centre? 

• Where will resistance emerge, and what might that resistance be telling us? 

The people answering those questions aren't merely implementing strategy. They are part of the mechanism through which strategy becomes institutional reality. 

The accidental leader 

Both reports also raise uncomfortable questions about how people arrive in leadership. 

Our research identified what we called the ‘accidental leader’: academics and others who move into increasingly significant leadership responsibilities despite having built their careers around expertise in something quite different. Formal preparation doesn't always accompany that transition. 

AdvanceHE/ Wonkhe find much the same. One participant describes universities taking somebody who excels in research or education and effectively giving them a completely different job as a leader. 

If two independent sets of conversations are surfacing the same phenomenon, surely this deserves attention. But it also leads me somewhere slightly different. 

Is ‘emerging leader’ quite the right description? 

AdvanceHE/ Wonkhe deliberately use the term emerging leaders for people at the mid-level, in part because some will become the senior and institutional leaders of the future. There is clearly an important succession question here. 

That said, I wonder whether that language can inadvertently reinforce the very hierarchy that distributed leadership seeks to challenge.  

• What if somebody is an outstanding head of department and has no desire to become a dean?  

• What if a professional services colleague exercises enormous institutional influence but doesn't aspire to join an executive team?  

• What if programme administrators, technicians and course leaders provide precisely the leadership their institution needs from exactly where they are? 

One of the contributors to our research asked a question that has stayed with me:

Whose leadership counts? 

Maybe we should value excellent leadership in the middle not primarily because it creates tomorrow's senior leaders, but because institutions need excellent leadership there. Progression can be one outcome of development without being its justification. 

Beyond preparing people to manage change 

There is another distinction between the research that I think matters. 

Because AdvanceHE/ Wonkhe are examining strategic change, they understandably focus on the capabilities leaders need to navigate and execute it. Their research makes a strong case that those capabilities can't be separated from institutional culture, relationships and infrastructure. 

Our research led us towards a complementary question:

What helps somebody develop a sustainable identity as a leader? 

Our participants talked about purpose, authenticity, values and resilience alongside influence and communication. Leadership development, in that framing, isn't simply the acquisition of a better toolkit. It includes understanding who you are as a leader, what you stand for and how you want to lead when circumstances become difficult. 

That makes leadership development more than an investment in individuals. It becomes part of how an institution builds the capability to adapt, make decisions and deliver change over time. 

That distinction feels increasingly important. The sector unquestionably needs people capable of delivering change. But those people also need to remain capable of leading when the programme finishes, the strategy changes or the next institutional challenge arrives. 

Start before somebody becomes a leader 

Perhaps the most interesting implication is where development should begin.  

AdvanceHE/ Wonkhe conclude that conversations about impact, influence and building trust should start much earlier than somebody's first formal leadership appointment. 

I agree, but I would go slightly further. 

If leadership in HE is genuinely relational and distributed, then maybe we need to stop treating leadership development primarily as something awarded after somebody acquires a particular role. 

Instead, we could start by recognising where leadership is already happening. 

• Who is bringing people together? 

• Who is translating between different communities? 

• Who can challenge constructively? 

• Who creates trust? 

• Who sees beyond their own functional or disciplinary boundary? 

• And crucially, who might we currently be overlooking because they don't conform to our established picture of what a future leader looks like? 

Both pieces of research highlight the danger of reproducing familiar leadership models and the importance of widening access to leadership opportunity. 

So… what if the question for institutions isn't simply: 

How do we develop our mid-level leaders? 

And is instead:

Where is leadership already happening here, what institutional conditions enable more of it, and how do we ensure the people exercising it are supported to flourish? 

HE’s next generation of leadership is most likely already leading. 

Our task is both to get better at seeing them and to create the conditions in which they can flourish.