Managing at the Yield Point: Leadership Reflections from the 2026 Higher Ed Conference Season - Part 2: The Staffing Crisis
Part 2: The Staffing Crisis
Ghost Portfolios: Myth of the Fully Staffed Team
Key takeaways:
When AVPs and VPs are forced out of scope to manage daily operations and hiring, long-term strategic planning, assessment, and innovation gets left to the wayside.
Staff shortages and erratic leaves are forcing a culture of survival. Resentment builds from mid-level managers (particularly professionals of color) who feel excluded from decision-making but are entirely responsible for absorbing the work of others now gone.
The sessions focused on burnout, "rest as resistance," and staff retention felt different than last year. I went to a handful and listened in on conversations that were now focused more on surviving current realities. No one talked about self-care days anymore. In one session, a presenter spent the entire time sharing strategies on how she “protected” her team from the pressure to do more with less. All of this reveals a workforce struggling to survive and fundamentally overextended - capacity collapse.
The Toll of the “Unfilled Role”
Search fatigue: Hiring is no longer a process. Now, institutions cannot keep up with the work of trying to fill vacancies. It is like a second unpaid full time job when counting the amount of time spent on hiring, sourcing qualified candidates, getting them through the rounds of the process, only to have things fall apart in negotiation and to face starting all over again. Each day that position sits unfilled is another day managers are in the weeds doing operations work instead of strategy and planning, asking their team to take on more beyond their core responsibilities, and hoping they don’t burn out.
Operational drift: AVPs and VPs with smaller portfolios are stuck keeping the lights on, causing long-term strategy and assessment to be put on the backburner. Leaders are directly impacted by leadership transitions and departures because they find themselves working out of scope and role. They are juggling being understaffed and while also running search committees to fill vacancies.
Unregulated leave: As burnout peaks, managers are juggling erratic mental health days, sick days, longer vacations, and unpaid leaves with no backups to run basic programs. These sudden requests create stress for managers who are expected to fill that gap.
Constant working beyond capacity and out of their scope and role creates a collapse in capacity for leaders. Without the mental bandwidth to focus on strategic thinking innovation and future thinking ceases to occur, problems stay persistent, and siloed work deepens in a culture of survival. The feeling of vulnerability with the potential for instability and coming change also puts people in a constant survival mode state because they don’t know how they will be impacted and don’t feel like they can leave their jobs because it feels like there are so many people posting on LInkedIn about unemployment.
Feeling a lack of agency that changes are happening at them, managers grow increasingly resentful towards senior leaders who expect them to execute decisions they were not a part of. The resentment was especially palpable among professionals of color who articulated the impact of labor exhaustion, and change anxiety and fatigue. The sheer number of sessions that focused on the racial battle fatigue, middle manager burnout, and the realities of Black professionals was notable.
As a senior leader who is most likely experiencing all of the above, what can be done about restoring the energy, capacity, and health of their leadership team, who may be experiencing their own version of exhaustion, anxiety, and fatigue? We are in a moment where senior leaders can no longer expect their AVPs to simply handle all of the things without burning them out. Do you have the key stills to create restorative, human-centered supervision?
In the next part of this series, I’ll share more about the impact all of this is having to individuals as well as the profession. The impact is more profound than what you think.
