The Pragmatic Leader

Why the future belongs to those who deal in reality, not rhetoric

There’s a leadership archetype that gets almost no airtime on the conference circuit. Not the visionary. not the servant leader or the empathetic coach or the bold disruptor, but the pragmatist - the person who walks into a meeting, hears two good arguments pulling in opposite directions, and says calmly, without drama – okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Pragmatic leaders function in uncertain times by making clear-eyed decisions. They live at the intersection of two uncomfortable truths: that most decisions must be made under uncertainty and that waiting for certainty is itself a decision – often a costly one.

The forecast had been cautious at first—a wintry mix. Then, significant ice accumulation is possible at higher elevations. By early afternoon, the radar was no longer abstract. The ice had begun to form on the trees and settle on cars parked in the school’s parking lot. What began as a potential weather event quickly became a growing risk to faculty, staff, and students. I had been immersed in preparations for an afternoon lecture until one of my security officers appeared in my doorway and asked if I would step outside for a minute. I knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t have disturbed me if it wasn’t serious. Together, we walked out onto the concrete walkway leading into the school. He cautioned me to be careful, just as I slipped and almost fell. The ice was invisible and dangerous. He remarked that a student who had just completed his admission interview sought him out to report that he had been leaving the campus and, as he braked for the stop sign at the bottom of the hill, slid sideways, drove over the pole holding the sign, coming to rest in the intersection blocking traffic, including ambulances who were coming into the emergency room. My natural response was, Has the campus called closing classes? He responded that he had called over to the security office to report the accident and asked when a decision would be made. The response was non-committal; We will let you know.

The problem was twofold. One was location, and the other was organizational. The main campus was located five miles away on the other side of the city, but it wasn’t the distance which was the problem; it was the elevation. The Health Professions Campus, where I was standing with the security officer, was located on a hill overlooking the Medical Center on the northwest side of the city. We were 200 feet higher than the main campus, which was located alongside a stream and at the lowest point in the city. They also benefited from the Heat Island Effect; cold air coming in from the northwest had to cross over the buildings in the city before reaching the main campus. The result was that the temperature of the air reaching the main campus was several degrees higher than the air that was creating a rapid deterioration in our parking lot.

The second problem was organizational. The university bureaucracy was designed to adhere to policies and procedures that emphasize uniformity (unless situations dictated otherwise). I consulted with my Assistant Dean for Student Affairs, and we decided that this was one of those situations. Sometimes policies need to be adjusted to conform to different situations. My choices were to wait for the officials to respond to a situation that was probably not perceived as serious on the main campus as where I was standing, or to protect the safety of the students entrusted to me, even if it didn’t agree with the stated policy of the bureaucratic officials who crafted the policy.

We are closing, I said. Immediately! Send faculty, staff, and students home while the roads are still passable. I will stay and close up with security. Within minutes, my Assistant Dean moved through the school of pharmacy, passed the word, and our part of the building began to empty out.

By nightfall, the storm had intensified beyond what was initially forecast, and, eventually, main campus officials were forced to acknowledge that the situation was worse than they had previously thought. Then came the repercussions of my decision. The School of Nursing, with whom we shared the facility, had been notified by my Assistant Dean that we were closing, but chose to wait for formal notification. Their faculty, staff, and students faced major challenges getting home and, when activities returned to normal, questioned why they were not sent home when the pharmacy students left.

When classes resumed late the next day, I was walking to a conference room to celebrate a staff member’s birthday. I was surprised to meet the Director of Campus Security walking down the hall, headed for my office. I stopped and remarked, What brings you to the Health Professions Building? He glanced around and, rather than answer my question, he asked his own. I understand you cancelled classes yesterday. Are you planning on doing that again? I grinned and started walking down the hall to the birthday party. I will do what is needed when those in my charge need to be protected. That includes assessing the threat of an ice storm and getting them home safely. Would you like a piece of cake? He looked uncertain and stammered, uh, no. I never heard from the university administration because even they knew that there are times when pragmatism should always outweigh stated policies and procedures.

Bureaucracy exists for good reasons: fairness, consistency, shared governance, and risk mitigation. But in fast-moving crises, processes can lag behind reality. When time is compressed, someone must compress the decision.

The temptation for leaders in large systems is to distribute responsibility until it dissolves. We’re still evaluating. We’re awaiting guidance, or, my favorite, we need to form a task force to evaluate the situation. Each phrase shifts ownership slightly away from the person at the helm. This is the favorite strategy of leaders who want to avoid responsibility for bad outcomes. It even has its own tag line, Plausible Deniability. On that icy winter day, the lesson was not that bureaucracy is unnecessary, but that bureaucracy is a tool - and tools serve judgment, not the other way around. On that day, I chose students over symmetry. Safety over synchronization. Decisiveness over diffusion.

In the aftermath, some administrators grumbled privately about not following the proper procedure. A few emails questioned whether the closure should have occurred. But as reports of downed power lines and multi-car accidents filled the news, the critique softened. No policy and procedure manual can perfectly match the speed of ice formation on exposed surfaces. Some disgruntled administrators who were embarrassed by their hesitation continued to harbor grudges, but others quickly filed it in a different memory box. This is the role of a pragmatic leader: to always work to protect their charges regardless of the personal cost.

Why does higher education and, for that matter, most organizations need a bureaucracy?

Bureaucracy exists in large-scale organizations to foster coordination, preserve legal fairness, and to meet public expectations for transparency and accountability in situations requiring consistent, predictable behavior across thousands of cases (tax processing, licensing, military logistics). Pragmatism excels in crisis management, innovation, startups, policy experimentation, and any situation where conditions are rapidly changing, and rigid rules become obstacles. Those are, increasingly, the situations we are faced with today.

The deepest conflict is about what legitimizes a decision. For pragmatists, a decision is good if it works — if it solves the problem and produces better outcomes. For a bureaucrat, a decision is good if it follows the correct procedure, regardless of outcome. A bureaucrat who followed all the rules but achieved a bad result has still done their job correctly; a pragmatist who bent the rules but fixed the problem has succeeded.

The Pragmatic Leader

We live in an age flooded with performative leadership. Social media platforms thrive on outrage and endless purity spirals, where the loudest moral posturing wins attention. Institutions increasingly prize virtue signaling over actual results. Against this backdrop, the truly pragmatic leader has become almost countercultural—even quietly rebellious—simply by choosing substance over spectacle. It demands real courage to lead effectively and pragmatically in such an environment.

Every capable leader sooner or later faces the same subtle trap: the very systems built to protect an organization’s integrity can end up strangling its ability to adapt and survive. Bureaucracy upholds standards, spreads responsibility, and guards against reckless moves—yet in times of rapid change, those same safeguards can calcify into obstacles. The leader’s task is to distinguish between essential structures that must be preserved and mere comfort zones masquerading as safeguards.

Navigating this requires navigating a tension that exists between two truths: honoring stewardship of what already exists while still making room for necessary disruption. Steer too softly, and the organization slips toward stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Drive too aggressively, and you risk shattering trust and cohesion. The goal isn’t to declare war on bureaucracy, but to thoughtfully reform it - preserving the foundation it was meant to protect while freeing the institution to evolve.

Where to Begin?

In higher education, bureaucratic authority often runs less as a mechanism for institutional order and more as a tool for personal control. When faculty members challenge established processes, administrators often respond not with reasoned justification but with an appeal to precedent - enforcing outdated policies less out of principle than out of a desire to reassert dominance over those who questioned them.

This dynamic runs deeper than simple risk aversion. Many administrators - whether former academics or career bureaucrats - have developed a quiet resentment toward things they perceive as threatening their authority: tenure protections, flexible academic schedules, and the kind of intellectual autonomy that administrators rarely enjoy. That resentment rarely surfaces directly. Instead, it expresses itself through institutional inertia: the reflexive invocation of that’s how we’ve always done it as a conversation-ender rather than a legitimate rationale.

The consequences are real. When an innovative educator advocates for something as straightforward as modernizing a curriculum approval process unchanged since the 1980s, the resistance they meet from administrators is often not about protecting institutional integrity – it is about protecting their professional prerogatives.

This dynamic thrives in environments where accountability is diffuse and metrics reward compliance over outcomes. For pragmatic leaders, the answer isn’t a frontal assault on the system - that approach typically backfires and entrenches positions - but strategic navigation: building alliances with sympathetic administrators, piloting small-scale exceptions that establish new precedents, and documenting failures to build a case for change.

When I became a dean, I developed a disciplined approach to that last task. Confronted repeatedly with the failures of higher education bureaucracy, I created two files to document them - not as an outlet for frustration but as a tool for understanding their impact and mapping a strategy to prevent recurrence. The first I called the System Failure File. Inclusion required a clear finding: someone in the bureaucracy had made an error, and we knew who. It was the larger of the two files. The second was the Enigma File, reserved for cases where a failure was clear, but responsibility remained unattributed.

The distinction was not arbitrary. Both files served as data I shared with my leadership team as incidents occurred, and later as teaching tools when mentoring future academic leaders. More fundamentally, the two-file framework imposed a discipline that most institutional actors avoid: the discipline of honest attribution - the willingness to name what went wrong, and when possible, who was responsible, even if it was the leader.

Until higher education confronts the cultural divide between those who administrate and those who teach, organizational compliance will continue to be bought at the expense of common sense, and progress will remain the casualty of unresolved resentment.

The System Failure File is ultimately a file about accountability - and accountability, in a university setting, is a surprisingly radical concept. Higher education has spent decades building structures that diffuse responsibility so thoroughly that when something goes wrong, the fog of process absorbs the blame before it can land anywhere useful. Naming the person, the decision, and the failure is an act of institutional courage. It also, over time, reveals patterns. The same names reappear. The same offices become recurring characters. What looks like a one-off incident turns out to be a chronic condition with a known address.

The Enigma File is, in many ways, the more philosophically interesting of the two. These are the failures that the system produced but that the system cannot explain - at least not in terms of individual culpability. No one did it. Everyone did it. The process itself did it. This is where bureaucracy reveals its deepest nature: its capacity to generate genuinely bad outcomes while simultaneously providing everyone involved with a clean conscience. W. Edwards Deming was the architect of this concept, but he readily laid the blame for the failure at the feet of administrators for the way the system was structured. He argued that the vast majority of quality problems - he often cited around 85–94% - stem from the system itself rather than from individual workers, and management is responsible for the system. Therefore, when things go wrong, management bears primary responsibility, not the front-line employees who are simply operating within the constraints of the system they were given. His most famous quotation that captures the essence of this system failure is A bad system will beat a good person every time.

The Enigma File is a record of structural failure as opposed to personal failure. And in higher education, the Enigma File is almost certainly the most troubling and the most difficult to correct. The Enigma File becomes a systems re-design tool. When you can’t blame a person, you’re forced to ask the more productive question: what in structure made this failure not only possible but, on reflection, almost inevitable? Those answers point toward the process changes, the redundancies, and the clarified handoffs that might actually prevent a recurrence. The Enigma File, in other words, is where institutional learning either happens or doesn’t.

The best institutional learning is rarely found in strategic plans or accreditation reports. More often, it lives in a well-organized folder on someone’s hard drive - maintained by a leader patient enough to document what everyone else just complains about. Unfortunately, in an era of administrative bloat, this approach is becoming increasingly rare because the purpose would be to create system efficiencies, and unfortunately, leaders in higher education seldom appear concerned about efficiency.

Growth in the higher education bureaucracy

The data exhibited in the chart below is sourced from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). They collect data for the student fall enrollment and faculty headcount (used as a proxy for FTE, as historical FTE-specific data follows similar trends with adjustments for part-time faculty). For administrators (including executive and professional staff). To show comparative growth, the values are normalized to 1975 = 100.

Between 1976 and 2023, the number of full-time administrators (executive, administrative, and managerial) increased by approximately 150% to 200% at many 4-year institutions, while the number of full-time faculty grew by roughly 50% to 70%. Since the early 2000s, Other Professional Staff (specialists in student services, HR, admissions, and DEI) has been the fastest-growing category, often exceeding the growth of both traditional administrators and teaching faculty. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment, which grew by 78%, and there was a shift from tenure-track to contingent faculty who are less costly and operate on a year-to-year contract.

Why Is This Growth Happening?

NCES and education researchers (such as those at AAUP) attribute this growth to several factors:

• Student Services: Modern universities compete on student experience, leading to more staff in mental health, career services, and extracurricular programming.

• Technological Complexity: The shift toward digital campuses has caused a massive increase in IT and data management staff.

• Increased Regulation: Compliance with federal mandates (Title IX, Clery Act, ADA) requires dedicated administrative oversight.

Administrative salaries are increasingly taking a bigger bite out of university budgets. Over the past two decades, administrative salaries in U.S. universities have typically risen faster than faculty salaries, both in nominal terms and after adjusting for inflation, while tuition increases have outpaced both categories significantly. This trend is driven by factors like administrative growth, rising operational costs, and shifts in institutional priorities toward non-instructional services. If you are tempted to attribute the growth in the bureaucracy to increased student load, note that in 2010, when student enrollment began to flatten and decline slightly, the growth in the professional bureaucracy did not. With the coming of the demographic cliff, colleges and universities are faced with budget challenges that may dictate increased attention to system efficiency. Accountability is coming, but not in the way that most administrators expected. Deming’s prophetic message was that transforming quality within organizations requires management to take ownership of the system - designing processes, removing barriers, and creating conditions where workers can actually succeed. That is the phase we may be about to experience.

Smarter Growth

As a dean, I relied heavily on the university Factbook to pull data for accreditation reports - building comparison tables, tracking benchmarks, and showing growth. When the 550-page document disappeared from the website, I called the Office of Institutional Research. The director’s explanation was blunt: Nobody but you had the patience to search through it. It had been replaced with a digital dashboard.

That evolution - from factbook to dashboard to web-based policy manuals - mirrors a broader shift in higher education. The skilled bureaucrats who once curated and interpreted institutional knowledge are being replaced by something faster and more powerful: generative AI that can research and craft answers that help time-pressed administrators produce polished reports in seconds. This shift is now being accelerated by regulation.

In April 2024, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued rules requiring all public colleges and universities to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA digital accessibility standards by April 24, 2026. Every website, course platform, and policy document must satisfy criteria for keyboard navigation, color contrast, heading structure, and link clarity. Institutions are auditing years of legacy content and consolidating PDFs into structured digital manuals - not merely to avoid liability, but because accessible, well-organized policy infrastructure has become a strategic asset in its own right.

That infrastructure is now becoming the foundation for something more consequential: generative artificial intelligence (AI) that can query institutional policy and data in real time, compressing the distance between a question and a decision from days to seconds. The skilled administrators who once curated and interpreted institutional knowledge weren’t inefficient - they were the technology of their moment. What’s replacing them isn’t just faster. It’s available at 11 am before a noon board meeting.

Pragmatic leadership has always required knowing which tools to trust - and when to stop defending the ones you’ve outgrown. The factbook served its time well. So did the bureaucrats who mastered it.

But the administrators who lead most effectively in the years ahead won’t be defined by what they’ve memorized or which systems they’ve navigated longest. They’ll be the ones who treat accessible digital infrastructure and generative AI not as a threat to institutional judgment, but as an amplifier of it.

The modernization of higher education’s information architecture was never really in question. The only question is whether leaders will be shaped by it — or use it to deliberately shape what comes next.