What Nursing Leadership Can Learn from Higher Ed

 What Nursing Leadership Can Learn from Higher Ed

This week in my doctoral program, I dove into some eye-opening articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education about leadership development—and honestly, it hit close to home.

One article by Brown and Kolditz (2020) focused on the Doerr Institute at Rice University. They’re doing something really innovative: actually measuring leadership growth in their students with the help of research psychologists. Not just surveys or feel-good feedback, but real data. As someone teaching future nurses and thinking deeply about how we support our students before they even start the program, I found myself wondering, “What if we applied this same level of intentionality to leadership training in nursing education?”

Then I read Kevin McClure’s (2025) piece, which called out how little higher ed invests in preparing its own leaders. Faculty are often promoted into leadership roles because they’re great teachers or researchers—not because they’ve been trained to lead. This was such a familiar truth for me. I’ve been in informal leadership roles where I had to figure things out on my own, and I’ve seen colleagues struggle with the same lack of support. We do so much to prepare our students academically, but what about preparing ourselves and our teams to lead well?

These readings made me think about how nursing programs could benefit from structured leadership development that starts early—maybe even before students walk into their first class. Just like my proposed academic readiness webinar series is designed to ease the transition into nursing school, maybe we also need something parallel for emerging faculty leaders: something measurable, intentional, and supportive.

Because the truth is, leadership isn’t something that just happens—it’s something we build. And if we want nursing programs that thrive, we have to start investing in our people the way we invest in our students.