Empathy, Empowerment, and the Future of Leadership: 2025 Jenzabar Executive Summit Takeaways

At this year’s Jenzabar Executive Summit in Nashville, education leaders came together to explore what it means to lead in higher education, especially during times of change. But where last year’s event focused on leading through disruption and the external factors influencing institutions, this year’s theme looked inward and focused on one powerful question: How do we build systems where leadership doesn’t just sit at the top—but lives throughout the entire organization?

This year’s Executive Summit was presented by the Leading Through Institute (LTI). Their presentation explored new models of organizational leadership designed to build resilience, trust, and institutional alignment across higher education.

Below are some key highlights and insights from the summit.

Leadership Needs to Be Empathetic

The summit opened with a bold assertion: If we want different results, we need to change our design. The suggestion: embedding empathy as a core leadership value.

According to LTI, empathetic leadership—leadership that values the experiences, perspective, and emotions of others—is essential for organizational health and for better outcomes for students, faculty, and communities. With empathetic leadership, the goal isn’t just to add empathy to existing systems; it’s to redesign how leadership functions so that empathy, feedback, and trust are part of the structure itself.

Leadership Needs to Be Decentralized

To bring the ideas of empathetic leadership to life, attendees participated in the “Airplane Factory” exercise—a hands-on simulation that demonstrated how leadership structure directly impacts communication, productivity, and morale.

In the first version of this exercise, where only one person at each table could speak, teams struggled with bottlenecks, miscommunication, and confusion. In the second round, teams appointed a leader—but everyone could talk, which meant their experiences, perspectives, and emotions could be taken into consideration. The shift was immediate: production increased, morale improved, and teams adapted in real time. The takeaway: Centralized control can limit problem-solving and engagement. Decentralized leadership—where roles are clear and communication is open—is more empathetic in nature and creates the conditions for collaboration, innovation, and efficiency.

It was a memorable reminder that structure and outcomes are deeply linked. As many attendees noted, the exercise mirrored their real-world experiences in higher ed—where top-down decision-making can leave those closest to the work feeling unheard.

Leadership Needs to Be Empowering

After the hands-on exercise was a brief presentation on leadership theory. Attendees were introduced to the concept of “leading through”—a modern alternative to the traditional “power over” paradigm that still shapes many institutions.

“Leading through” shifts the focus of leadership from compliance and control to empowerment and clarity. It’s built on four foundational ideas:

• Leadership is deeply personal and human.
• Decentralized teams make faster, better decisions.
• Autonomy paired with visible goals and shared values creates organizational alignment. 
• Executives should evolve into enablers—people who support, coach, and build leadership capacity across levels. 

To successfully lead an institution, institutional leaders need to move away from hierarchy-driven systems and adopt models that empower people to act with purpose. It’s important to note that empowering leadership doesn’t remove structure—it reshapes it to unlock potential across the organization.

Leadership Needs to Be Collaborative

The summit concluded with a case study that brought the day’s insights into focus. Participants examined a fictional—but all too familiar—scenario: a new university president stepping into a fractured institution shaped by top-down leadership, siloed departments, and an undervalued IT team.

Working in groups, attendees identified core challenges and discovered that solutions focusing on collaboration, on “leading through,” were those that would work best. For instance, to break through silos, a new campus leader should work with other leaders on campus to create shared values and a unified institutional vision. They should collaborate to strengthen communication across departments, embrace shared governance, and take a relationship-driven and phased approach to change.  

A New Era of Leadership in Higher Education

The 2025 Jenzabar Executive Summit highlighted more than just a new way to think about leadership—it demonstrated a blueprint for systemic change. Through empathy, decentralization, empowerment, and collaboration, institutions can begin to view leadership not as a title or position, but as a shared responsibility embedded across the organization.

One of the biggest takeaways from the summit was that leadership isn’t a fixed trait; it’s a capability that campuses can cultivate—one that will be essential to meeting the future with resilience, innovation, and shared success.

The 2025 Jenzabar Executive Summit kicked off JAM 2025. You can read more about the highlights and takeaways of JAM 2025 here.