The UK research system’s current approaches to leadership are under strain in a rapidly changing research environment where crisis has become the norm.
To create conditions for research and innovation to thrive – and be able to deliver our ambitions and society’s expectations of benefits for all – the sector needs approaches to leadership that are effective in uncertainty and crisis.
The sector is under sustained pressure, with uncertainty that is no longer episodic but enduring. This strain is fuelled by geopolitical instability, volatile student markets, funding disruption, financial constraints, and rapid technological change. Its impacts are far-reaching: job losses, rising precarity, increasing workloads, and strain on well-being. Universities are not unique in facing this: McKinsey’s recent report highlights continuous turbulence, economic disruption, and workforce shifts globally.
This sustained pressure holds a complex and reciprocal relationship with leadership, influencing both what is needed from them and how leaders behave. In turn, leaders shape how uncertainty is experienced by the people, teams, and institutions they lead, influencing whether disruption deepens instability or creates opportunities for adaptation.
We explored this at the UKRI Future Leaders Fellows Development Network (FLFDN) Host Summit in Leeds in February 2026. The summit’s focus on “Leading through Crisis” reflected growing recognition that academia is operating under sustained strain. What we found most striking at the Summit was not so much the language of crisis itself, but the matter-of-fact way it was used. In a sector known for careful, analytical phrasing, the word “crisis” was not used for rhetorical emphasis but to describe a shared operating reality. Crisis, in many ways, has become normalised.
Discussions with colleagues from across the UK higher education sector highlighted concerns that current leadership approaches are no longer fit for purpose.
Are old approaches to leadership fit for the future?
Against this backdrop, and through conversations held at the Summit, we felt a growing sense that established conceptions of leadership – and means of recognising and developing leaders – are mismatched with this crisis environment.
This crisis amplifies existing tensions around leadership. We have long known that changes in how and why research happens have created a leadership challenge. Matthew Flinders’ 2022 report highlighted the risks posed by the sector’s legacy leadership approach. Growing expectations for research to deliver benefits for individuals, communities, and society have made it increasingly collaborative, interdisciplinary, and boundary-crossing: a team sport. As a result, leadership now requires relational and collaborative skills, including emotional intelligence, self-awareness, resilience, and the ability to navigate complexity. Without leaders who cultivate these capabilities, the sector’s future is at risk.
The Summit highlighted how this threat is becoming reality. Many delegates described efforts to help leaders develop these capabilities, essential for operating in crisis. Yet researchers continue to step into leadership roles without deliberate preparation, and Flinders’ description of leadership development as a “laissez-faire hierarchic apprenticeship” still resonates. Delegates also described underlying structures, incentives, and role architectures remaining unchanged, and sometimes actively inhibiting their efforts to embed these leadership capabilities.
A different kind of leadership is emerging
In crisis, leadership requires collaborative, adaptive, and reflective capacities. Discussions at the Summit suggested these approaches are already emerging in pockets across the sector, albeit unevenly and without consistent institutional support.
This leadership embraces complexity rather than attempting to control it. It involves making decisions with incomplete information, intentional reflection that enables shared sense-making, and creating conditions for others to succeed. Leadership suitable for this volatile and unpredictable environment becomes an ongoing process of learning, experimentation, and adaptation, grounded in collaboration and strong interpersonal relationships of autonomy and high trust.
This requires distributed leadership capability. Rather than being restricted to formal leadership roles, this leadership ethos is expressed in everyday practices, and is apparent across all roles, disciplines, and career stages. This leadership is expressed in daily behaviours across roles and career stages — curiosity, listening, kindness, and effective feedback. These habits are built in small, everyday moments, contribute to collective leadership, and shape research culture.
Thinking about leadership in this way has clear implications for how skills and practices are developed. It requires more than attendance at development programmes or applications of frameworks by people with senior responsibilities. It necessitates creating conditions in which people can practise making decisions in conditions of uncertainty, engage others in collective problem-solving, and reflectively attune their everyday behaviours.
There are already pockets where this is happening. Throughout the Summit, participants shared examples of initiatives to develop these capabilities – often driven by individual motivation, sometimes supported by institutional or cross-sector programmes. Examples include: Liverpool’s THRIVE project, piloting a new model of shared convening and inclusive governance; Newcastle’s Reimagining Leadership initiative, co-producing new ways of recognising leadership practice; and FLFDN itself, supported by UKRI, prioritising cross-sector collaboration and was what brought the authors together in the first place.
In fact, the Summit itself offered a practical demonstration of this ethos. It combined a clear sense of direction with deliberate space for participants to shape the experience, enabling autonomy, reflection, and collaboration. It incorporated evidence-based approaches to harnessing distributed intelligence, like using Futures Thinking to explore alternative pathways. This balance of structure and freedom reflects a form of leadership that trusts people to contribute meaningfully within a shared frame.
Can we embed it across the sector?
These initiatives are generating compelling insights for how we can develop leadership practices that are better suited for crisis and complexity. However, less apparent at the Summit was how these new models could apply at scale, or how they could connect into sustained change at institutional and sector level.
For these initiatives demonstrate another challenge: leadership development suitable for this context has often been in pockets, sometimes hidden, and usually available only to a few. Some are limited by eligibility, institutional boundaries, or reliance on founders, making translation them into durable systemic change challenging.
Our sector’s challenge now, therefore, is to translate effective – and localised – interventions into widespread change. We can draw on expertise within our sector, such as Lancet Psychiatry’s (2024) Commission on implementing effective mental health interventions, but also beyond – such as McKinsey’s 2016 seminal report on the building blocks of change. What will be required is: visible and sustained leadership commitment; active involvement through a shared purpose; deliberate upskilling of new behaviours; and alignment of structures, processes, and incentives. Together, these elements move change beyond intention, ensuring that new ways of working are not only adopted but sustained in a meaningful way.
There are already encouraging indications of collaborative training and development approaches that can scale leadership development and make it more inclusive and accessible. In Scotland, cross-institutional programmes are being developed to address this need, and made open with lower barriers to access. The fact that FLFDN and the new Wellcome Mid-career Report are already sharing, or planning to, their resources and toolkits openly also address this need for visible and accessible sector-level upskilling.
Crisis as opportunity
Perhaps because of these positive signs of change, there was substantial optimism at the Summit. Many people expressed a strong sense that change at scale is both possible and advantageous for the sector.
So, despite the normalisation of crisis and the challenges the UK research system is under, one of the other most striking feelings we hold now is hope. Periods of crisis have often catalysed transformation: from the 1918 influenza pandemic leading to the development of universal health systems, to COVID-19 accelerating innovation in vaccines and telemedicine.
Following periods of disruption, people and systems can emerge not only recovered, but enhanced. Tedeschi’s Posttraumatic Growth research demonstrates that crises can lead to transformation– particularly when supported by structured reflection spaces and sense-making.
Leadership development approaches required in this time share a lot with posttraumatic growth approaches, creating space for reflection, purposeful questioning, and exploration of entirely new possibilities. In this way, leadership development could act not only as support during the crisis, but as a mechanism for our sector’s transformation.
Can the sector systematically embed this relational, collaborative approach to leadership that is grounded in reflection, shared learning, and the capacity to navigate complexity? Doing so would enable it to navigate the crisis and emerge transformed: with adaptive resilience, enhanced cross-disciplinary and cross-sector working, improved translation of research into societal benefit, and with resilient and sustainable leadership cultures across higher education.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Emily Woollen, who contributed substantially to this article. Emily designs and implements training and development for research leaders and Principal Investigators at the University of Edinburgh, where her work focuses on enhancing research leadership development for research culture improvement.
We are grateful to UKRI’s support to the Future Leaders Fellows Development Network (FLFDN) that convened the 2026 Host Summit, creating space for reflection, dialogue, and shared learning across the sector. We are particularly grateful to Sara Shinton for her thoughtful leadership and longstanding commitment to advancing leadership development in UK higher education.
