In 2024, the Constructive Dialogue Institute set out to understand how college and university leaders handle their hardest moments: a demonstration that draws national attention, a contested institutional decision, or a faculty statement amplified far beyond campus. We wanted to know what distinguished the approach of institutions that came through those moments well, and whether their practices could be taught. Drawing on this research and on our culture change team’s work with campus leaders, we’re pleased to introduce Conflict-Ready Leadership: Strategies for Building Institutional Resilience, a six-hour workshop for presidents, chancellors, provosts, deans, and vice presidents. The workshop helps senior leaders build the relationships and practices that allow an institution to respond to difficult moments with clarity and to come through them with trust intact.

What the Research Suggested

Our study drew on four sources: institutional data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, campus climate survey data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression of 55, 102 students, protest event data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, and 26 in-depth interviews with administrators, staff, student and community activists, and scholars of student activism. We published the full findings in our white paper, Navigating Campus Protests.

Three patterns from the interviews proved most useful in designing the workshop.

The first was the value of relationships built in advance. Administrators who had spent the year attending student organizations’ events, meeting with their leaders, and supporting their activities described being able to have productive conversations once tensions rose. In several cases, students shared plans for upcoming demonstrations, and staff worked with organizers to adjust timing or location in ways that protected expression while reducing disruption to classes. As one administrator told us, “We built trust as a muscle.”

The second was the importance of expectations set in advance. Students, staff, and faculty judge their institution’s response largely by its prior decisions: whether policies have been applied consistently, whether reasoning has been explained, and whether leaders have followed through. Several institutions had rarely enforced their policies on expressive activity because they had not needed to, and those that revised them in the middle of a conflict found that students often interpreted the changes as attempts to limit expression.

The third was the role of listening after an event. Administrators who had checked in with student activists throughout the year, including on how they were managing academically, were better positioned to understand what their communities needed once a difficult moment had passed. Students, for their part, noticed when that contact was absent.

These patterns come from interviews rather than controlled comparisons, and we describe them as themes rather than measured effects. But taken together, they point to a consistent conclusion: much of what determines how an institution weathers a difficult moment is already in place before the moment begins.

How Conflict-Ready Leadership Builds on the Findings

The workshop is organized around what we call a flashpoint, an event that tests an institution’s structures or core norms under time pressure and with limited information. Our research and culture change teams built the workshop together: the findings supplied the patterns, and the culture change team’s experience with campus leaders supplied the practices that build institutional and relational trust and the discipline of writing those practices down. Because the research pointed so consistently to the work that precedes such an event, the program is divided into two halves: readiness, meaning the relationships and expectations an institution establishes beforehand, and resilience, meaning the capacity to move through a flashpoint and repair what it strains.

The readiness practices come directly from what administrators told us about the year before a conflict. Leaders who had built relationships with students, staff, and faculty could draw on them when tensions rose. The workshop therefore begins with relational trust and the dialogue practices that strengthen it. The second practice, proactive policy communication, reflects how students and communities judged their institutions: by whether policies had been explained and applied consistently long before a crisis. The third asks participants to identify the people on campus who are trusted on both sides, and to maintain those relationships as an institutional practice rather than a personal one.

The resilience practices take up the response and what follows it. Teams working across departments must stay aligned in rapidly changing circumstances, which requires that roles, decision authority, and communication channels be settled in advance. Participants design a response management team suited to their institution and an escalation process the campus community knows about before it is used. The final practice is based on what students told us about the silence that often followed a difficult event. Participants plan the retrospectives and post-flashpoint dialogue through which an institution learns from one event and carries that learning into the next.

Throughout, participants work from realistic scenarios, including an extended case study of a university responding to a contested faculty op-ed, and assess each practice against three questions: whether it is written down, whether the people it affects know it exists, and whether someone is accountable for it. Those answers become the basis of the 90-day action plan each team develops before the workshop ends.

Looking Ahead

The research behind this workshop was conducted during a period of intense campus protest. We designed the practices to apply more broadly, to the contested budget decisions, personnel matters, and viral moments that test institutions in quieter years as well.

Please get in touch to learn more about Conflict-Ready Leadership and how it can support your leadership team.