As autumn settles over college and university campuses across the country, a familiar academic ritual is once again underway. In auditoriums and faculty lounges, newly appointed presidents, provosts, and deans are stepping up to podiums to announce the start of their tenure with a time-honored tradition: the listening tour. For a long-suffering faculty member seated somewhere near the back of the auditorium, simply hearing those words is often enough to elicit an audible groan.
Listening tours have become ubiquitous features of academic leadership transitions, particularly at institutions that have experienced frequent turnover at the top. Because of their sheer commonality—and occasional superficiality—they are frequently met by campus communities with a tepid reception, if not outright skepticism. That cynical response is often thoroughly warranted when a tour is performed perfunctorily. Too often, these exercises amount to little more than heavily documented photo opportunities for social media, a few hasty scribbles in a notebook, and a new administrator eager to show off an impressive wardrobe of campus-branded T-shirts.
Yet, as newly arriving academic leaders step onto campus this fall, they face stakes that are higher and more complex than ever before. When chronic financial deficits and persistent enrollment pressures are layered atop an overt air of political polarization and a simmering, historical mistrust of administrative leadership, the standard listening tour takes on a newfound urgency that demands rigorous scrutiny.
Drawing from their own experiences undertaking listening tours and sitting across the table sizing up new leaders during theirs, educators offer a vital perspective on how to elevate this ritual into a genuine act of leadership. Lisa Jasinski, president of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, and Hilton Kelly, professor of sociology and dean of Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences at Elon University, point out that many of the deepest insights into this process only become apparent years into a tenure.
What’s in It for You?
The most pervasive misconception about the traditional listening tour is that its primary purpose is to buy a new leader time, information, and context before they are forced to make hard decisions. Structured conversations with faculty, staff, and students will almost certainly reinforce what an administrator already knows, help them become fluent in local campus jargon, and deepen their well of arcane institutional trivia. However, an incoming leader can probably gather that baseline information, and perhaps much more efficiently, through institutional fact books, budget reports, and strategic plans.
Instead of approaching the process as a data-gathering exercise, new leaders should view themselves first and foremost as ethnographers. The true, lasting value of a listening tour is that it provides rich nuance and deep insights into interpersonal dynamics that can never be found in a statistical report or handbook. What an administrator hears moving between various groups and individuals—their points of pride, sacred campus myths, areas of shared consensus, and points of bitter contention—equips them to take informed, calculated risks down the road.
While there is much that an incoming leader cannot control, such as the size of an incoming freshman class or a stubborn structural budget deficit inherited from a predecessor, they maintain absolute control over the quality of the attention they bring to those they have been entrusted to serve. The direct reward for that attentiveness is the building of genuine relationships, which serve as the real currency for any meaningful work an administrator hopes to accomplish. Far from being a hollow administrative exercise, a well-executed listening tour is advanced statecraft.
For all practical purposes, a listening tour serves as the first formal demonstration of how a leader intends to lead. In most cases, it will stand as the single highest-leverage act of an administrator’s entire first year on the job.
What’s in It for Them?
To fully understand the dynamic of the listening tour, leaders must recognize a simple, reciprocal truth: while the administrator is touring the campus, the campus is simultaneously touring the administrator. Every colleague sitting across the table is running a quiet, internal calculation, deciding whether the new arrival is someone worth investing political and professional capital in, or simply someone to wait out until the next transition. The tour is a two-way audition, and the leader who understands that they, too, are constantly onstage behaves differently—and almost always better—than one who assumes the spotlight points in only one direction.
From the perspective of the faculty and staff, an ideal listening tour offers far more than a superficial chance to impress an incoming boss. For many campus employees, it represents the very first time in years that someone holding the actual power to move resources and shape policy has asked them what they actually do all day, what aspects of their work they are most proud of, and what systemic obstacles they are currently facing. Being made visible to power is not a trivial matter within a large institution. This is especially true for long-serving staff members, who hold enormous institutional memory but are asked to access and share it far too rarely. For them, simply being invited into the room and heard is a powerful message.
Furthermore, campus stakeholders sense, at least intuitively, that a new leader’s priorities remain like wet cement for roughly a semester before they are finally set in stone. During Lisa Jasinski’s listening tour as a consortial leader, a member college president offered a piece of direct and emphatic advice: "Less is more." That succinct comment put everything into immediate perspective, saving her from an innate administrative tendency to overcomplicate early initiatives. It helped her realize that a primary early challenge would be identifying which competing priorities genuinely demanded attention, giving her the confidence to refocus, invest in the programs that matter most, and gracefully let lesser things go.
Stakeholders inherently know that the listening tour represents their narrow, fleeting window to put something meaningful on the new leader’s map before that map is permanently drawn. Because a new arrival carries limited institutional history, people are often willing to share candid perspectives they would never express to someone implicated in the past decade of administrative decisions. That level of candor is a precious gift available only during the immediate transition window, and it closes fast.
None of these positive outcomes occur if a leader sits back and passively absorbs information while reserving all judgment for a later date—a luxury that the current low-trust higher education environment simply does not afford. Leaders can help their colleagues prepare for a visit by clearly communicating what to expect, and by asking for quantitative matters, such as course enrollments or departmental metrics, to be submitted in a standardized format ahead of time so they do not crowd out interpersonal conversation. Bringing a few framing questions in advance helps surface genuine points of pride and institutional distinctiveness. At the same time, leaders must bring presence and substance; no one expects a newcomer to unveil a fully formed 25-point strategic plan on day one, but they do expect to hear early assessments and an articulation of how the leader’s background aligns with the institution’s current moment.
What’s in It for Us?
Ultimately, the fundamental question that all campus leaders and communities should ask at the outset of this process is whether a listening tour is truly the best use of a president’s, provost’s, or dean’s limited time.
In the current higher education landscape defined by crisis, financial scarcity, and widespread anxiety, the value of these tours is heavily heightened. All leadership transitions are inherently challenging, and these tours provide a designated, structured period to smooth out rough edges and ease the apprehension that inevitably accompanies the arrival of a consequential newcomer. Setting aside dedicated time for these conversations is a collective recognition that institutional change is underway, and that all campus constituents benefit from having a moment to adjust.
Beyond their basic meet-and-greet functions, listening tours offer a collective, public opportunity for a campus to reflect upon its shared core values and identify the projects most worthy of its collective time and attention. Even the smallest colleges and universities maintain deep institutional silos, and listening tours stand out as rare occasions when silo dwellers look up, look around, and collectively reassess their institutional environment.
There are currently far too few moments in higher education where educators are permitted to genuinely believe that difficult things are possible. The arrival of a new leader provides one of those rare windows. It is vital that colleagues are given the space to bask in that sense of renewed possibility, making an intimate audience with senior decision-makers a precious gift the campus community can offer itself.
Sticking the Landing
The single biggest mistake new leaders make regarding listening tours is the assumption that the process ends with listening. Too many administrators spend hundreds of hours engaged in deep conversation, only for nothing tangible to happen afterward—or at least nothing outwardly visible. While they may have successfully earned some trust, won over a few fans, and learned a great deal about campus culture and history, the tour does not truly conclude until the leader articulates their mandate as they have come to understand it.
All the preliminary work of the listening tour leads directly to this defining moment. The tour provides an institutional perspective that no other individual on campus possesses, while the leader’s position provides a public pulpit to act upon that perspective in ways others cannot. Elegantly connecting those dots often dictates the ultimate success or failure of an administration.
To mark the conclusion of his listening tour, Hilton Kelly produced a clarified mission, vision, and values statement for his college. That clarified mission represented the synthesized, shared thinking of faculty, staff, and students across diverse departments, programs, and disciplines. He provided a framed copy of the new statement to every campus office to display centrally—serving as a clear, daily reminder of the ties that bind the community together at a time when powerful institutional temptations exist to retreat inward.
While it is certainly gratifying when broad consensus emerges naturally to make the work easier, the reality is that hard decisions and difficult work still lie ahead. In exchange for being heard, a campus owes its new leader the opportunity to be led, trading well-practiced institutional skepticism for the much harder work of hope.
Everything learned during a listening tour ultimately helps craft a strategy to share those findings and propose concrete actions. While all-faculty and college-wide meetings provide natural starting points, the leader—now fluent in the local language and customs of the institution—is well-positioned to choose their words thoughtfully and repeat them often in the places and with the individuals that matter most. At that point, the newcomer is finally one of them.
