Building Leadership Capacity in a High-Stakes Enrollment Environment

The Client

The Talent Was Already There

The client is a nationally recognized top 20 private university and research institution with a highly competitive admissions process, a complex operational footprint, and significant external visibility. The Vice President of Enrollment leads a team of over 70 people responsible for undergraduate recruitment, admissions, financial aid, and enrollment operations. Senior leadership, comprising Directors and Deputy Directors, was the focus of this engagement.

The Vice President came to the role with deep expertise in highly selective university enrollment and a clear vision for what her division could become. Having worked with high-performing leadership teams for 20+ years in higher education, she recognized both the talent and the untapped potential already within her team. What her division lacked was not ambition, talent, or commitment. Rather, COVID, the asynchronous hybrid schedule that followed, and key staff departures led to silo formation, lost institutional knowledge, and—most importantly—eroded the connective tissue that was the glue for the team’s high performance. The need was a development infrastructure to turn those positive qualities into consistently excellent leadership.

The university’s central HR function, while capable, did not have the bandwidth or focus to design a program tailored to the enrollment division’s specific culture, pressures, and growth stage. Nor was the VP looking for a generic training vendor with off-the-rack workshops. What she sought was a partner who could bring institutional-quality people expertise to a team under real operational pressure while earning the trust of senior leaders accustomed to high standards and tight deadlines.

The Challenge

Development on a Fixed Calendar

Building a leadership development program inside a university enrollment division is not a straightforward undertaking. The work sits at the intersection of several forces that make it difficult to focus on the right issues at the right time.

Enrollment teams operate in intensely cyclical environments. The rhythms of admissions seasons, financial aid cycles, and yield campaigns create real constraints on when development work can happen and how much energy leaders have left to give it. A program that ignores those rhythms — that pulls leaders away from urgent operational demands at the wrong moment — loses effectiveness and longevity before it begins.

At the same time, the senior leaders in a division like this one tend to be highly educated, analytically rigorous, and professionally accomplished. These are not leaders who need to be convinced that development matters. They need development that meets them at their level of sophistication: Specific enough to be useful, grounded in their reality, and challenging enough to help them grow.

The division was also at an inflection point. The VP was driving a new strategic plan while simultaneously trying to build the leadership capacity required to execute it. The challenge was not just to design a program that builds the leadership capability required to successfully execute the strategic plan. How do you introduce a formal development process into a team that has run for years on informal trust and habit? How do you honor a team’s calendar and bandwidth while still delivering insight instead of administrative burden?

These were not abstract questions. They were the concerns of a leader who cared deeply about her people and understood that development, handled badly, could cost her team and her budget more than it gave back.

The Approach

Sequenced to Build, Not to Impose

As the first step in any engagement we take on, this one began with listening. Before any workshop was designed or any assessment administered, significant time was spent with the VP scoping out what was needed and what would truly move the needle. Then the focus turned to her team; understanding the division’s history, its internal dynamics, the strategic moment it was navigating, and what each leader actually needed to grow.

A structured stakeholder interview process was designed and conducted across the division’s Director and Deputy Director population. These were not perfunctory check-ins. They were substantive, confidential conversations built to surface themes, tensions, and development needs that would never emerge in a group setting. The insights informed both the strategic planning process and the design of the development program that followed.

Rather than launching a full program immediately, the work unfolded in phases, each one building on the last and allowing trust to develop alongside it. The next phase was to design and create bespoke workshops spaced throughout the engagement that addressed issues and growth areas unique to the team. The third phase used assessment tools chosen not because they were popular, but because they addressed this team’s specific development needs, time, and budget. In the next phase, the directors explored, defined, and aligned on the capabilities their deputies needed not only to excel in their current roles, but to grow into senior leadership themselves. Throughout the engagement, executive coaching helped staff to process the ideas and issues that surfaced.

That sequencing had two important effects. It meant the workshops and assessments that followed were grounded in real data about this team, rather than assumptions about each other and the team. And it meant trust was already established by the time the harder conversations began — which matters enormously when the coaching involves a leader’s own management style, or a team’s own dysfunction. Bi-weekly executive coaching ran underneath the entire engagement for the VP, while coaching for the senior leadership team focused on internalizing all areas of the development program.

What We Built

From Listening to Leadership

The engagement produced a sequenced, integrated set of deliverables across five phases.

Stakeholder Listening & Strategic Planning Support

Thirteen structured stakeholder interviews were designed and conducted with Director and Deputy Director-level staff, generating a rich qualitative dataset that informed both the VP’s strategic planning process and the development program design. Separate interview instruments were developed for leadership and staff populations. Interview findings were synthesized into a themes-and-storyline presentation used to shape the division’s strategic direction.

Six Leadership Development Workshops

A six-workshop leadership development curriculum was designed and facilitated for Deputy Director-level staff, building progressively across the arc of the engagement. Workshop topics were drawn from the VP’s goals, observations, and the themes that surfaced in the stakeholder interviews. This ensured the curriculum addressed the leadership challenges this team actually faced rather than a generic set of management topics. Each workshop included structured application exercises and coaching designed to bridge the gap between learning and practice.

Leadership Assessment Administration & Debriefs

Everything DiSC® Management assessments were administered to all Director and Deputy Director-level participants, with individual profile reports generated for each leader. One-on-one debrief sessions helped each participant understand their DiSC style, its implications for how they managed and motivated others, and the development opportunities it surfaced. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team® assessment was administered and debriefed at the team level, giving the group a data-grounded view of where they functioned well collectively and where the most significant growth opportunities lay.

Custom Competency Framework

A competency framework was developed in partnership with the Directors to define the core capabilities expected of Director and Deputy Director-level staff. This provided a shared vocabulary and common understanding for development conversations and promotion metrics. The framework was designed to be practical and useful: Specific enough to be actionable and flexible enough to apply across roles with different functional responsibilities.

Six Months of Executive Coaching

All senior leaders received coaching grounded in their DiSC profiles and the specific leadership challenges each one faced. Deputy Director-level staff received parallel coaching to support the application of workshop learning. The VP of Enrollment received sustained coaching support throughout the entire engagement — a confidential thought partnership for the leadership and organizational decisions the strategic plan required.

The Outcome

What Becomes Possible

When leadership development is designed with care — grounded in listening, sequenced with intention, and calibrated to the specific culture and moment of the organization it serves — something important happens. Leaders stop operating on instinct alone and start leading with self-awareness. Teams stop functioning as a collection of silos and start functioning as a cohesive unit.

Each leader gains a precise, data-grounded picture of how they show up: how their management style lands with the people they lead, what they naturally bring to difficult conversations, and where their instincts are likely to serve or limit them. That kind of self-awareness is not something a single workshop or a one-time feedback conversation can produce. It requires validated assessment data, skilled debriefing, and sustained coaching over time.

The team gains a shared language and a common model for functioning at a higher level together. The Five Behaviors framework gives the team something specific to work on collectively—not in the abstract, but grounded in its own data and patterns. When an enrollment division is navigating the pressures of a competitive admissions environment, the stakes of team dysfunction are real and visible. A shared model for building trust, engaging in productive conflict, and holding each other accountable makes that navigation less dependent on luck, an individual, or informal chemistry.

The organization gains something it cannot easily replicate without deliberate investment: a leadership bench developed together, using consistent frameworks, around a common picture of excellence. That alignment matters when decisions need to be made quickly, when a VP needs to delegate with confidence, and when an institution’s leadership pipeline requires capable internal candidates for roles that open up or do not yet exist.

And structure does not have to come at the expense of culture. A leadership development program designed with genuine respect for the people it serves can introduce rigor without becoming bureaucratic, create accountability without creating anxiety, and build capability without diminishing the intrinsic motivation that brought excellent people to the work in the first place.

What This Engagement Demonstrates

The Work Beneath the Work

Not every university division needs a dedicated HR business partner. But every organization serious about its mission needs what a great people leader does: the listening that surfaces what is actually true, the frameworks that give teams a shared language, and the sustained coaching that turns insight into changed behavior.

This engagement is what that work looks like when it is done thoughtfully, sequentially, and with genuine respect for what already exists. Lindsey Honari Advisors does not arrive with a program. We arrive with a process — one that begins with listening, earns trust before making recommendations, designs and implements a solution that is right for the organization at a specific point in time, and ends with something the organization can own and build on long after we’re gone.

If your organization is navigating a similar moment — building leadership capacity in a high-performing team, supporting a senior leader through a significant transition, or simply recognizing that your people deserve more structured development and coaching than they currently have — we would welcome the conversation.