The COVID-19 pandemic intensified communication challenges for community college leaders navigating prolonged uncertainty and organizational disruption. This qualitative study examines how community college administrators described and interpreted their communication practices during the pandemic. Guided by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), this study explores how leaders made sense of message design, audience responsiveness, and trust under conditions of information overload and emotional strain. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve administrators from community colleges across the United States, including presidents, vice presidents, and senior-level directors. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Five themes emerged: communication breakdowns between employee groups; tailored messaging for specific constituencies; preferences for in-person and interactive communication; trust-building through transparency; and reliance on collaborative communication structures. Participants described communication as an ongoing relational and organizational practice rather than a one-time transmission of information. Administrators reported adapting strategies by combining repetition, audience-specific framing, interactive formats, and structural supports to manage uncertainty and sustain institutional trust. Findings are not intended to be generalizable but provide contextually grounded insight into leadership communication during an extended crisis. This study contributes to scholarship on higher education leadership and crisis communication by illustrating how persuasion, sensemaking, and relational cues intersected in administrators’ communication practices.
Jill Channing (Thu,) studied this question.