Responsible Leadership Today for a Better Tomorrow
Everything rises and falls on Leadership”
-John Maxwell
Responsible leadership is one of the defining issues of our age. The social, economic and environmental challenges illuminated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have highlighted the importance of new approaches to leadership. It has forced humanity to re-embrace core values of responsibility, sustainability and equitability. Responsible leadership is about putting values back at the center, addressing the world’s most pressing problems in ways that unleash new waves of sustainable and equitable growth.
Responsible Leadership is a model of leadership that focuses on strong organisational performance in concert with positive social and environmental impact. Leaders must have more emotion, intuition, mission and purpose.
The climate crisis, growing inequality and economic fragility threaten human wellbeing like never before. We need a stakeholder approach in which companies combine entrepreneurialism with purpose, working with others to improve the state of the world in which they operate.”
-Adrian Monck, managing director for the World Economic Forum.
Preparing for Tomorrow
A growing number of countries and organizations are proudly marking their calendars with far-off dates by which they have pledged to achieve important societal goals, such as carbon neutrality, but we must acknowledge that such achievements will only be possible if we begin substantive and sometimes difficult work toward them now.
According to a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum and Accenture, the trade-off between sustainability and performance isn’t as high as many people believe. A five-element model of responsible leadership was proposed in the report. The five elements, which encompass attributes and characteristics that leaders will require in the future decade to accelerate growth and improve societal outcomes, are:
- Stakeholder inclusion – considering diverse stakeholders’ viewpoints in decision making and fostering an environment where diverse individuals have a voice and feel they belong;
- Emotion & intuition – being truly human and showing compassion, humility, and openness to unlock commitment and creativity;
- Mission & Purpose – advancing goals by inspiring a shared vision of sustainable prosperity for the organization and its stakeholders;
- Technology & Innovation – innovating responsibly with emerging technology to create new organizational and societal value; and
- Intellect & Insight – embracing continuous learning and knowledge exchange to continually forge better paths to success
The five elements of responsible leadership Image: World Economic Forum / Accenture
The evidence is clear that to differing degrees, all Five Elements of responsible leadership are more pronounced among profitable and trusted innovators. Some organizations have progressed further than others in building an environment where trust, innovation, and high organizational performance reinforce each other, producing a virtuous circle with its own momentum. Companies that combine top-tier trust with top-tier innovation outperform their industry peers, with an average operating profit of 3.1 percent greater.
Gauging the Impact of Responsible Leadership
It’s great to have the discourse about responsible leadership, but it’s futile if we can’t track measurable outcomes While there is a shared goal for change across industries, there is still a lot of work to be done on the details. We must be able to develop company, industry, and societal metrics that will allow us to review our progress, discover how effective our efforts have been, and, most crucially, record where and how we may be failing. Developing such metrics must become a top priority as we move forward.
However, for many industries, there is still a lot of confusion about exactly how they might adopt responsible, long-term efforts. There is also a lack of knowledge of the actual influence they may hope to have by doing so. The issue isn’t that they are unaware of the end goal, it’s that they aren’t sure of the roadmap to get there.
That means that any effective measuring efforts must begin with identifying and defining such unknowns, including the creation of taxonomies, ontologies, and other tools that will become part of the unwavering steps we take in tracking our successes and shortfalls.
Change lives. Change organizations. Change the world.”
-Stanford GSB
The Role of Education
Academia will play a pivotal role here, in several ways. Through research, entrepreneurial efforts and industry projects and partnerships, universities are at the forefront of identifying the gaps and developing solutions to some of society’s thorniest challenges.
Academia can also contribute to the development, testing, and evaluation of industry or society-wide metrics. Choosing how these measures should work and evolve will necessitate the presence of a neutral third party who can examine, experiment, and reassess on a frequent basis. This is a job that academia is particularly positioned to fill, with business schools in particular playing a critical role.
Traditional leadership curriculum often fails to challenge students in a way that compels them to reflect on their own personal leadership capacities, and to improve them. However, at Stanford Graduate School of Business, we were consistently challenged to live up to the mantra ‘Change lives. Change organizations. Change the world.”
Questions like “as a leader do you recognize the right thing to do? “And “ how do you balance your responsibilities to shareholders, customers, employees, and society?” were commonplace in classes like Values-Based Leadership taught by Neil Malhotra and Ken Shotts. The course combines human psychology and philosophy to challenge students in examining what they believe in, understanding why others might not believe the same, and articulating companies’ responsibility to the world.
From a young age, I have been focused on living a life that is passion-filled, purpose-driven and performance-oriented, with an unwavering conviction in my core values and a vision of sustainable prosperity for all. I have been uniquely privileged to operate at the intersection of healthcare, finance, technology and impact. My belief in access to quality care as a fundamental human right, propelled me into building Evercare, with the vision to transform the healthcare landscape in emerging markets by expanding access to quality care, promoting better health outcomes, and enabling collaboration across a global platform.
It is encouraging that a growing number of stakeholders—consumers, employees, investors, business partners, policymakers, and the general public—are calling for a more responsible path. Their demands are based on the shared idea that the world’s most pressing issues can be addressed in ways that unleash fresh waves of more sustainable and equitable growth. Furthermore, there is enough desire and energy to face the task, particularly among the younger generations who are currently at the forefront of change.
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