Is Responsible Leadership Possible? Exploring the Experiences of Business Leaders, Educators, and Scholars
Abstract
This study addresses a simple yet complex question: How can leaders come to make more responsible decisions within today’s highly economized context? Using narrative inquiry, I explore the stories which leaders in academia, business, and education tell about their experiences at what I call the point of impingement—the point where, as leaders, they must make decisions while facing conflicting and opposing norms and values. Underpinning the inquiry is Kempster and Carroll’s (2016) conceptualization of responsibility in leadership, and their argument that transformation toward a future in which responsible leaders address societal, ecological, and humanitarian challenges requires exploration of lived experience. As a participant researcher, I engaged in in-depth interviews with eleven participants. Their stories highlight the challenges and risks they face as leaders who consider norms and values beyond growth and profit in their decision-making. A variety of insights emerge about developing the capacity to withstand pressure at the point of impingement. Evolving over time, and as a result of learning from failure and learning humility, making responsible decisions is revealed as a complex endeavour requiring commitment, a purposeful and strategic approach, the willingness to build specific competencies, and the need for patience and temperance. Participants’ stories highlight the need to reconceptualize personal notions of success and failure, and to recognize that responsibility is both an individual and collective activity requiring self-knowledge and a support system of like-minded individuals. Participants’ stories also point to the possibility of exploring how and why responsibility is a critical priority for some leaders and not for others. By connecting conceptual and theoretical studies of responsible leadership and by looking through the lens of transformative learning theory at the lived experiences of a sample of leaders, this study informs both scholarship and practice. Some insights reinforce existing scholarship while others offer new dimensions to current areas of study. Still others offer to leaders an opportunity to consider individual practice, to educators the possibility of new curricular and pedagogical approaches, and to researchers new avenues for further inquiry.