From Research to Dialogue to Impact: Scholarship and Development Confront Leadership Challenges That Matter

Session Submission Type: Panel Discussion

Short Description

This panel assembles scholars and practitioners to reflect on their efforts to redirect leadership research and development activities to grapple with major societal challenges affecting large numbers of stakeholders in turbulent environments. All recently hosted or participated in workshops, collaboratories, and other engagements addressing such challenges as the global refugee crisis, the challenges of peacebuilding in fragile and post-conflict regions, and South Africa’s university crisis and continuing struggle for racial reconciliation and equality. This session will review these initiatives, look for ways to extend their impact, and discuss the broader implications for leadership research and development.

Detailed Abstract

Throughout 2016, a loose network of leadership scholars, leadership development practitioners, business executives, NGO workers, and community activists organized three events to figure out how to bend the tools of leadership research and development to exert a positive impact in the context of the global refugee and migration crisis.

The first event, hosted at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, took the form of a day-long case study workshop designed to help the Danish Red Cross find better ways to collaborate with their private sector partners. The second was a professional development workshop at the Academy of Management conference in Anaheim, California last summer. That engagement brought scholars together to talk about how to change the fact that leadership research simply does not address the refugee crisis, even though it represents one of the most complex and pressing challenges of our time— displacing more than 65 million people, igniting anti-immigrant sentiments around the globe, and threatening the stability of sovereign governments and the institutions of international governance and cooperation such as the European Union. The third event was a pre-conference workshop at the ILA’s annual meeting in Atlanta last November. This time the network expanded to include refugee community leaders, aid organization workers, and local politicians from one of the most successful refugee resettlement communities in the United States, while the focus shifted from corporate and academic efforts to inclusive leadership and grassroots activism in support of refugees in local contexts.

Also during 2016, members of this same network joined together with partners in other places around the world to launch similar efforts addressing other pressing challenges. The Alliance for Advancing Leadership in Peace and Security—a collaboration between the Center for Creative Leadership EMEA and the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Geneva— received a NATO grant to host an advanced research workshop on Advancing Cooperative Leadership in Fragile Environments. The workshop brought together UN representatives, diplomats, military leaders, aid and development workers, and a team of international leadership scholars to spend three days delving into the leadership and governance dynamics of peace building and cooperation in post-conflict regions.

In March 2017, members of this same network will join yet others in Johannesburg, South Africa, to participate in the Fourth International Conference on Responsible Leadership, co-hosted by the Albert Luthuli Center for Responsible Leadership and the GIBS Business School at the University of Pretoria, The Copenhagen Business School, and The Global Responsible Leadership Initiative, with the ILA as a sponsoring partner. The theme of the conference is “Leadership Challenges That Matter,” and it will feature a post-conference collaboratory workshop on the leadership dynamics of the South African university crisis. South African institutions of higher education have been wracked by protests and forced closings over the past year as a result of the “Fees Must Fall” movement, which has highlighted continuing racial divisions and class and antagonisms in the post-apartheid era, as well as the need for new kinds of leadership and renewed efforts toward reconciliation.

There is a clear pattern connecting these various events and workshops, and an emerging method to the madness. Responding to the call to infuse leadership research and development with a higher sense of purpose and mission (Kempster, Jackson, & Conroy, 2011), participants in these activities are working to refine a blueprint for a new mode of collective mobilization, leadership knowledge production, leadership development, and social innovation. Their goal is to render leadership research, theory, development, consulting, and practice more collaborative, more problem-driven, and more relevant to societal and global challenges that matter.

The events described above are all designed to flip the conventional model for leadership research and academic engagement. This model typically starts from broadly defined academic areas, declaring allegiance to a particular approach or definition of leadership, and then applying existing theories and disciplinary concerns to research, teaching and engagement in a deductive manner. By contrast, the new model seeks to mobilize around pressing real-world challenges and complex problems, drawing on the insights and experience of stakeholders deeply involved in specific issues. By seeking and contributing to solutions in an inductive manner, with a heavy dose of sensemaking and improvisation, this model seeks to develop new theories and new approaches to leadership via a problem- and issues-driven form of interdisciplinary action research and learning in collaboration with a diverse, international network of partners from the public and private sectors.

These are lofty ambitions, and there are many obstacles in the way of achieving them all. While the events listed above can all be described as successes individually, it is unclear how to tie them more effectively together, how to keep momentum going, and how to transform existing academic institutions and incentive structures to allow for this kind of mobilization to flourish and to exert sufficient impact to make a substantial difference.

These in fact are the topics we will address in this panel. Each of the participants will describe the activities they have undertaken to connect leadership research and development more directly to global challenges that matter, and exchange ideas about how to improve these efforts and to advance the whole movement forward. To inform and deepen the discussion, the panel will draw upon recent developments in complexity leadership theory, in theory about leadership in social change organizations, and in research on multi-actor governance networks (Ospina & Foldy, 2010; Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007; Vermeesch, Craps, Dewulf, & Termeer, Currently Under Review). This panel should be of interest to all ILA members who seek to render their professional activities more relevant to challenges that matter in turbulent times.

Sub Unit

• Leadership Scholarship

Chairs

• Eric R. Guthey, Copenhagen Business School

• Steve Kempster, Lancaster University

Presenters

• Derick DeJongh, University of Pretoria

• Johannes Beukes, in Harmonie

• Mary Uhl-Bien, Texas Christian University

• Peter Cunningham, GCSP-CCL Leadership Alliance

• Sonia M. Ospina, New York University

• Drikus Kriek, Wits University