Leadership as Stewardship: Honouring Our Past While Ensuring Our Future

Leadership as Stewardship: Honouring Our Past While Ensuring Our Future 

by Dr Marian Iszatt-White, Lancaster University Management School 

Abstract

Exploring different understandings of stewardship across a range of research domains and cultures, this seminar will examine the tensions between competing perspectives and their implications for leadership. Marian Iszatt-White proposes 'leadership-as-stewardship' as a new signifier for leadership research, providing practical guidance to leaders navigating the challenges and trade-offs of the Anthropocene. The research behind the idea of leadership-as-stewardship identifies how the apparent inadequacy of modern leadership coincides with a shift in scholarship away from practical inquiry and towards a range of aspirational approaches, including authentic, sustainable, responsible and ethical. Marian proposes stewardship as an alternative to these aspirational forms of leadership and challenges the ability of Western, Enlightenment-based thinking to solve global issues created by that same thinking. The seminar will put forward the view that it is time to place the more enact-able construct of stewardship at the heart of leadership aspirations and scholarly activities. It will conclude by outlining the next phase of Marian’s research, which consists of compiling rich and varied case studies of organizations currently enacting leadership-as-stewardship and the ways in which they have negotiated the challenges and trade-offs which this strategic decision entails.

About the speaker

Marian Iszatt-White is a Senior Lecturer in Leadership at Lancaster University Management School (LUMS), where she is also a member of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business. Her research interests revolve around ‘aspirational’ forms of leadership (Authentic, Sustainable, Responsible) and their implications for leadership practice and leadership development. Her most recent work centres on ideas of stewardship across various research domains and as a potential successor to our hopes and aspirations for practicing leaders.