Exploring different understandings of stewardship across a range of research domains and cultures, this webinar 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 webinar 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.

Attendees will:

• Understand the different perspectives on stewardship emerging from a range of research disciplines and from Western and Indigenous cultures.
• Consider why leadership-as-stewardship matters now and how it can offer new insights to business and organizational leaders.
• Understand more about the challenges and tensions involved in enacting stewardship and the strategies leaders might adopt in negotiating them.