Benefits of Leadership in Stewardship Mould

There’s a slow acknowledgment of confusion in long tenured employees, due to intermittent denials of change and a poverty of clarity regarding the content of ongoing change.  So, the significance of self-awareness becomes paramount again.  Moving from mind blindness to mindsight is crucial content of transitions in leadership. 

Strategic Leadership Talent is the pool from which future stewards of organization are nested in proximate, preparatory access for the top management to draw from. Let us assume that the top management cadres are the current stewards of resilient organizations. 

Stewardship is the willingness to be accountable for the well-being of the larger organization by operating in service, rather than in control of, or dysfunctional dependence on, those around us.  Stated differently, stewardship is accountability without control or compliance pressures from external sources. It is an inside-out state of being, and not an outside-in dynamic. This is not an overnight transformation or a month or year of mindful sabbatical.

Organizations require leaders to be both awesome at their work, and likeable too to acquire credible mindshare, regardless of whether leaders assume stewardship accountability or not. In order that the growth towards corporate stewardship is seen worthy of attention in leadership transitions, it is useful to see the significance of stewardship markers too, as tabled below.

Stewardship Marker	Leadership Significance
Ø  Choosing partnership over parenting –	Information is increasingly accessible in an internet world, and the youngest are at greatest advantage and naturally poised in entitlement to its benefits. It is a reputational differentiator for leaders to partner with those with complementary knowledge, irrespective of age or experience.
Ø  People at the margin acting as owners –	This is the contemporary avatar of initiative and drive. It makes leaders more employable than also rans. Announcing one’s conception of problems to be picked in strategic mould from near boundary positions is the first gulp of stewardship challenges.
Ø  Minimum social distance between levels –	New generations of employees do not like to suffer for their growth. They flock toward the more inclusive leaders, or the young at heart at work.
Ø  Pay systems based on equity, transparency and common good –	With big-data analytics and corporate disclosures, leaders who cannot establish pay equity, will lose talent to competition faster. This dimension is a collective accountability of multiple stewards.
Ø  A purpose larger than the bottom line –	Increasing awareness of ecological impact and social compact makes socially responsible leadership an obligation, not a choice. It is however individual choice that aligns with one’s beliefs, values and capabilities that one’s own Purpose fuels.
Ø  Support groups that educate rather than control –	The tipping point of leadership is differentiating influence. Teaching or facilitating learning is a huge inimitable win that stewards master over time.
Ø  Learning chosen rather than cascaded –	Legacies leaders leave behind are a consequence of leadership focus. Among structures business leaders create is the content of learning and its levels of application, despite standing on the shoulders of other giant leaders.
Ø  Care for community over individualism –	This is the emerging circle of concern that influence seeks to map. The more it coincides, the more the community benefits from stewardship.
Ø  Investing in relationships –	Investing oneself in others is remarkably more about impactful influence. It is in less judgmental connect with others, that inspiring higher-self outcomes from others are born.
Ø  Every gathering an example of the above –	A self-aware steward knows how compassion empathy in care for community differs from relational empathy in invested relationships. Cognitive empathy or mere understanding of a current topic barely shifts the influence needle.

So, what do you think?