The Partnerships Resource Centre of RSM, under Academic Director/Founder Professor dr. Rob van Tulder, has brought the research of two academics, Sander Tideman LLM and drs. Muriel Arts DMD, to Rotterdam School of Management.

Their field of research?  Sustainable Leadership, Shared Value Creation and Measurement.  “Leadership development has become an increasingly important concept in large companies over the past 15 years; organisations have realised that leadership development is an actual practice, something you have to do – this comes from the notion that leaders are made and not born,” says Tideman. “At the same time, leading companies have embraced the concept of sustainability and shared value creation.  But Muriel and I realised that at business schools’ and in other leadership programmes, there was no real link made between leadership development and sustainability – these courses were done in classrooms where the context of the larger world was often neglected.”

Sander Tideman and Muriel Arts will contribute to research on Sustainable Business Models  in a new consortium led by Prof. van Tulder, supported in part by a 4-year grant from NWO. “A key element of this research project is sustainable leadership because there is no sustainable business model and shared value measurement conceivable without concordant leadership,” says Tideman.

“That is a missing piece. The next step in sustainable development and shared value creation is that we align it with organisational leadership and also with its culture – the soft side of business that includes mindsets, beliefs, and behaviour of leaders. Including the measurement, that’s what our research addresses.”

Both remain active in business. Arts is Director Strategy, M&A and Corporate Development Achmea, while Tideman is Managing Director of Flow Foundation. “We see ourselves as academic entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial researchers – a new breed. What you see at leading business schools is that a lot of faculty is purely academic and hasn’t worked in companies, and that people working in business have not returned to academia after their MSc or MBA. I hope that changes because in the field of leadership development continuous development is needed for new insights and knowledge.”

Finding the flow of leadership

They are well-placed to do field research on the topic: In addition to combining business with their formal academic activities at RSM where both Arts and Tideman act as occasional lecturers for the Business-Society Management Department and since 2007 the two have offered intensive, experiential Leadership Journeys   which embed sustainable leadership development  through their non-profit organisation  Flow Foundation.

The idea for the first Leadership Journey was to bridge the gap that Tideman, in his work as a banker in Asia and later a sustainability advisor in Europe and the US, had seen in business – the above-referenced lack of link to sustainability in leadership programmes, and particularly the depersonalisation of sustainability issues. “I had worked in Tibet, China, and India so I was exposed to the world and the sustainability challenges of poverty, climate destruction – that was real to me,” he says. “As I was working with corporate leaders in the West helping with leadership development and strategy, I realised that they weren’t aware of the challenges happening at a grassroots level. They saw sustainability as the responsibility of the CSR department, as a nice word that didn’t apply to their job.” 

Redefining leadership and self

 With the goal of bringing the ‘real world’ into the minds of leaders on a deep experiential and emotional level and “not just a cognitive level,”  Leadership Journeys  take place as far away as Bhutan, Tibet, and the Sahara, or as close as Ischgl in Austria or the Waddeneilanden in the Netherlands.   Through time spent in nature, meditation, mindfulness, experiencing sustainability challenges and solutions and personal reflection, participants began to question their purpose values, processes, leadership and lives.

“During these Leadership Journeys people begin to ask: ‘Am I living the life I’m supposed to live?’,” says Tideman. “Often people are so busy in their jobs, they think they have the life they want but they are imprisoned by the pressure and speed of corporate life and have forgotten about their true vision, mission and dream.”  The results of the Flow Foundation’s Leadership Journeys has been that participants rediscover who they really want to be. “It opens a huge new perspective on their lives and their sustainable leadership, and what is gratifying is to see that they have been able to bring some of their dreams back into their organisation post-Journey,” he says.

 

Gross National Happiness

The most recent Leadership Journey took place on 27 March – 8 April 2015 in Bhutan. The focus was not just on spending time in great natural beauty of the area; it was to examine the unique values of the country, which include Gross National Happiness.  While the world is to an extent defined and dependent upon money, in Bhutan leaders and the larger population are all aware of the fact that there are other values at stake. “Happiness is not just a vague notion, they consider it a very practical idea and it is the object of economic policy. It is ingrained in the policy and culture of the country – something we can’t imagine in the West,” says Tideman.  The Journey opened up new perspectives on leadership for participants, and asked them to practically consider how as business leaders they can enhance the happiness and wellbeing of all stakeholders.

“Everything we are now doing in the field of sustainability is part of an evolutionary process,” he says. “Sustainable development and leadership is an inevitable next step for business. Now we must answer the call for ‘how?”

 

 

Type
Sustainability