Abstract:

Leadership is one of the most essential skills developed in business education. According to scholars and business experts the leadership role has considerably transformed in recent years. This transformation is caused by various factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic context, widespread adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs), climate change and its impacts, responsible consumption and production, as well as progress in accomplishing other universal sustainable development goals (SDGs).

While organizations need leaders who can effectively lead their organizations through complex and dynamic changes, there is a gap between expectations and experiences of preparing managers for VUCA (volatile-uncertain-complex-ambiguous), BANI (brittle-anxious-nonlinear-incomprehensible), SHIVA (split-horrible-inconceivable-vicious-arising) and TACI (turbulent-accidental-chaotic-inimical) transforming times.

Firstly, this paper reflects on the requirements for leaders in the 21st century to meet global challenges. It provides an overview of valuable leadership characteristics and skills.

Secondly, it describes a simple technique for enhancing personal leadership, which is based on the principles of the Theory U. As claimed by Otto Scharmer, it is important to “shift from ego-system to eco-system awareness”.

Finally, the paper illustrates the practice of using Theory U methodology and the results of the interviews addressing the experience of two research groups, business and management students (n=62) and experienced managers (n=18). The author analyzes opinions and preferences of different groups including independent assessors, students and managers. He uncovers positive changes in personal leadership behavior among assessees after the experiment. Overall, the great majority of participants (81.25%) demonstrated better results in collective leadership (co-initiating, co-sensing, co-creating, etc.).

This paper contributes to the leadership body of knowledge, in particular, to a better understanding of a business leader’s role in times of uncertainty, as well as practical methods and techniques to develop leaders in the SHIVA-world and TACI-world.

Keywords:

Leadership, Theory U, soft skills, business and management education, education for sustainability, education and research, Russia.