Leading with Conscience

Leaders of conscientious companies and those becoming conscientious have to work in new ways. There is a pressing need to foster much more collective leadership. Thus, a key CEO role is nurturing a team of leaders who bring complementary skills and leader styles. In addition, such a CEO must also empower this team and give its members reasonable latitude in making decisions. A leader must also foster deep, ongoing dialogue between the team members so that each person’s complementary skills generate the desired synergies. This collective approach to leadership calls for great self-awareness on the part of all members of the management team, so that they can grasp what their strengths and weaknesses are and how they can best draw on their colleagues’ complementary skills. This requires the courage to acknowledge one’s own vulnerabilities and listen carefully to others. One of the benefits of collective approaches to leadership is that it greatly speeds up decision-making by being better able to gauge stakeholders’ needs and expectations. Finally, collective leadership greatly boosts commitment to the firm’s strategic vision. In this chapter, guest author Liz Sweigart illuminates the dilemmas of leadership and the requirement for a new ethical approach of leaders as moral integrators.