RME

All business schools in our global sample are committed to delivering RME, however their journey in doing so varies, dependent on their own unique context, organisational needs and idiosyncratic capacities

We have now got staff who are taking responsibility for what we do as a business school, not just what we teach and not just what we research. They are asking questions and saying why don’t we do things this way, wouldn’t it be better, wouldn’t we save more paper, wouldn’t we save more fuel or save more whatever, if we do this differently?

In research, while sustainability forms a big part of business schools’ research, most schools don’t have a formal, coherent SDG-driven research strategy, policy/guidelines or criteria for sustainability. SDG research in particular is driven by the 'personal interest' of individual staff and in most cases, the schools’ approach involves aligning the normal research outputs with the SDGs, rather than a coherent research strategy at the top level. Sustainability/SDG focused teaching or research is not yet recognised in most schools for workload allocation or promotion. Thus, academics have little incentive to spend time and effort engaging in meaningful sustainability teaching and research. For example, one member of mentioned:

When it comes to promotions and things like that, they (university management) are looking at publications which are in your area; since I am in marketing they are looking at marketing publications, so I was kind of discouraged; when we spend a lot of time on this but not getting enough recognition.

Different initiatives emerged in our findings that could facilitate embedding sustainability in the research culture and send a powerful message about its importance to the staff, as well as other stakeholders. These included:

‘linking promotion and funding with sustainability initiatives’; ‘linking people’s profiles with SDGs’, and ‘allocating appropriate resources’ realising the time-consuming nature of publishing and developing relationships.

What is lacking?

The different approaches adopted by business schools to embed sustainability across their curricula, research and operations show that their journey to RME remains fragmented and characterised by different ‘challenges’ and ‘enablers’ along the way. We discuss three key challenges with recommendations below:

Awareness, and understanding

Business education has come a long way in developing an understanding and awareness of the worldview of social consciousness towards realising the SDG vision with pockets of excellence recognised in all three areasteaching, research and operational practice. Despite this progress, a lack of understanding, and awareness of the relevance for sustainability by key stakeholders — staff, industry and students— emerged as a key theme in our study. The lack of awareness of PRME/SDGs was also an issue amongst the businesses. For example, one member of staff expressed his frustration: Actually, I have presented to our regional meetings where some local business entities thought it was a fad and didn’t expect universities would be involved in this. It doesn’t really make you any more attractive as a business school, and I can quote he said “This doesn’t get you one extra student, so why you are doing it?”

Moving Forward

Business education has come a long way in developing an understanding and awareness of the worldview of social consciousness towards realising the SDG vision

Raising awareness is therefore a critical first step for “developing a sustainability focused mindset”, “commitment and buy-in of academics”, as well as building the academics’ cognisance about its relevance, and actively engaging academics and businesses. This could be done through capacity-building sessions or workshops/seminars and discussion forums, to highlight the importance of SDGs, and also through the appointment of PRME/SDGs champions. Considering that educators have a key role in shaping the mindsets and skills of our future thought leaders to influence entire societies, the impetus can begin with cohesively developing educators’ awareness, capacity, and dispositions to facilitate the seamless integration and development of societal responsibilities and environmental issues in the curriculum as well as in research and operations. A systemic approach involving awareness raising of staff, students and other stakeholders could act as a springboard for their ‘buy-in’ to develop appropriate values and influence the dispositions of our future leaders to effect societal change at scale. For example, many Australian higher education institutions are in the process of mandatory infusion of ‘indigenous knowings’ into curricula empowering both teachers and students towards the betterment of society - a significant step in the right direction.

Cultural and structural Issues

Raising awareness and developing the knowledge, skills and dispositions of key stakeholders is necessary but alone is not sufficient for RME success. The authentic realisation of RME demands the adoption of a systems perspective to address cultural and structural barriers arising from (a) the disconnect between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ by key stakeholders (students, academics, policy makers and top management) owing to deeprooted beliefs, values and dispositions and (b) lack of institutional top-level structural support for operationalising RME in business schools. Addressing the first issue requires a fundamental cultural transformation, seamlessly embedding sustainability/SDGs into the culture of the business school at all levels – top-down, middleout and bottom-up. Tackling the second issue requires top management support in terms of developing holistic sustainability policies and procedures, clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities, and genuine commitment and engagement to operationalise the RME vision.

Moving Forward

SDGs need to be institutionalised as an explicit part of the school’s strategy, permeating all aspects of the school and extending across all functional areas - curricula, research and operations. Support from the top management is critical for such cultural and structural transformation to motivate staff, allocate resources, develop capacities and capabilities, encourage taking ownership and integrating SDGs in key policy documents to facilitate execution. Sample strategies include systematic integration of service-learning pedagogies into the curriculum, opportunities to work with culturally diverse learners and facilitating student and faculty exchange programs. The lived and immersive experiences from these opportunities will have a lasting impact on actual practice, leading to impactful mainstream societal outcomes. An example of such a deep-rooted habitual transformation is the practice of maintaining hand hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, research and operations can be enhanced through incentive schemes and a facilitating environment.

Resource Constraints

The final biggest challenge to firmly embedding SDGs, particularly in curricula and research, is the lack of resources – time, funding, and knowledge. This has become particularly evident since the pandemic, budgets have shrunk and domestic and international enrolments have declined. The pandemic also led to workforce layoffs across the world, with departing staff taking their significant tacit knowledge and networks, often built up over many years, with them, and it is these which schools are finding difficult to replace. As one participant explained: "when a member of staff leaves, history and knowledge goes along with them, leaving a vacuum." Workforce layoffs have led to increased workloads among the remaining staff, along with tensions around multiple competing priorities of teaching, research and leadership responsibilities. For example, one of the experts stated “even if people have the best intentions, they just don’t have the time." In the midst of all this, the RME and SDG agendas take a back seat.

Moving Forward

To address these concerns, the following strategies could be deployed. The implementation of systems to encourage work on sustainability through the provision of awards, thereby recognising the timeconsuming nature of research and relationship development. Secondly, retaining knowledge through 'knowledge creation and sharing', appointing 'champions and ambassadors', developing a knowledge bank to transfer and store tacit knowledge and information on the network of people. Third, developing sustainable work practices facilitated by institutional leadership support towards establishing a sustainability culture, providing direction, allocating time and incentives, motivating staff, and supporting them with resources.

Conclusion

While business schools’ journey to deliver RME varies and there is no one-size-fits-all approach, highlighting the need to develop their own approach to RME focusing on their individual context, organisational capabilities and needs, there are certain common barriers to RME that apply to all schools. These include lack of awareness and understanding of SDGs by the key stakeholders, the need to transform business schools to create a culture so sustainability is institutionalised, and general lack of resources. It is hoped that business schools will be able to meet these challenges head on, as things start to return to normal after the global pandemic. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that RME is not optional but an essential attribute of business schools. How this challenge will be met remains to be seen.

About the Authors

Dr Fara Azmat is an Associate Professor and PRME Director of Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.

Dr Ameeta Jain is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Finance and a Co-Director of PRME at Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.

Dr Bhavani Sridharan is the Associate Dean, Learning & Teaching, and Accreditation in the Faculty of Law and Business, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia.

References:

Azmat, F., A. Jain and B. Sridharan (2023). Responsible Management Education in Business Schools: Are We There Yet? Journal of Business Research 157.

Beddewela, E., C. Warin, F. Hesselden, & A. Coslet (2017). Embedding responsible management education – Staff, student and institutional perspectives. The International Journal of Management Education, 15(2), 263-279.

Cicmil, S., G. Gough and S. Hills (2017). Insights into responsible education for sustainable development: The case of UWE, Bristol. The International Journal of Management Education, 15(2), 293-305.

Kurucz, E. C., B.A. Colbert and J. Marcus (2014). Sustainability as a provocation to rethink management education: Building a progressive educative practice. Management Learning, 45(4), 437-457.

Wersun, A., J. Klatt, F. Azmat, H. Suri, C. Hauser, J. Bogie, M. Meaney and N. Ivanov (2020). Blueprint for SDG Integration into Curriculum, Research and Partnerships. UN PRME Secretariat.

There is an increasing awareness in business schools and beyond that we need to take the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seriously. But how to truly integrate these goals into what we teach and research remains up for discussion.

As somebody who is involved in both the worlds of SDGs and leadership scholarship, I am beginning to understand how the SDGs can help us change the way we teach leadership. Simply put, the SDGs require us to rethink the heroic bias in how we teach and research leadership.

Most people in business schools are well aware of the heroic bias in leadership studies: the, often untested, assumption that good leaders are exceptional and charismatic individuals with a higher level of agency than other people.

This heroic bias is of course not surprising. The earliest reflective work on leadership, such as the books by Thomas Carlyle and the controversial Francis Galton, explicitly depicted leaders as being qualitatively different from their followers.

The heroic bias, or at least an emphasis on individual leaders who have the exceptional capability to inspire followers by selling a great vision, continues to permeate many of our approaches to leadership. Even transformational leadership theory, probably the most-researched contemporary leadership theory, paints leaders in individualistic and heroic terms.

The SDGs, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in which they are embedded, challenge such conventional approaches to leadership in at least the following ways:

• The agenda explicitly foregrounds the notion of partnership – between citizens and their governments, between the state and non-state actors, between developing and developed countries and even between current and future generations. Heroic leaders are known to struggle to form mutually accountable and equal partnerships.

• The complexity that underlies the SDGs as a system of goals makes it impossible for one leader to make authoritative judgements. No one individual has the knowledge required to understand the complexity of synergies and trade-offs inherent to the SDGs.

• The level of ambition of the SDGs not only makes collaboration across sectoral and disciplinary boundaries essential but also requires potentially game-changing innovation. This type of innovation is premised on decidedly non-heroic leadership behaviours, such as distributing influence among team members and transitory and task-specific forms of leadership.

• More practically, the lack of global progress on the SDGs requires leaders to admit to their own mistakes and to try to do better. This type of honesty and vulnerability does not characterise heroic leaders.

What needs to change? In my recent book on why leaders fail, I identify a couple of lessons that can be fruitfully applied to how we think about the leadership needed to achieve the SDGs. My overarching argument is that the complexity and urgency of contemporary challenges require post-heroic leaders.

Post-heroic leaders accept their fallibility Leaders who accept their fallibility do not sell unrealistic and unachievable visions to their followers. Rather, they acknowledge the scope of the challenge and activate their followers’ agency. This realism is urgently needed when we talk about the SDGs. No country is on track to achieve these goals, and we need a serious step change if we want to have a shot at achieving them.

Post-heroic leaders embrace their boundedness. At the most fundamental level they are bounded by the culture of their organisation and the expectations of their followers. They are also bounded by their particular skillset and personality. Such leaders realise the importance of forging productive partnerships even with competing groups and organisations in their environment. In many respects the notion of boundedness is the motivation for the focus on partnership embedded in the SDGs.

The latest research on post-heroic leadership shows that post-heroic leaders benefit from making space for dissent. One of the major weaknesses of how the SDGs are approached in business schools and beyond is that they seem to be beyond criticism. If we are serious about the SDGs, we need to have honest conversations about their limitations and the trade-offs of specific targets. Only then will we be able to reflect on how to mitigate such trade-offs.

Post-heroic leaders, and certainly the type of leaders we need to achieve the SDGs, practise courage. Courage is not, as one might think, a heroic leadership trait. When reflecting on Aristotle’s foundational definition of courage, this virtue is ‘bracketed’ by the extremes of excessive confidence and excessive fear or lack of confidence. Heroic leaders tend to exhibit excessive confidence, which makes them more prone than others to surround themselves by acolytes and engage in risky behaviour. Practising courage, however, means that a leader has the ability to gauge what is called for in a particular situation, and is willing to take on the potential risk of failure.

Other post-heroic traits, capabilities and behaviours can be highlighted, as I also discuss in my book. The overarching point is that the SDGs offer us an opportunity to question and update many of the popular assumptions of what constitutes ‘good’ leadership. In a complex world characterised by rising tensions and ever-more serious challenges, overly simplistic approaches to leadership – such as the notion that we merely need exceptional and charismatic individuals – are not good enough.

About the Author