Fifteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

How do we build business leaders who promote the vision and values of sustainability? Beyond passion and commitment, we argue that future leaders also must have specific sustainability-related competencies to be truly effective leaders in this space. If competence is defined as “the state or quality of being adequately or well qualified,” competent business leaders must possess the knowledge, skills, and qualities (e.g. motivation, drive, values) that have a high probability of ensuring that someone can actually achieve some of the key goals of the sustainability movement. Some business schools have begun to think deeply about what competencies they want to instill in students to ensure those students are well prepared to act to establish sustainability goals and act to achieve them. This session will bring together leaders from business schools deep into developing business sustainability competency models with those just beginning to address these issues to share and evaluate existing sustainability competency models and synthesize a new competency model from the best of each existing model. Each panelists will highlight the variety of approaches adopted and candidly share their views about some of the challenges involved. Discussion also will focus on the value of developing a sustainability credential for business students and professionals in this space and the parameters of how that credential might be constructed.