Responsible Leadership – ICRL

ICRL

The IESEG Centre for Responsible Leadership

The aim of the Centre for Responsible Leadership at IESEG is to bring our school to an internationally recognised high level of teaching and research in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

CSR and related themes as part of research and teaching in Business schools are of increasing importance to us as a school due to a change in our stakeholders’ perception of what we should teach our students, and also, most concretely, due to the inclusion of CSR activities as a benchmark for accreditation.

The launching of the Centre is an integral part of IESEG’s commitment to its membership of the GRLI (Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative). This Initiative is a foundation started by EFMD (the European Foundation for Management Development) and the United Nations in 2002. Its goal is to provide a global think tank and network on re-inventing and establishing responsible corporate governance and business education. GRLI bases itself on the UN Global Compact (Core values for responsible corporate governance) and PRME, the Principles for Responsible Management Education (to which IÉSEG is a signatory). More information on these can be obtained via the attached power point presentation of GRLI and the UN Global Compact website (http://www.unglobalcompact.org/).

ICRL and teaching

We are a school with a very strong and effective commitment to the education of responsible young managers. We differentiate between initial education towards responsible behaviour (“avoir être”), and, at the MSc stage, courses that look more at the more macro-level (“savoir” and “savoir faire”: role of the firm in society, Corporate Governance). We also differentiate between mandatory CSR -related contents taught in our core curriculum, and optional possibilities for motivated students to engage in more concrete projects and courses giving students the possibility to actively engage themselves in CSR-related projects through projects and internships.

ICRL and research

This involves work, both applied and theoretical, in our respective fields with the aim of conceptually understanding, and propagating, sustainable leadership practices and, at a meta-level, the context of organisational development in a changing environment. Benefiting from the non-attached (but not detached!) viewpoint of the academic, we also see ourselves as agents provocateurs, striving to point at problematic issues and to think-and argue- “out of the box”.

For more information, contact the ICRL coordinators Birgit Kleymann and Mathias Falkenstein.