Competency Assessment for Responsible Leadership – 2014

Survey Development

The survey builds on Anna Liechti’s meta study of all literature on responsible leadership and associated surveys and identified five competency dimensions (stakeholders relations, ethics & values, self-awareness, systems understanding, and change & innovation) across three degrees of mastery (knowing, doing and being), as described below:


Liechti as a result of her work suggested the following definition of responsible leadership:

“A responsible leader possesses an advanced understanding of the interdependencies of the system and the own person, is recognized through an ethical and values-based attitude, is able to build long-term relations in particular with stakeholders and to take into account their needs, and advances change towards sustainable development” (Liechti, 2014)

After two years of testing in a graduate class of the University of St. Gallen and a further improved version with all level executives at Swisscom, a major Swiss telecom provider, we have further improved Liechti’s work by summarizing existing survey and meta study insights into three competencies across these 15 fields (five competency dimensions across three competency levels), resulting in 45 distinctive responsible leadership competencies that could be measured and assessed (see below for details).

 

Use for Business schools and learning institutions

We offer an additional service for universities, business schools and other learning institutions that interested in having data available for a specific cohort, course or program. If you wish to have such data available, please let us know either by reply email or by writing to CARL@bsl-lausanne.ch. You will need to let us know before anybody takes the assessment, so that we can set up a special CODE for you. The associated cost with such an additional service amounts to US$/CHF 280 per report generated and we hope this keeps this tool very affordable. 
Update: Further information about CARL is now available at https://carl2030.org/ 

We recommend that you consider taking up this offer for two reasons:

  1. You can use this information as you start teaching a class, understanding where the blindspots / learning opportunities for the class are
  2. You can undertake a Before / After Assessment of a specific group of participants, as an additional measure to understand the impact of any learning intervention over a given period of time.
    We are currently closely observing how CARL does in reality and we are anticipating reviews and continuous improvements which will results in possible updates. We shall of course be very mindful of timing such updates in order not to influence any ongoing before/after assessments. It would thus help us in planning to know approximately when you would be planning to do an after assessment, if at all.

We are are grateful for the enthusiasm that has been shown of this Assessment and, to those who have actively requested the link, the interest shown in using this first ever attempt of a responsible leadership assessment. We hope that this is yet another, even if small, contribution towards our shared goal of helping to develop globally responsible leaders in any position of any kind of an organization so that business can be celebrated for its positive contribution to serving the common good.