Leadership for What? Eric Guthey, The Copenhagen Business School, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8830-4521 Steve Kempster, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1432-372X And Robyn Remke Abstract We argue that the majority of leadership research and development has sought to make itself relevant in the wrong way—by supporting commercial organizations in their attempts to isolate pseudo-scientific levers that can align individual leader competencies and drive desired behaviors in the service of their core busi- ness. Elsewhere we have addressed this problem by outlining an alternative approach to leadership research and development as a networked, collaboratory process of multi-stakeholder engagement designed to tackle major societal problems and, in the process, to generate new ideas and to nurture the emergence of the relational capacities needed to address even more complex challenges into the future. In this chapter we elaborate on this collaboratory approach by drawing connections to ongoing conversations about leadership and purpose. We exemplify these connections by describing the design of an upcoming collaboratory en- gagement with public sector managers in the Gaunteng City Region, the most heavily populated province in South Africa. We build on this and other examples of similar engagements in public, commercial, and cross-sector contexts to discuss how to redirect leadership development to address pressing social chal- lenges and to learn new things about leadership in the process. Introduction Would it really matter in the broader scheme of things if leadership studies didn’t exist? In its current state, we are not so certain that it would. When you pause to think about it, leadership research and devel- opment have not really made any sort of substantial contribution to society, nor have they provided much in the way of meaningful support for collective efforts to address major societal and global challenges. With a few laudable exceptions, leadership studies have had next to nothing to say about such complex problems as food waste, famine, or obesity, discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, the global refugee crisis, the rise of racist and anti-immigrant sentiments, the resurgence of nationalist and populist movements or political demagoguery, or the very real threats posed by human-made climate change. This is a major failing, we argue here, because leadership research and leadership development practice have the potential to address such pressing social and environmental challenges, to help repair fractured communities, and to contribute to the betterment of society on a global scale. Furthermore, we argue, engagement in multi- stakeholder efforts to address these sorts of complex challenges could in turn help to rejuvenate leadership CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Lancaster E-Prints