Stewardship: The leadership competence the job won't teach you

About three years into the CEO role at LIW, succession started to feel urgent.

I don't just mean my own. I mean the next group of people who will take LIW forward when I'm not here, and when the people around me today aren't either. It felt early to be thinking that way. Nearly seven years in, it feels like the most important thing I do.

Thirty years into our work, LIW has been led by three CEOs before me, and every one of its original directors has since moved on or retired. It's a strange feeling to look around and realise that the purpose, what we do and why we do it, has carried on well beyond the people who started it, without being diluted. That continuity didn't happen by accident and it won't continue by accident either.

I've come to believe that almost every capability you hold as a leader, you earned through consequence. Negotiation, influence, reading a room: all of it comes from people and outcomes pushing back on you.

Stewardship is the exception. The people it serves can't reward you, punish you, or tell you that you got it wrong. Your successors, the customers who haven't arrived yet, the staff who will inherit the culture you set: none of them are in the room. There is no feedback loop. That's why the job, on its own, will never teach stewardship, it has to be built on purpose.

The mistake we made with stewardship

We praise leaders for being stewards, yet we almost never train them to steward effectively. We assume it as a virtue and hope it will materialise.

The challenge is that virtues get admired, while competences get built. When we conceptualise stewardship as a virtue, we quietly remove it from the list of things a leader should develop. It becomes something you either have or you don't.

I certainly wasn't trained in it at work. Humility was modelled early in my family: you didn't make a big deal of your own achievements, and you found ways to celebrate other people instead. Then there was Scouting, a system designed to build exactly this mindset. Older members take responsibility for younger ones. And there's the old campsite rule: leave it better than you found it. The next group to pitch their tents there will never know your name or thank you. You do it anyway. Scouting doesn't wait for consequence to do the teaching. It builds the practice until that sense of responsibility becomes a habit.

Stewardship theatre

Without deliberate practice, the concept of stewardship becomes little more than a performance. In the private sector, it looks like purpose statements and long-horizon language in the annual report, while capital allocation, incentives and the operating rhythm stay relentlessly quarterly.

In the public sector, it looks like process. Consultation, review and sign-off chains are meant to protect the long term, but following the steps can tick the box, without fulfiling the purpose. In the social sector, it looks like mission fidelity: a real strength, right up until it hardens into resistance to change and the organisation stops asking whether the mission, as currently expressed, still serves the people it was created for.

Different costumes, same performance. Each onelets a leader feel like a steward without exercising any capability at all.

What the competence is made of

In our work with leaders across sectors, three things keep showing up.

Disciplined imagination. Most strategy is little more than telling the story of the “extended present”: take the current trajectory, extend it, call it a plan. Stewardship asks you to argue with your own forecast. Hold several futures seriously at once, notice which assumptions you're most attached to, and ask what would have to be true for you to be wrong.

Designed accountability. Because the beneficiaries of stewardship can't hold you to account, someone else has to. Who in the room is structurally rewarded for defending the decade? If everyone shares the same time horizon and the same incentives, the long term has no advocate, however good everyone's intentions.

Practised constraint. This is the least glamorous of the three and the most revealing. Stewardship often shows up in the deals you don't do. If someone offered to buy LIW, the price would matter, and we'd have a responsibility to our shareholders to take a serious offer seriously. But for us, the real test of any merger or acquisition is whether it would amplify what we're here to do. An offer that looks good on paper but pulls against our purpose is unlikely to create lasting value for anyone, shareholders included.

I've seen what happens when that fit is missing. Earlier in my career, I was part of a small L&D business that was acquired by a much larger organisation. The deal made sense commercially, but the cultures never quite came together, and I eventually moved on. It taught me that the people inside a business feel a poor fit long before it shows up in the numbers.

Constraint applies to ego too. You have to be willing to give up the credit and hold a delicate balance. You can't lack confidence, but you can't need constant validation of your own importance either.

Why we're building a foresight practice

This is why LIW has established its own foresight practice. Not to forecast, and not because we think we can tell anyone what's coming. Scouting's motto has always been Be Prepared, and it has never meant predicting the future. It means building the capability to meet it.

The real value we see in foresight is how it leaves participants, contributors and facilitators changed. When leaders do the work themselves, imagining what their organisation is like once they've gone and letting that picture challenge how they lead today, it has the potential to fundamentally reshape how you think and lead.

We also see that this need is growing. AI is removing friction at extraordinary speed, and much of that is welcome. But every removed point of friction is also a lost chance to sit with an idea or an opportunity long enough to argue with it. That is where we lose our grasp on the tension required for the practice of stewardship, and we find ourselves drifting to performing it instead.

The real dividend

LIW's purpose has been sustained well beyond the tenure of the people who started it, and it held because those who came before us were thinking about what, and who, would comenext. That is the standard I now try to hold myself to.

Every leader hands something over. The question is whether your successors inherit capacity or cleanup. That inheritance is the real dividend of leadership. It's far less glamorous than the rest of the job, but it's the part that makes it all worthwhile.

In the end, it's as simple as the campsite rule: leave it better than you found it.