The connection of Responsible Leadership competencies to the strategic sustainability areas for business enabled us to create a learning and development map. This map serves to help individual leaders, both current and future, to design their own pathway and so to accelerate their positive impact. A map is the same as the territory. Hopefully, it provides orientation and support to the courageous leaders when they find themselves on a path less travelled. 

Educators and leadership development specialists can benefit from these insights when designing learning journeys for students or managers. The CARL map provides an overview of the current status of a leader and can be compared to the desired future state. The resulting learning opportunities can be addressed with relevant developmental tools as deemed appropriate by the learning designer. We will outline a few options for the individual leader below, these may serve as further inspiration for concrete learning and skills development, taking into account what students and managers bring to the table in terms of attitudes (being) and reducing the knowledge transfer to those few nuggets of wisdom that enable the student to enhance their practical skills. 

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Recommendations are provided for the five competency areas:

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1. Ethics and values: Inspire responsibility through integrity and fairness

2. Self-awareness: Create an open culture of shared learning

3. Stakeholder relations: Facilitate trustful collaboration for shared success

4. Change and innovation: Drive change by challenge status quo & creating actionable results 

5. Systems thinking: Address complexity holistically

No one’s journey is alike, and it is important that the interested change agent takes full ownership of that journey. No survey can fully reflect reality. We suggest using the CARL survey as a structured tool to deepen reflection and to broaden the perspective. 

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We have worked with AI to identify current relevant learning and development offers for the different RL competencies. We have focused heavily on supporting the acquisition and further development of the skills domain, fully acknowledging the importance of knowledge and attitudes. 

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Our suggestions will not resonate equally with a future, emerging or current leader. For somebody not currently in a professional setting, the recommendation of a concrete course or program might be most appropriate. For the busy executive, a short and concise reading and video viewing list may be all that fits the agenda.

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Using the CARL survey has one great advantage for leaders and educators. It allows measuring the current state of RL development at both an individual and group level. We recommend individuals to take the CARL survey as a part of their periodic assessment of their own learning journey. It serves as a basis for reflection and allows highlighting next learning fields. Educators receive a free group code from us which they distribute to their students so that the educators have an overview of where a given cohort is at the beginning and the end of their learning intervention. By early 2025, more than 35’000 people on all continents had used this tool. 

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What follows is an overview of 20 concrete suggestions for developing the five responsible leadership competencies: ethics & values, self-awareness, stakeholder relations, change & innovation, and systems thinking. We suggest focusing on the one dimension that you prioritize in your learning journey right now, and that you pick the most relevant suggestion given your context. Please remember that the suggestions likely also bear a Western European culture bias.