Nurturing future talent for climate action: Resetting character-education in institutions of higher learning

By Professor Susela Devi K Suppiah, Professor and Director of Centre for Accountability and Governance Research, Sunway University Business School, Sunway University

The 25th Annual Global Survey of CEOs conducted by PwC identified six priorities for CEOs in the Asia Pacific region to address the environmental, social and governance pressures on businesses that hinge on climate action.

These priorities encompass

  • Adopting a mindset for long-term value creation, involving responsible consumption and production decisions;
  • Focusing on building capability and capacity locally, with an emphasis on leadership skills to include empathy and a willingness to embrace sustained multi-stakeholder engagement;
  • Reframing Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) conversations with multi-stakeholders to underpin realistic trade-offs with short-term financial goals;
  • Creating a diverse talent pool for the Asia-Pacific region;
  • Aligning incentives comprehensively to facilitate achievement of financial/non-financial outcomes, performance management measures and reporting requirements; and
  • Enabling cooperation with government/policy-makers, other business leaders, investors and NGOs to collectively drive outcomes and build trust.

These priorities have important implications for educators who aim to create future-ready students who will be the next generation of corporate leaders. The survey also highlighted a need for talent with empathy and the capacity to build relationships that sustain trust.

As an educator, I believe that these values need to be inculcated through character education to better ready our talents emerging from universities to be the leaders of tomorrow.

Arguably, a long-term solution lies in character education that focuses on building the individual’s personality through manners and invoking the individual’s conscience to assimilate good behaviour, empathy, honesty, responsibility, respect for others and other virtues.

The bigger agenda is to nurture future citizens with good conscience and morality. This will go a long way toward achieving the priorities set above. A talent pool with a conscience would benefit companies, societies and nations as they will self-govern and implicitly know how best to perform their roles, having developed an understanding that they are accountable for their actions. 

While character education starts from home and should be reinforced at each phase of an individual’s development – institutions of higher learning certainly play an important reinforcement role.  

A pragmatic approach to nurturing future talents with character is to embed these values and attributes in the curriculum, embracing a paradigm shift in teaching that reiterates the realisation that self-governed –actions have consequences– imbued conscience.

The Oxford Global Leadership Initiative, the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University and the Oxford Character Project are some recent initiatives that set the pace for character education.

Character education can be instrumental to ensuring future leaders in business as well the community are equipped to respond effectively to any challenges going forward.

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