Responsible leadership and transformative cross-sector partnering

The demands on business, governmental, and nonprofit leaders to deal with major economic, social, and environmental problems are increasingly exceeding their individual capabilities. This has led to a growing recognition of the imperative of collaborating across sectors to combine complementary resources and capabilities. Such collaboration has been largely neglected in the Responsible Leadership literature. This chapter presents a framework for analyzing cross-sector collaboration, with special emphasis on transformational collaboration. Cross-sector partnering is a manifestation of transformative leadership, and transformative collaboration is an especially powerful and understudied leadership form. We provide five categories of descriptive parameters of Transformative Partnering: Goal Orientation, Problem Focus, Collaboration Processes, Collaboration Configurations, and Collaboration Mindsets and Leadership Roles. To document and illustrate the development, characteristics, and leadership of Transformative Partnering, we present two case studies of collaborative constellations that achieved institutional and systemic transformations. Both have produced important social and environmental value as well as financial benefits to the collaborators and the larger society. We conclude with leaders' reflections on Transformative Collaborative Leadership. The chapter has striven to enrich the Responsible Leadership literature opening the window of exploration of the transformative collaboration dimension.