Sustainable Leadership Skills Development –Learning From Bees

Abstract

The paper aims to present the development of sustainable leadership skills based on the metaphorical organization of the bees. I hope to identify mechanisms educators could use when developing team leaders. The method used is the qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources and the analysis of the educational exercise I implemented as a pilot study. I present the exercise I carried out at the School of Economics and Business at the University of Ljubljana for international and domestic students in the winter semester of 2023/24. I have incorporated the research question: “What can we learn from bees in developing future leaders?” into the Stanford Social Innovation Questionnaire. Students have been searching for possibilities to exercise communication, teamwork, and creative problem-solving based on the functioning of bees. The findings show that a limited number of exercises are available that incorporate into leadership skills development natural environment elements. More common is a combination of sports or art as a “playing ground” for developing games or simulations of leadership context. The research limitation in my endeavor is time, as my study is still at its beginning, and I hope to be able to do interdisciplinary research on the topic in the future.