Leaders are also responsible for future leadership. They need to identify, develop, and nurture future leaders. Leaders are responsible for such things as a sense of quality in the institution, for whether or not the institution is open to influence and open to change. Effective leaders encourage contrary opinions, an important source of vitality. I am talking about how leaders can nurture the roots of an institution, about a sense of continuity, about institutional culture.
Leaders owe a covenant to the corporation or institution, which is, after all, a group of people.
Leaders owe the organization a new reference point for what caring, purposeful, committed people can be in the institutional setting. I did not say what people can do what we can do is merely a consequence of what we can be. Corporations, like the people who compose them, are always in a state of becoming. Covenants bind people together and enable them to meet their corporate needs by meeting the needs of one another. We must do this in a way that is consonant with the world around us.