The Stewardship Question
Much of what passes through our hands was here before us and, if well stewarded, will remain after us.
Institutions, businesses, public offices, community organizations, families, relationships, knowledge, and opportunities often have histories that precede our involvement with them, yet for a period, some part of their future may depend on the choices we make. We take on responsibility and exercise judgment, and the consequences may extend long after our authority has ended.
This is where stewardship begins.
At its core, stewardship is the responsible care of something of value that has been assigned, assumed, or inherited. Something may be placed within our authority, taken into our care, or passed to us by those who came before without becoming exclusively ours. In each case, stewardship concerns the responsibility attached to what is now within our care and the condition in which it will eventually pass beyond us.
Davis, Schoorman, and Donaldson (1997) challenged assumptions that those entrusted with organizational authority necessarily act primarily from self-interest, recognizing instead the possibility of collectivist and pro-organizational behavior. More recent scholarship has further conceptualized stewardship around a duty to care for something of value (Casoli et al., 2025).
Stewardship is not simply another word for leadership, ownership, or preservation.
Leadership involves influencing others toward shared purpose while stewardship concerns our relationship with what has been placed within our care. Ownership creates certain rights, stewardship emphasizes responsibility, and preservation, although sometimes necessary, is not always stewardship because responsible care may require something to be strengthened, reformed, or even relinquished.
A chief executive, for example, may exercise substantial authority over an organization, but the enterprise is larger than the executive’s tenure. Employees have invested their labor, investors have committed capital, customers have extended trust, and communities may depend on its presence.
Government makes the distinction even clearer because public authority is temporary by design. An officeholder occupies a position but does not own it, and every administration inherits institutions shaped by those who came before. Decisions made today, whether they strengthen public confidence and institutional capacity or weaken them, become part of what future administrations and the public inherit or encounter.
The same tension exists in mission-driven organizations. Programs may expand, revenue may increase, and visibility may grow while systems remain vulnerable, knowledge stays concentrated, and relationships become increasingly dependent on one person.
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Transition reveals the difference.
Indispensability is therefore not necessarily evidence of stewardship. There is a difference between building something around ourselves and strengthening something entrusted to us. An institution may celebrate an individual leader while remaining poorly prepared to function without them.
Every steward therefore stands at the confluence of entrustment, enablement, and handover.
The executive leaves the company, the public official relinquishes the office, the nonprofit leader gives way to a successor, and one generation of a family eventually yields responsibility to another.
Stewardship, then, cannot be measured by achievement alone. A leader can achieve ambitious targets while exhausting people, a government can complete visible projects while weakening institutional controls, a nonprofit can expand programs without building the infrastructure to sustain them, and a family can accumulate wealth without transferring the knowledge necessary to preserve it.
Stewardship places achievement within a longer horizon by considering what was received, what happened while it was within our care, and what remained afterward. Some of its most important evidence may therefore become visible only after the steward has moved on, when institutional resilience, transferred knowledge, developed people, preserved trust, and enduring capacity are tested without the presence of the person who once held authority.
Stewardship is a relationship of responsibility between what we receive, what we do while it is within our care, and what remains when our period of responsibility ends.
Whether what passes through our hands is a business, a public institution, a nonprofit mission, family resources, knowledge, a relationship, an opportunity, or responsibility for another person, one question eventually remains:
What condition are you leaving behind?
REFERENCES
Casoli, D., Visentin, M., Tuan, A., & Cappiello, G. (2025). The power of a stewardship mind: Reorienting organizations around the duty to care to better address grand challenges. International Journal of Management Reviews, 1 — 23. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.70006
Davis, J. H., Schoorman, F. D., & Donaldson, L. (1997). Toward a stewardship theory of management. Academy of Management Review, 22(1), 20 — 47. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1997.9707180258
Ibrahim Owolabi writes from Minneapolis on leadership, governance, and institutions.
