Leadership is not a luxury for stable nations or booming corporations. It is a lifeline. It is especially true for countries like Nepal, where resilience, innovation, and transformation are daily necessities. From rebuilding earthquake-stricken communities, navigating federalism, or just trying to get a meeting started on time, leadership is the invisible current connecting aspiration with action.
Yet in our academic corridors, leadership remains strangely absent. Treated more like a weekend workshop than a scholarly pursuit, it is often relegated to a forgotten chapter of a management textbook or disguised as a motivational speaker with a wireless mic and PowerPoint full of stock photos. As a result, we continue to mass-produce graduates but underproduce leaders.
Rediscovering Our Roots
Ironically, Asia’s own heritage had figured this out centuries ago. The ancient Gurukul system was not just an early version of a boarding school with better Sanskrit. It was a holistic leadership academy. Students did not just memorize scriptures but practiced discipline, service, inner inquiry, and moral courage. They were raised not merely to become job-seekers, but to carry a civilization.
Fast forward to today, and we find ourselves caught between students’ rising aspirations and the realities of course delivery in tertiary education. Social fragmentation, technological upheaval, and the lure of foreign shores have created a leadership vacuum. If ever there was a time to reintegrate timeless wisdom into a structured, modern leadership education, it is now.
The Evolution of Leadership Studies
Internationally, leadership has evolved from a buzzword into a serious academic discipline. From Plato’s philosopher-kings to contemporary theories of transformational and servant leadership, the study of how people lead has become a rich field of inquiry.
Seminal thinkers like James MacGregor Burns and Joseph Rost revolutionized the field by shifting focus from “leaders” to the “process” of leadership. They emphasized ethics, relationships, and context over charisma or authority. Today, leading universities offer degrees and research centers dedicated to leadership studies. They blend theory with practice, and emphasize self-reflection, cross-cultural understanding, and service-oriented action.
In this global evolution, leadership is no longer seen as something you are born with. It is studied, cultivated, and practiced, like any other discipline. But in Nepal, we are still busy deciding whether leadership belongs in the curriculum at all.
10,000 graduates to take part in TU convocation on Dec 31
In short, leadership is no longer a matter of personality. It is a science and should be treated as such.
The Psychology Behind Purposeful Leadership
Parallel to leadership studies, the field of Industrial and Organizational (I/O) Psychology emerged from the trenches of early 20th-century industries and wartime mobilization. Psychologists began asking: How do people lead under pressure? What motivates teams? What makes workplaces ethical, healthy, and productive?
Globally, these questions reshaped companies, nonprofits, and even militaries. In Nepal, however, many organizations still cling to a more nostalgic model of leadership: top-down, compliance-driven, and suspicious of feedback. Without grounding leadership in behavioral science, we risk training the next generation to replicate the very systems they were meant to reform.
Leadership Starts in School, Not the C-Suite
Emerging research in Nepal reveals that leadership identity often begins to form during school years, long before students graduate or receive their first paycheck. If we want empathetic, thoughtful, and courageous leaders, we need to start cultivating those traits in classrooms, not just in corporate retreats.
This means going beyond electing class monitors or organizing sports day. Leadership education should include moral reasoning, responsibility, collaboration, and creative problem-solving. Co-curricular activities, student-led projects, and service learning play a role in shaping young minds into future leaders.
Teachers and parents are the first mentors in this journey. Their role in modeling values, offering trust, and encouraging autonomy is undeniable. Investing in the development of educators as role models is therefore just as crucial as curriculum design.
Thankfully, the leadership vacuum is not without sparks of hope. Across Nepal, youth-led initiatives are slowly reshaping the narrative. Organizations like Yuwa, which empowers adolescents through sports and education, and Teach For Nepal, which places talented graduates in underserved schools, are nurturing a new generation of civic-minded, confident, and community-rooted leaders. These are just a few examples of the efforts being made at the national and local levels.
And as Stanley Keleman, the founder of Formative Psychology, once noted, human beings are living processes. Our body and mind are inseparable. Our very posture, habits, and emotional regulation shape our choices, courage, and clarity under pressure. Leadership is not about external performance alone; it is about inner readiness and integration.
The Missed Opportunity in Higher Education
While a few universities in Nepal now offer MBAs in Global Leadership or M. Eds in Leadership and Management, such programs are sparse, underfunded, and often inaccessible beyond urban elites. For a country grappling with mass youth migration, political disillusionment, and climate uncertainty, this is a grave missed opportunity.
Nepal doesn’t just need degree holders. It needs leaders who are ethical, emotionally intelligent, rooted in culture, and globally competent. Without that, we may continue to lose our brightest minds abroad while our institutions remain in slow-motion decay.
Breaking the Chains of Bureaucracy in Higher Education
The problem, as usual, is systemic. Nepal’s higher education system operates with all the nimbleness of a fax machine in 2025. Innovation often dies at the altar of outdated bureaucracy. Even globally accredited degrees struggle for local accreditation. Colleges lack the autonomy to design interdisciplinary, future-ready courses.
To borrow a metaphor: a caged bird may flap its wings, but it will never learn to fly.
True academic transformation requires granting universities the freedom to create interdisciplinary programs, to collaborate with global partners, and to experiment with future-ready curricula. Higher education should not merely be about employability. It should be about forming whole persons. It should be about creating thinkers, builders, and citizens who can navigate ambiguity with integrity. A reimagined academic model can have far greater impact than the current system of tick-box curricula and procedural hurdles.
A Curriculum for Conscious Leadership
To shift from crisis management to long-term nation-building, leadership education must be treated as a national priority instead of a niche interest. This means weaving ethics, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, theology, and social justice into mainstream curricula.
These are not “soft” subjects. They are what teach students how to think, why to care, and when to act. Without them, we risk building a generation fluent in data but blind to dignity, clever in strategy but hollow in soul.
The world’s top universities have already recognized this.
From Graduates to Guardians of Change
Nepal stands at a crossroads. We can either continue producing technically skilled graduates or we can rise to the challenge of forming principled, visionary, and adaptive leaders. The stakes are high. Our institutions, our youth, and our future depend on this shift.
To raise leaders, not just graduates, we must think beyond job markets. We must invest in leadership as a science, leadership as a discipline, and most importantly, leadership as a moral calling.
This is not just an educational reform. It is a national imperative.
