Ethical Leadership

Leading for Good

Ethical Leadership means Making decisions, building a life, and influencing others to allow yourself, others, and the common good to flourish.

 At Guilford, this means aligning our personal and professional life and actions with community, justice, stewardship, diversity, equity, integrity, and excellence.

Developing Ethical Leaders

Anyone can be an ethical leader, whether they have a title or not, whether they are outgoing or shy, whether they coordinating others actions or allow their efforts to be coordinated. Guilford College develops ethical leaders through a development process that heightens values-based decision making and coordination towards socially just goals at the individual, small group, and community levels. 

An ethical leader cultivates this development process in oneself through self awareness, congruence between one’s values and actions, and commitment to this process; with groups through facilitating collaboration, promoting a common purpose, and addressing controversy with empathy; and in the world by working towards socially just goals.

Ways We Develop Ethical Leaders

At Guilford, we develop ethical leaders a number of ways: 

  1. Through our curriculum. Our curriculum intentionally includes self-reflection seminars to prompt students to discern their goals, motivations, values, where they want to go and provides the support with the best way to get there. The small-class teaching heavily emphasizes discussion, critical thinking, and writing so that students not only know how systems work, but why, how systems affect various others, and if they want to advocate for change, how to articulate a plan. By graduation, each student must complete their own project that culminates their 4 years of reflection and learning into making a lasting impact in an area they care about. 

  2. Through Campus Life. Our campus life attracts, supports, and develops Ethical Leadership. As a small campus, we are very socially conscious and engaged, winning top 30 LGBTQIA+ campus in the country from Campus Pride, and consistently one of 40 colleges that change lives. With over 35 clubs and organizations, students easily rise to leadership experiences, even the students who “don’t think they are a ‘leader’” (Even when we insist that if they can make choices intentionally, they can make a difference, and that means they are a leader regardless of not having a title or not being outspoken). Some of the events that support this student leadership are the Ethical Leadership Conference in the Fall open to all students, ongoing workshops from the Office of Student Leadership and Engagement, alumni brought to campus or virtually to connect with students about their passions and futures, and speakers and practitioners. 

  3. Through Career preparation. Career, Academic, and Personal Exploration (CAPE) oversees students’ career readiness through 4 phases: Reflection on their interests and building their community, Discovering their major and building their networks, Reaching out to industries, grad schools, and organizations of interest by developing a resume and career plan, and finally find and interview for desired jobs or schools with alumni and advisors’ support. 

  4. Through Athletics. Almost half our students are student-athletes on our 14 different Div III teams, and even more through our very active club teams (like Ultimate Frisbee and cheerleading). Athletics at Guilford are laboratories for leadership, each team dedicating time to campus and community service, team building, and character development. Coaches, sports psychologists, and ethical leadership trainers nurture athletes’ ethical leader development.

A Curriculum for Ethical Leadership

Guilford's curriculum develops students’ abilities to think–creatively, empathetically, and critically. Instruction emphasizes personal mastery of why and how things occur (in business, math, social sciences, humanities, etc) not just memorizing that they occur for tests.

These academic foundations prepare students to navigate ambiguity, work in diverse teams, empathize with various audiences, manage projects, and create dynamic human or technical systems–skills which predispose our students to leadership and career advancement in many fields. This education culminates with every student completing an in-depth senior project that reflects their four years of learning and their contribution to an issue, field, or community.

Promoting Ethical Leadership of Guilford

Leading Guilford College as an ethical institution is a process of striving, not perfecting, and it is a task for all of us--students, staff, faculty, boards, donors, and administrator--to use our influence for good, which may mean different things for different departments, situations, and individuals. We can use our Quaker influences and our core values of community, stewardship, integrity, excellence, equity, diversity, and justice to help us discern whether our actions are helping or harming various others and what the right path forward may be. 

We can do this: 

  • By using values- based queries and ethical reasoning to reflect on the decisions at hand

  • By observing practices of equality (like using first names) and, when appropriate, non-hierarchical organizing 

  • By meaningfully integrating stakeholders who will be affected by decisions into the decision making, keeping our decision making processes transparent, and being open to self and group reflection about the impact of those decisions and our identity and power related to it.  

  • By employing moral imagination to avoid reductive, zero-sum interpretations of conflict

  • By exercising empathy, including towards those with whom we have controversy