Professor and Director for the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers University Joanne B. Ciulla spoke to Doane students about how to sustain ethical leadership on campus.
On March 19, Doane hosted Professor and Director for the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers University Joanne B. Ciulla who held a lecture called “What the Humanities Tell Us About Ethical Leadership” in the Heckman Auditorium. The lecture aims to explain how to develop and sustain ethical leadership, Ciulla pulled from numerous examples across history, art, philosophy, religions and more for what defines leadership.
Throughout the lecture, Ciulla was adamant about the responsibility and quality of character leaders need to have in order to properly guide their peers, their nation, their business or even themselves.
“When you take on leadership, you take on moral obligations that normal people don’t have. There is more weight in your actions,” Ciulla said.
Ciulla is a pioneer in defining ethical leadership, as she is the founding member of the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers University and aims to have her curriculum make leaders who are kind, understanding and ethical.
Ciulla used several different examples of leadership to illustrate her point on what ethical leaders look like. Throughout the lecture, Ciulla used examples such as ancient Egyptian scripts about how to build trust and why reducing your ego is important for followers to understand you, the philosophies of Plato and Tao-Te-Ching, or recent examples such as Nelson Mandela all in an effort to illustrate that ethical leadership is something that many societies both new and old have attempted to solve.
“We all carry preconceived notions of what a leader is, but leaders are defined by their actions and moral codes, not just their looks and titles or positions,” Ciulla said.
The goal of this lecture was to have Doane students and staff to think critically about leadership and understand the inherent power and responsibility in taking on leadership positions and how to avoid ethical compromise and corruption, and act morally not only for themselves but for those they are leading.
