The Ethical Leadership Challenge Exercise: Charting a Moral Azimuth

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Short Description

The Ethical Leadership Challenge (ELC) is an interactive, context-based, and collaborative exercise designed to improve participants’ understanding of moral temptations and ethical dilemmas. After an overview of the methodology’s purpose, approach, and outcomes, the presenter will highlight key definitions and major concepts of the ethical triangle tool. In small groups, participants will then examine a post-conflict reconstruction scenario filled with ethical paradigms, moral temptations, and ethical dilemmas, learning how to dissect key ethical issues, develop appropriate options, and foster their own and their group’s ethical development.

Detailed Abstract

Leaders in government, military, business and non-profit organizations face enormous challenges within the turbulent global environment. Marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), this environment’s rapid pace of political, social, and technological change is raising many wicked moral leadership problems. Exercising ethical leadership, therefore, requires a solid foundation of cognitive and practical leadership skills. Especially important are the ability to recognize and examine moral problems, make sound moral decisions, and ethically guide organizations toward a common goal. This workshop provides a method to foster moral development by honing critical thinking, moral reasoning, ethical decision-making, and collaborative leadership skills in the context of a turbulent global environment.

The Ethical Leadership Challenge (ELC) is an interdisciplinary method to effectively prepare leaders to face morally ambiguous situations where they must choose between competing and often morally questionable courses of action. Lawrence Kohlberg’s and James Rest’s works provide the theoretical foundations for the exercise. As a targeted moral development exercise, the ELC encourages participants’ moral thinking to progress from simplistic views of right and wrong to more complex understanding of moral dilemmas. The exercise also integrates Rest’s sequential model of moral reasoning that occurs in four stages: moral recognition, moral judgment, moral intention, and moral behavior. In short, leaders must first recognize and examine moral issues, make moral judgments as a basis for crafting decisions, translate decisions into intentions to act, and then carry out the actions. The ELC stresses the first three stages.

This workshop will include discussion, demonstration, and experiential learning. The workshop will initially cover the exercise’s overall methodology including its purpose, learning outcomes, and content. Next, the presenter will briefly review the key definitions and major concepts from the Ethical Triangle tool. Finally, workshop attendees will participate in an ELC exercise, as described below.

The Ethical Leadership Challenge (ELC) combines audio-visual scenarios and facilitated small group discussions in timed sessions to explore moral temptations and ethical dilemmas in the context of a post-conflict reconstruction scenario. During the ELC, each participant will be encouraged and ultimately required to commit publicly to an ethical course of action. This interdisciplinary exercise involves a fictional scenario based on a compilation of real world strategic situation that creates ethical tensions between national interests, values, and ethical conduct. The overall scenario consists of three sub-rounds where participants identify relevant ethical issues. A final fourth round synthesizes key themes from the entire scenario.

During the ELC exercise presented in this workshop, workshop attendees will break down into table groups of participants with a facilitator leading each huddle. For this workshop, I will ask volunteers to serve as facilitators to help stimulate discussion within the table groups.

The ELC exercise contains four sub-rounds where workshop attendees will discuss the evolving scenario within the round’s allotted time. Within each sub-round, table groups will dissect key ethical issues, develop appropriate options (i.e. what actions should be taken to address the issue), and explore how the situation applies to the group’s and their own ethical development. Participants will imagine themselves as advising the key leader who has to make an ethical decision about the situation that unfolds in the sub-round.

Upon the conclusion of the workshop, participants will understand how to design, prepare, and conduct the ELC; apply judgments derived from the Ethical Triangle; and facilitate an ELC session. The ELC provides an interdisciplinary method to immerse participants in the complexities of moral reasoning and ethical decision-making. The exercise’s design causes participants to develop a greater sense of empathy for the leader’s perspective, to think critically, and make better moral judgments. Over time, leaders exposed to the ELC will be better able to think about and resolve ambiguous moral dilemmas with sound moral and ethical solutions.

Sub Unit

• Leadership Education

Presenter

• David Gray, Virginia Military Institute