Teaching The Moral Leader

A Literature-based Leadership Course: A Guide for Instructors

Sandra J. Sucher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781136756078
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book is a comprehensive, practical manual to help instructors integrate moral leadership in their own courses, drawing from the experience and resources of the Harvard Business School course 'The Moral Leader', an MBA elective taken by thousands of HBS students over nearly twenty years. Through the close study of literature--novels, plays, and

Chapter 1

Introduction

Every year since the 1980s, a hundred or more Harvard Business School students have taken a literature-based course on moral leadership called “The Moral Leader.” They find its combination of powerful material and guided discussion compelling and challenging to their own assumptions, beliefs, and questions. When I was asked to develop my own version of the course, I became convinced that others would find that combination as gratifying as I have, and thus the idea of this guide for instructors, and its companion student text, took root.

Teaching “The Moral Leader” has been written for people concerned with the intersection of leadership and complex situations involving moral and ethical stakes – instructors of management, organizational behavior, philosophy, education, medicine, engineering, and the list can go on. As instructors with such concerns, you may be searching for ways to engage students in issues of moral leadership, to build capabilities in that arena. It has also been written for those intrigued by harnessing the power of literature itself: each of the texts and corresponding class plans shows how students’ learning can be both broadened and deepened through exposure to the rich, profound, diverse, and ageless human preoccupation with morality found in such readings.

For all of you, whether you adopt “The Moral Leader” in whole or in part, or seek inspiration for integrating literature into other approaches to learning (see Appendix 1), this guide aims to provide hands-on suggestions. Teaching “The Moral Leader” addresses how learning through literature is done: how such a course is structured and how learning is integrated; how class sessions based on literature are organized and facilitated; and the practical details of how class participation and papers in such a course might be evaluated and graded. In sum, my goal is to equip you to take on the challenge of introducing the topic of moral leadership into your own classrooms.

The “Moral Leader” Course: Overview

The power of “The Moral Leader” course stems from the use of prize-winning novels, short stories, plays, biographies and autobiographies, and selected supplementary readings that enable discussion to be focused and cumulative. (Chapter 3 expands on this point.) The aim is for students to develop their own workable definition of moral leadership – through their preparations for class, their participation in discussion, and in a final paper. The course does not provide a pre-existing definition of either “moral” or “leadership” but guides students towards their own discovery of meaning.¹ Thus, student discussion is structured, as the following sections (and this entire guide) make clear. And it is graded, for this is an academic endeavor that incorporates the same rigor (and grading) as any other Harvard Business School course. As is the case with any course, and particularly one on this topic, learning does not ipso facto translate into action. “The Moral Leader” does not guarantee moral leaders.

The course does, however, reflect a commitment to educating the whole student – the adult who will make choices in a variety of venues, often with responsibility for others as well as for himself or herself. These other people may be family members, fellow citizens, investors, customers, patients, clients, suppliers, regulators, board members, or members of the organizations, industries, and professions that students will join as their careers develop.

The reading list for the course is international in scope, appealing to students through fictional and historical accounts set in the US, Great Britain, Nigeria, Japan, Thailand, Greece, Antarctica, and Italy. Students read about challenges faced more than two thousand years ago and ones as recent as September 11, 2001, by actors in times of war, peace, and unsettling periods in between. The varied settings, times, and situations reinforce the universality of moral challenge and the requirement for students, future leaders – and for all of us – to develop abilities to describe and analyze moral problems, to think them through, and to act (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 The Moral Leader readings

Reading	Setting	Format
Module I: Moral challenge
Endurance:Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage Alfred Lansing	Antarctica, 1914	Historical account
Antigone Sophocles	Ancient Greece	Play
Blessed Assurance Allen Gurganus	1940s America	Novella
Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe	Nigeria, early twentieth century	Novel
Module II: Moral reasoning
Trifles Susan Glaspell	Rural America, early twentieth century	Play
Principles of Biomedical Ethics Tom L. Beauchamp,		Text excerpts
James F. Childress
The Sweet Hereafter Russell Banks	Contemporary America	Novel
The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro	Britain between world wars	Novel
A Man for All Seasons Robert Bolt	Sixteenth-century England	Play and movie
Module III: Moral leadership
The Prince Niccolò Machiavelli	Sixteenth-century Italy	Treatise
The Secret Sharer Joseph Conrad	1890s off the coast of Siam	Short Story
Truman and the Bomb	Second World War, beyond	Text excerpts
Just and Unjust Wars Michael Walzer		Text excerpts
Personal History Katharine Graham	1970s America, recalled	Autobiography
A Good Life Ben Bradlee		Autobiography
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center William Langewiesche	Post-September 11th USA	Eyewitness account

The texts are arranged in a flow of thirteen two-hour sessions, divided into three modules – Moral Challenge, Moral Reasoning, Moral Leadership – that move students through an exploration of the topic of moral leadership. The flow highlights a succession of questions that constitute the modules of the course: What is the nature of a moral challenge? How do people “reason morally”? What do these look like when they are undertaken by leaders – individuals who must make decisions under conditions of responsibility for others?

These are not necessarily literary questions, or philosophical ones (except for that of moral reasoning), or ones that derive from any particular school of leadership studies. They are, instead, the kind of practical questions that students ask themselves as they wrestle with the reality of moral decision-making and worry about their ability to make good, morally satisfying decisions when they are in leadership roles.

In addition to the literature, background readings on moral philosophy are offered, sparingly, at points where students have struggled for clarity and are grateful for models of moral reasoning and decision-making. These readings also provide reassurance: students, and the instructor, are hardly alone in their exploration.

Module I: Moral Challenge

The Moral Challenge module lays the groundwork for the course, introducing students to situations with clear moral and ethical stakes, where they are able to examine how people behave when faced with a moral challenge. The four texts illustrate what is to many students a surprising concept: moral challenges are not all the same – there are types of moral challenge, and each one suggests a different set of strategic responses. For example, most students have not considered the difference between a “right versus wrong” challenge and a challenge of “competing rights” in which each position is morally defensible, and what this difference might imply for action. Students learn how to describe the particular tensions each type of challenge presents, and are able to examine the strategies – some successful, many not – that characters in the stories devise to resolve them.

Module II: Moral Reasoning

Better able to appreciate the various types of moral challenge they may encounter, students then move to the Moral Reasoning module, where they will explore how people actually think these challenges through. The four texts are laid out in a progression that steadily broadens and deepens students’ understanding of what moral reasoning consists of, and of how it works. Beginning with reasoning from moral theory, the stories layer on additional ways that people reason about their challenges, including reasoning that flows from their history and life situation, reasoning from an established system of beliefs and values, and reasoning that encompasses multiple bases of morality – the ability to consider and attempt to make good on multiple moral duties and ideals.

Module III: Moral Leadership

In the third module, students build on their understanding of moral challenges and of moral reasoning by examining what moral decision-making and action look like under conditions of responsibility for others. The module on Moral...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• A Literature-Based Leadership Course
• Module I: Moral Challenge Class Plans
• Module II: Moral Reasoning Class Plans
• Module III: Moral Leadership Class Plans
• Appendix 1: Adapting “The Moral Leader”
• Appendix 2: Defining morality and the “Moral Leader” class card
• Appendix 3: the “Moral Leader” course paper
• Bibliography
• Index