What It Means to Be an Ethical Leader: A Conversation With Dr. Stephanie Varnon-Hughes
Think of the leaders you’ve known in life. What characteristics do they share? Our leaders typically carry the most responsibility and power in our communities and organizations, and they’re often tasked with top-level decision-making that drives collective growth or change. The ethical frameworks driving the decisions of those in power can determine whether a community or an organization flourishes — or fails.
When our leaders believe that certain individuals or groups have more value than others, only a select few can flourish. Ethical leadership offers an answer to these systems of privilege and exclusion, with the core understanding that all human beings have equal and intrinsic value. In this article, Dr. Stephanie Varnon-Hughes, Executive Dean of Academic Affairs at Claremont Lincoln University, shares her thoughts on what it means to be an ethical leader and the power of inquiry to help communities and organizations flourish.
What Is Ethical Leadership?
To understand ethical leadership as a concept. Dr. Varnon-Hughes points to the cultural connotations of the term “leadership” itself. She notes that, especially in the West, the term is often conceptualized “in terms of to push or pull, or to be punitive and didactic. To try to force something as a leader.” However, the earliest definitions of the term suggest a very different model of leadership: “The etymology of that word is actually to flow like a river — ‘to be in flow’ — which makes more sense to me.”
Dr. Varnon-Hughes explains that leaders must also know when their expertise and experience are needed. “If you think about actually being on a river with someone, if I haven’t been on this river, and you have, I do need your expertise to know when the rapids are coming,” she notes.
“So, the leader is someone in a relationship with those in the community and has an awareness of the needs of the community and also the strengths of the community, so that there can be flow, so that there’s not contorting or hiding ourselves, or any of those things that keep us from being in flow.”
For a leader to sustain this sense of flow within their community or organization — and to navigate strong challenges — Dr. Varnon-Hughes believes that both parties must share an ethical framework. “If we’re talking about ethics and thinking ethically about decision-making, it’s important to have some kind of center we can agree on,” she says. “And I believe we have maximum flourishing for the community when we center the fact that all human beings have intrinsic value, just by their nature.” It is this belief that keeps leaders and their communities aligned in pursuit of the common good.
5 Key Traits of an Ethical Leader
Dr. Varnon-Hughes also provides some key traits of ethical leaders. They include the following:
- Preserving a Sense of Curiosity: Curiosity isn’t typically thought of as a leadership skill, but staying curious about the world around you is essential to understanding new perspectives and finding innovative solutions to challenges.
- Maintaining a Humble Mindset: With curiosity comes the acceptance that you don’t know everything. Embracing humility by admitting you aren’t the expert, even when traditional ideas of leadership suggest otherwise, allows you to be open to new perspectives and experiences.
- Leaving Time for Reflection: When making a decision, a leader is responsible for considering multiple data points and perspectives. Rather than racing against the clock to force quick action, the ethical leader acknowledges and respects the time required to make an informed decision.
- Listening Before Speaking: A leader may seek to prove their authority in a room by oversharing, which leaves little space for others to engage in conversation or meaning-making. An ethical leader facilitates discussion through active listening and chooses to share their specialized knowledge only when it’s truly beneficial to the conversation.
- Building a Comfort With Uncertainty: Leadership is ultimately collaborative, and achieving goals that lead your community or organization to flourish means accepting the parts of the process that you didn’t plan for — leaving space for perspectives that may enrich your own.
Ethical Leadership: The Foundation for a Flourishing Society
Dr. Varnon-Hughes describes communities and organizations whose leaders make decisions for the common good as “flourishing,” a term she borrows from philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum and her book Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Nussbaum identifies 10 capabilities that exist within a functioning society of free individuals and that lead to human flourishing.
Among those capabilities is affiliation, defined as the ability to “live with and show concern for others, empathize with (and show compassion for) others and the capability of justice and friendship.” In a flourishing society, institutions have a responsibility to “develop and protect forms of affiliation” within communities, work that, according to Dr. Varnon-Hughes, ultimately falls on the leaders of those institutions.
For Dr. Varnon-Hughes, the role of the ethical leader is “to be in flow with the community and to help move communities from place to place.” By prioritizing affiliation and alignment with the broader community, ethical leaders enable “maximum flourishing” for everyone, as opposed to flourishing for a few within a competition-based, individualistic model. “All of us do better when we care about all of us,” she says.
The Role of Inquiry in Ethical Leadership
Being curious about the world around you is a key aspect of ethical leadership. However, it’s just as important to turn that curiosity inward — to understand how your personal and social circumstances influence your worldview as a leader. Claremont Lincoln University’s online Master of Arts in Social Impact begins with Invitation to Inquiry: Foundations of the Claremont Core, a course that challenges students to identify the big question driving them as leaders. It encourages students to facilitate shared power and a growth mindset to build equitable outcomes and positive outcomes for the collective good.
“The key research method is to be curious about the world, and we will teach you how,” says Dr. Varnon-Hughes. The course also guides students in the process of self-inquiry to help them identify the social issues in which they’re personally implicated. “Who are you in the world? Who are you within the world? And what’s your big question?” These are the questions that she encourages students to consider as they seek to expand their influence as leaders.
One of the first assignments in the foundational course is an exercise that requires students to plan a conceptual dinner party with guests who are all seeking to answer the same question. “What’s your big question?” she asks. “Is it food insecurity? Who would you invite to come? Some of them may be your classmates. Some of them are your family members. And some of them may be thinkers like Paulo Freire or Martha Nussbaum.”
The exercise represents how the social issues that we seek to solve in our communities and organizations can bring together individuals from different backgrounds and circumstances, whose lives and work have been impacted by these same issues. It’s the role of the ethical leader to find community in the questions that unite us, even across time and space, and work toward a future in which everyone can flourish.
Sources
Cambridge University Press, “Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach”
Edward Elgar Publishing, “Ethical Leadership: A Primer – Second Edition”
Harvard University Press, “Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach”
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Global Ethics: Capabilities Approach”
Journal of Leadership Studies, “A River Runs Through It: A Metaphor for Teaching Leadership Theory”
Oneworld Publications, “Without Buddha I Could Not be a Christian”
Claremont Lincoln University is a non-profit university offering affordable online degrees, graduate certificates, and professional development programs. Through a socially conscious education framework, CLU’s mission is to create a new leadership ecosystem through its proprietary Claremont Core®, a distinctive model that encompasses the knowledge needed to become an effective leader of positive change in the workplace or community. CLU is regionally accredited by the highly regarded WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC), which ensures institutions meet strict standards and fulfill their missions to serve their students and the public good. Degree programs at CLU focus on healthcare administration, human resources, organizational leadership, management, professional studies, public administration, social impact, and sustainability leadership.
Claremont Lincoln University is the university of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a non-profit global thought leader solving social, environmental, and economic challenges. Together, we are mobilizing leaders worldwide to tackle the most pressing climate, land, water, finance, housing, infrastructure, and other issues.
