Giving Voice To Values Based Leadership

How can you effectively stand up for your values when pressured by your boss, customers, or shareholders to do the opposite? Drawing on actual business experiences as well as on social science research, Babson College business educator and consultant Mary Gentile challenges the assumptions about business ethics at companies and business schools. She gives business leaders, managers, and students the tools not just to recognize what is right, but also to ensure that the right things happen. The book is inspired by a program Gentile launched at the Aspen Institute with Yale School of Management, and now housed at Babson College, with pilot programs in over one hundred schools and organizations, including INSEAD and MIT Sloan School of Management. She explains why past attempts at preparing business leaders to act ethically too often failed, arguing that the issue isn’t distinguishing what is right or wrong, but knowing how to act on your values despite opposing pressure. Through research-based advice, practical exercises, and scripts for handling a wide range of ethical dilemmas, Gentile empowers business leaders with the skills to voice and act on their values, and align their professional path with their principles. Giving Voice to Values is an engaging, innovative, and useful guide that is essential reading for anyone in business.

Describes an approach to recognizing what is right and knowing how to act on values in the face of opposition, and includes advice, practical exercises, and scripts.

The complexity facing today’s organizations calls for a rethinking of leadership. The world is facing grand challenges for people and the planet. Leaders and employees bear the responsibility of formulating strategies grounded in strong values. These strategies aim to foster the growth of sustainable organizations and promote ethical work practices. This book gives voice to values-based leadership and provides a method for leaders to develop a values-based organizational culture. Values play a role on many levels in how we work as individual leaders, in teams, and in organizations and in how organizations approach societal challenges. Values can be a compass or orientation point, giving direction for decisions and actions. Awareness of values can make organizational responsibilities clearer and give a sense of meaning to work and help leaders to create organizations where corporate, moral, and social values are embedded at every level. This book gives insight into a Scandinavian values-based leadership model built on the institutional leadership tradition. It provides processes and practices that leaders can use to develop organizations where values are continuously nurtured. The book provides practical ideas of how leaders can work on becoming conscious of both the organization’s explicit and implicit values, as well as working on the direction of the organization and its broader organizational culture. This book will be an invaluable resource for both practitioners and graduate students interested in leadership and organizational development.

This is a practical guide on how to navigate the complexities of ethical leadership in sport, while recognizing the increasing pressure placed on individuals and organizations to win and be exemplary role models. While you and most leaders know right from wrong, giving voice to your values isn’t always straightforward. This book explores how to approach the ethical decisions, dilemmas, and valuebased conflicts that emerge for leaders in sports organizations in order to make good choices, drive a sound culture, and reduce the risk of going awry. The approach in this book is two-fold: Coaching to help you learn how to make and act on an ethical decision when faced with a dilemma, and an exploration of those deep personal values and beliefs about sport that underpin your actions. This book considers ethics in the context of modern sport and highlights the classic ethical traps and cultural slippery slopes to avoid using case studies and examples.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Brené Brown has taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead. Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart! NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential. When we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don’t see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don’t avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it’s necessary to do good work. But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we’re choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we’re scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can’t do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start. Four-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brené Brown has spent the past two decades studying the emotions and experiences that give meaning to our lives, and the past seven years working with transformative leaders and teams spanning the globe. She found that leaders in organizations ranging from small entrepreneurial startups and family-owned businesses to nonprofits, civic organizations, and Fortune 50 companies all ask the same question: How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture? In this new book, Brown uses research, stories, and examples to answer these questions in the no-BS style that millions of readers have come to expect and love. Brown writes, “One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100 percent teachable, observable, and measurable. It’s learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It’s why we’re here.” Whether you’ve read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong or you’re new to Brené Brown’s work, this book is for anyone who wants to step up and into brave leadership.

Never before have the pressures of a comparative and competitive world impacted on our sense of wellbeing, particularly among young adults. Building on the principles of Giving Voice to Values, which honors the complexity and difficulty of leading with our values, this book addresses the unique challenges faced by young adults. It provides a clear process that details how to harness natural wisdom to flourish through the relentless pace and pressure of today’s world. Moving beyond mere values clarification, Authentic Excellence helps the reader to develop a deeper relationship with their values and confidently express them, and builds effective coping skills to manage the relentless noise of our comparative and competitive world. Authentic Excellence answers five primary questions: How are young adults affected by this world of relentless change and pressure? Why are young adults vulnerable to a plateau that can negatively affect their resilience? What is the difference between fear-based excellence and authentic excellence and what role do values play in this distinction? What is necessary to move beyond fear-based excellence and why is it so hard? How do you train a deeper level of effectiveness that includes more consistent productivity, fulfillment and resilience?

Just as the Wright Brothers combined science and practice to finally realize the dream of flight, Ryan and Robert Quinn combine research and personal experience to demonstrate how to reach a psychological state that elevates us and those around us to greater heights of achievement, integrity, openness, and empathy. It's the psychological equivalent of aerodynamic lift, and it is the fundamental state of leadership. This book draws on recent advances in positive psychology and organizational science to describe four questions that, when asked in any situation, will help us experience the fundamental state of leadership. Engaging personal stories illustrate how the Quinns and others have applied these concepts at work, at home, and in the community. --

Despite four decades of good faith effort to teach ethics in business schools, you’ll still find today headlines about egregious excess and scandal. It becomes reasonable to ask why these efforts have not been working. Business faculty in ethics courses spend a lot of time teaching theories of ethical reasoning and analyzing those big, thorny dilemmas—triggering what one professor called “ethics fatigue.” But what if faculty stopped focusing on ethical analysis and focused on a new curriculum—one that builds a conversation across the core curriculum (not only in ethics courses) and also provides the teaching aids for a new way of thinking about ethics education? This is where Giving Voice to Values (GVV) comes in—the GVV curriculum asks the question: “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?” This book will help faculty across the business curriculum with examples, strategies, and assistance in applying the GVV approach. In addition to an introductory chapter, which explains the rationale and strategy behind GVV, there are twelve individual chapters by faculty from the major business functional areas and from faculty representing different geographic regions. The book is a useful guide for faculty from any business discipline on HOW to use the GVV approach in his or her teaching.