Incorporating Ethical Leadership

Vision Statement: Guilford College will be a premier institution that practices and promotes ethical leadership. Students will be equipped to lead with integrity, enact innovation and create positive change.

Mission Statement: As members of the Guilford College community, we strive to live out the college’s core values and carry them in our sphere of influence. Ethical leadership programs at Guilford foster educational experiences that develop self-awareness and collaboration across difference to make communities, institutions, and societies more just and humane.

Ethical Leadership Tenets

We firmly hold two central tenets about Guilford’s institutional commitment to ethical leadership. The first tenet is that everyone -- students, faculty, staff, and administrators -- can demonstrate ethical leadership. Regardless of their position within a collective (whether a formally structured organization or even a “leaderless” group), people can act ethically while demonstrating socially responsible leadership. The second tenet is that ethical leadership doesn’t refer to an inborn, randomly-bestowed gift; it refers instead to a range of traits and skills that can be learned and strengthened. That implies that those traits and skills can, in some sense, also be taught, and (if so) that we can create intentional programs to teach those things and to assess our success in teaching or strengthening them.