Teaching the Moral Leader

From HBS Working Knowledge, by Sarah Jane Gilbert

What do Sir Thomas More, Chinua Achebe, and Sophocles have to offer today's business leaders? For MBA students in HBS professor Sandra Sucher's course, The Moral Leader, great literature helps them find their own definition of moral leadership.

Sucher is one of a number of HBS faculty who have taught the course. First introduced to HBS in the late 1980s by Harvard psychiatrist and educator Robert Coles, The Moral Leader uses literature to study moral decision-making and leadership. Individual faculty teach the course using their own unique curriculum.

Sucher recently published 2 books about the course: One is a textbook, The Moral Leader: Challenges, Tools, and Insights, that provides historical and social context for the works read in the course, as well as instructional materials.

The other is an instructor's guide, Teaching The Moral Leader: A Literature-Based Leadership Course, that includes practical details on how to facilitate the course, templates for grading class participation and the course paper, and conceptual overviews of topics such as how "morality" is defined in the course. "My goal is for instructors in a university or college, as well as those teaching leadership development programs (and even members of a leadership team inside a business), to feel confident in their ability to teach any of the class sessions, modules, or the entire course," Sucher explains.

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