Developing Leadership Character in Business Programs

Our objective is to encourage and enable leadership character development in business education. Building on a model of character strengths and their link to virtues, values, and ethical decision making, we describe an approach to develop leadership character at the individual, group, and organizational levels. We contrast this approach to existing practices that have focused on teaching functional content over character and address how business educators can enable leadership character development through their own behaviors, relationships, and structures. Most important, we provide concrete suggestions on how to integrate a focus on character development into existing business programs, both in terms of individual courses as well as the overall curriculum. We highlight that the development of leadership character must extend beyond student engagement in a course since “it takes a village” to develop character.