Week 8: Leadership as purpose
Introduction
Attaining racial equity and justice has been a driving purpose for people over centuries, and it has shaped the characters and practices of leaders and groups in very different times and places. Purpose is primarily concerned with ethics, and involves acting in an ethically rich and informed way. Ethics is about judging what’s right and wrong, good and bad. So, to act purposefully is to act ethically.
In this week of study, you will learn how to lead purposefully. What follows is informed by the work of Donna Ladkin (2015) on ethical mastery. Your journey begins with the need to pause and find stillness within your practice – this will enable you to focus on what really matters for leadership. Then you will be ready to attend to ethical leadership by learning how to better identify and imagine ethically significant situations. Finally, you will become adept at practising ethics – this means acting in ways that are loving, wise and challenging to power.
By the end of this week, you should be able to:
- understand a variety of approaches for identifying, interpreting and acting in ethically purposeful ways
- evaluate the ethicality of situations you are involved with in terms of leadership
- critically reflect on and apply models of purposeful leadership to improve your practice and the ethical practice of your own organisations.