UVA Darden Professor Wins Reimagine Education Award for Ethical Leadership Pedagogy

The University of Virginia Darden School of Business received a bronze Ethical Leadership Award at the Reimagine Education Conference and Awards Ceremony in Philadelphia on 5 December. The Bronze Award recognizes Professor Mary Gentile for her Giving Voice to Values (GVV) pedagogy in ethical leadership.

Reimagine Education is an international competition that “aims to acknowledge and reward those most successful in creating transformational educational initiatives, enhancing student learning outcomes and employability.”

Culminating in a global conference of educators, academic institutions and “those seeking to shape the future of education,” the contest draws over 1,000 applications in 16 total award categories from educational innovators around the world. The 2018 Ethical Leadership Award, sponsored by the World Economic Forum, boasted a crowded and competitive field this year, receiving the highest number of entries among all categories in the competition. The award acknowledges the project that is most successful encouraging students to:

• Adopt leadership roles
• Interrogate the question of leadership, examining and critiquing current leaders and models of leadership
• Examine the ethical implications and consequences of leadership, and the decisions with which leaders are faced
• Partake in and initiate projects in which they direct leadership qualities toward pursuits with positive ethical outcomes

GVV, Gentile’s internationally-acclaimed curriculum, is an innovative approach to values-driven leadership development piloted in over 1,025 schools and organizations on all seven continents. Unlike many business ethics methodologies that focus primarily on ethical analysis, the GVV pedagogy focuses on ethical implementation, helping students and business practitioners helps students, business leaders, employees, and other practitioners identify the many ways that individuals can and do voice their values in the workplace, and provides the opportunity to script and practice this voice in front of their peers.voice their values in the workplace through peer-based scripting and practice.

This is the third global accolade Gentile has received this year. In April, Compliance Week named her a Top Mind 2017, referring to Gentile as “one of the compliance and ethics field’s most renowned educators for her results-based ethics training.” Thinkers50, a biennial ranking of global business thinkers, recognized Gentile on its shortlist for the Ideas Into Practice Award at its Distinguished Achievement Awards ceremony in London this November.

“GVV is an idea whose time has come,” said Darden Institute for Business in Society Executive Director Joey Burton. “Professor Gentile’s work is being integrated across many courses at Darden and around the world. And we hope that as Mary’s program gains recognition, and as more people practice giving voice to their own values, it will become a feature of business education everywhere, and a key habit of business practitioners worldwide.”