Ethical Leadership for Corporate Directors
ETHICAL LEADERSHIP IS A RESPONSIBILITY. There is no sharp line separating your company’s financial risks from its ethics and sustainability risks. Thus, against the backdrop of major social and economic transitions, corporate compliance and ethics programs are more crucial than ever before. They’re also evolving quickly. As the responsibilities of governance change, corporations must have directors who manage organizational risk well by exercising responsible accountability, oversight, and control. Doing so can also promote a healthier corporate culture. More than ever, business leaders find themselves under a microscope. Every decision matters. How organizations interact with their stakeholders shapes brand reputation, employee retention, community credibility and the bottom line. Thus, inclusively sustainable corporate governance is quickly becoming a competitive advantage.
Ethical Leadership for Corporate Directors is a program that equips current and aspiring corporate directors with critical tools, powerful insights, and essential knowledge to strengthen their oversight of corporate compliance and ethics programs while promoting sustainable strategy and a high-integrity corporate culture. Participants will also find curated space for challenging conversations about how to take the next step in their own development as leaders committed to inclusive, adaptable, and high-integrity vision-casting on behalf of their organizations.
What Sets the Ethical Leadership for Corporate Directors Program Apart?
Clarity During Uncertainty
Program participants will benefit by learning from Leeds School of Business faculty and other experts.
Understand the Emerging Sustainability Responsibilities of Boards
Compliance oversight is still critical—but so is ESG strategy, corporate culture, and values-driven leadership.
Look Forward, Not Back
Let us help you navigate the issues you’ll face as a leader tomorrow—not those that leaders faced yesterday.
Curriculum
This course will contain three parts. The first will situate corporate compliance against the historical backdrop of leadership lapses and market failures that have produced public policy reactions from Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank to the current congressional scrutiny of Big Tech. Within this context, best practices for corporate ethics and compliance will be discussed—with special attention to the unique responsibilities of board members in overseeing these institutional systems.
The second part of the course will explore the emerging sustainability oversight responsibilities of corporate boards. We’ll consider the new legal liability that boards may face for neglecting to consider the environmental and social sustainability of their organizations. We’ll examine integrated reporting as an emerging paradigm for disclosing and managing ESG risk. By considering case studies from Engine No. 1/Exxon Mobil to Goldman Sachs and the legal standards for sustainability rhetoric, we’ll consider the long-term advantages of sustainable oversight and accountability mechanisms. This part of the course will also consider the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the boardroom and throughout the organization.
The third part of the course will focus on the creation of adaptable, inclusive, and equitable organizational cultures. Corporate responsibility will be presented as an exercise of empathetic attention to a firm’s stakeholders, expressed through a corporate purpose that contributes to the common good. Participants will have the opportunity to reflect—in a supportive and stimulating space—on their own journey of ethical self-development, while learning conceptual frameworks for articulating the principles that guide their systemic moral decision-making. Such insights will equip leaders to articulate their firm’s mission, vision, and values with conviction in a quickly-evolving social and political environment.
- In-person residency on the beautiful CU Boulder campus: March 19-20, 2022
- Five synchronous online sessions: 3/30, 4/6, 4/13, 4/20, 4/27 (8-11 am MDT)
- 27 hours of contact time
World-Class Faculty
The Leadership for Corporate Directors program features world-class faculty from the Leeds School of Business along with a former director and global leader in ethics and compliance.
The faculty bridge academic research and deep industry experience preparing participants to confidently and competently tackle ongoing oversight and governance issues facing organizations.