Our Mission:

By advancing thought leadership, applying scholarly research, and engaging students, the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership informs, equips, and inspires values-based leaders.  

We partner with stakeholders from industry, academia, and communities to support the Mendoza College mission to Grow the Good in Business. 

 

Ethical leadership is the bedrock on which enduring, successful organizations are built. This idea isn’t new or particularly ground-breaking. It just makes sense. If you have integrity at the helm, committed employees, a culture that supports your values, and the public’s trust, you’re a lot better off. Your company is strong internally, and that’s not only good for you—it’s good for your industry, your community, and the global market.

Yet every discussion of ethics seems to start with a litany of wrongdoings—from judgment lapses to outright fraud, the focus is on the bad things people and companies have done. And then we hear about the thing that’s going to prevent all of it from happening again: ethics.

It’s an education in avoidance.

At the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership, we’re about pursuit. We believe that ethics can drive the world forward and improve it, not just provide a safety net to catch us when we inevitably fail. We aim to understand how ethical behavior is generated in work contexts, and then to disseminate that understanding to business leaders.

Our Center arose from a partnership between the University of Notre Dame and the professional services firm Deloitte. Having identified a shared value of personal integrity in today’s business world, we developed the NDDCEL as a forum by which to advance the understanding and implementation of ethical leadership practices in the corporate sphere.

We deal in ideas—not just about business or management or how to train employees, but also about the human mind, behavioral science, culture, interpersonal exchange, and personality theory. We explore how people work, how their individual traits and ideas and actions make larger organizations work, and how leaders can affect culture and inspire their followers. We’re interested in a lot of things here at NDDCEL, and they’re not just the things you would expect.

So, how do we aim to serve you? From our diverse interests, we fund original research projects and search for and synthesize content from the academic and business worlds into “dispatches” for your consumption. We show you what we’ve found, tell you why we think it matters, and give you ideas on how to use the information. We provide forward-looking, pragmatic, and provocative content to assist you in bettering your organizations and, ultimately, in making business a force for good. 

Go ahead, have a look.