Recently ranked "America's Best Large Employer" by Forbes, Notre Dame leaders share their challenges and wins

Earlier this year, Forbes magazine named the University of Notre Dame as America’s Best Large Employer, a prestigious award that ranked the University above more than 700 other organizations across the country with 5,000 employees or more. That distinction is about far more than Notre Dame’s beautiful campus or selective admissions. It speaks to the loyalty that everyone in the enterprise feels to the school and the leadership qualities that are lived out on a daily basis by the people who work and learn there. 

In celebration of the Forbes award and to understand what it really means from the inside, The Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership set out to ask some of the strongest voices among staff and administration at the university to speak to the role that ethical leadership plays in their jobs and their lives. 

For many of the leaders interviewed, their leadership style was shaped in large part by their childhoods. Growing up in small-town Indiana, Micki Kidder, vice president for undergraduate enrollment, enjoyed leading from a young age, whether on the school student council or a sports team. “I am grateful for the opportunity to lead in a variety of ways during my youth – both formal and informal ones – hopefully advancing kindness and the common good,” Kidder said. 

Today, on her team at Notre Dame, Kidder tries to be everyone’s sponsor – standing up for them even when they’re not in the room and advocating for opportunities that honor individual strengths. When Kidder got dangerously sick a few years ago and was preparing for a risky surgery, she was moved when one by one, her colleagues phoned her in her hospital bed to pray with her and then organized a vigil to support her family. She learned that the University’s values translate to “showing up for one another.” 

Meanwhile around campus, Keri Kei Shibata, assistant vice president for campus safety and Notre Dame Police Chief, leads her team of officers in making fast, smart, on-the-spot decisions in challenging situations. They are anchored by the department’s values — words that are much more than just a sign on the station wall: respect, integrity, service and excellence. 

“I tell my officers that if their actions are in line with the University’s mission and these values then they are not going to make a wrong decision,” Shibata says. “While not perfect, the decisions by the leaders of this University are almost always made by keeping the best interests of the students, faculty and staff in mind.” 

Notre Dame doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but the stories Kidder, Shibata and other campus leaders shared illustrate the breadth of ways that ethical leadership is interpreted and lived out. After all, “ethical leadership” is a term used often, but has many unique interpretations and applications that go far beyond the campus’ borders. Read on for more of their insights.

The Leaders

How do you define ethical leadership? What characteristics make up an ethical leader?

Angela Logan: Seeing the humanity in others and recognizing it. It’s the higher truths that we’re all living towards: love, respect, kindness, equity, justice, grace, mercy. As a leader, that looks like helping others to discover who they are at their core and honoring the values they bring to the table.  

Micki Kidder: Integrity and respect for others are foundational to ethical leadership, but I also think that it encompasses other attributes: fairness, driving accountability, confidentiality, courage and a service or commitment to others.   

Rob Kelly: Building ethical systems, structures and organizations. If we can build organizations that make it easier to make the ‘ethical’ decision, while benefiting our company as a whole, the ‘right’ decisions become natural. That’s our responsibility as a College: to help students entering the workplace see that you can perform ethically in the corporate world while still being successful. 

Ryan Retartha: Ethical leadership means more than doing the right thing; it means creating the conditions for trust, humility and courage to flourish across our teams. Whether we’re allocating resources, designing programs or navigating institutional change, I work to ensure that our choices reflect both practical wisdom and moral clarity.

Fr. Pete McCormick: When I’m faced with important decisions, I often return to the wisdom of Fr. Hesburgh, who once said, ‘You don’t make decisions because they are easy, cheap or popular — you make them because they are right.’ His words remind me that faithfulness and integrity often require courage, not convenience.

As a leader, [that means] helping others to discover who they are at their core and honoring the values that they bring to the table.

Dr. Angela Logan

How do you model ethical leadership in your role? 

Angela Logan: Throughout the various leadership roles I’ve had over the years, I’ve discovered two important things: I prefer to lead from the back, to be the leader behind the leader, and that I’m actively becoming the person I once needed. People assume that in a role like mine, that I like to be front and center, but I’m actually an introvert. I thrive when I get to help the person up front find their voice, and most importantly, their authentic selves, which led me to realize that one of the most powerful things I can do for my students is to show up for them in the ways I needed someone to show up for me. 

Ryan Retartha: Every decision we make at Mendoza is an opportunity to reflect the University’s mission. We operationalize that mission by embedding its values into designing strategy, leading teams and engaging with the world. In practice, this means prioritizing long-term impact over short-term wins, creating space for ambitious dialogue and consistently asking: Does this decision form hearts and minds in the way Notre Dame aspires to? If the answer is yes, then we’re on the right path.

Micki Kidder: The mission and tone at the top inform all aspects of an organization, impacting actions and decisions that are made. At Notre Dame, we are held accountable to lead with a commitment to mission, high integrity and respect for all. The University's values mean something here – they’re practiced – they aren’t just written on a document nor posted on a wall. We’re blessed to have a mission at Notre Dame that has persisted for [nearly] 185 years - to invest in the hearts and minds of young people and their full human formation. The clarity and consistency of this mission, along with the expectation to lead consistent with the University’s values, encourage us to model ethical leadership. 

I lead with the belief that I should never ask someone to do something I wouldn’t be willing to take on myself. I also approach each situation with the humility to recognize the wisdom in the room. My aim isn’t to be the one with all the answers — it’s to help move us closer to a solution and a resolution.

Fr. Pete McCormick

Keri Kei Shibata: Law enforcement is a field where you’re making decisions that directly impact people's lives, and often you’re making those decisions autonomously. My responsibility is to be sure that I’m providing [my officers and staff] the training and experience to make good decisions. The way we think about it is simple: If your decisions are in line with the University's mission and values – respect, integrity, service and excellence – you’re less likely to make a wrong decision. 

The mission and tone at the top inform all aspects of an organization, impacting actions and decisions that are made.

Micki Kidder

Can you share an example of a time your own code of ethics was tested and how you navigated the situation? 

Rob Kelly: One of the most defining moments of my early career was the first concrete example of my own values being tested. I was working in supply chain management shortly after graduation and my team was in charge of inventory limits in a client’s warehouse. If we went below the inventory threshold, we were charged a fee for risking a stockout. If we went over, we incurred the transportation fees to return any excess inventory to our warehouse, but we could recognize the revenue as soon as the product left our warehouse. It was the end of a quarter and my supervisor and I were doing the dance that I’d unfortunately become familiar with: calculating how much inventory to ship, knowing that we’ll be over the threshold and it would all be coming right back to us, to recognize it as revenue in the current quarter and deal with the consequences later. I asked him, ‘Why are we doing this if it's just going to cost us more and create an even harder goal to hit next quarter?’ He said to me, ‘If this were our business, we wouldn’t.’ And that's when it dawned on me: This role, in its ownership and decision-making time horizon, isn’t aligned with my values. That moment, along with other experiences and aspirations for my family, motivated me to eventually leave that role and to begin my career at Notre Dame 16 years ago.

Keri Kei Shibata: Several years ago, it became really obvious that we needed to better define the independent roles of police officers and security officers on campus. There wasn’t a clear delineation between the two, which led to instances where we were endangering our teams, and as a result, our students and campus community. We tried several initiatives to help establish boundaries — separate uniforms, distinguishing which types of calls each group could respond to — but struggled to find a solution that maintained a sense of purpose and self-worth for both groups. We ended up going back to the drawing board with a survey and multiple rounds of officer engagement. The result was the creation of several entirely new roles that allowed both groups of officers to utilize their strengths, work together and ultimately maintain a safer environment for all of our Notre Dame family. The transition wasn’t easy, but now we have officers in roles that make a tangible impact and provide meaning instead of new arbitrary rules or having to downsize either group of officers. 

How does ethical leadership impact Notre Dame’s students and the broader community? 

Micki Kidder: In the enrollment division, we’ve embedded tenets of ethical leadership into the foundation of our practices. We seek to enroll young people who have excellent academic preparation and capacity to excel in Notre Dame courses, and we’re also mindful of the attributes that they present — kindness, respect, integrity, resilience, service to the common good. These are incredibly important at Notre Dame. Notre Dame alumni are expected to have high integrity, resilience and an authentic desire to serve the world around them. These elements are foundational to a Notre Dame education and meaningful in how we support our students.

Angela Logan: Our tagline at Mendoza is “Grow the Good in Business.” It’s quite literally in our slogan to prioritize the characteristics of ethical leadership beyond just making a company profitable. We’re also a nonprofit ourselves, which presents the most organic example for my students of living out the slogan. I regularly have to remind people that nonprofits are businesses, too, which means that my job is to teach and instill sound business practices in these future nonprofit leaders.

A question that I consider often is how do we prepare the people who are on the front lines doing the world’s most necessary work, to care for others in a way that’s successful? When I teach from that perspective, while encouraging these young people to lean into their authentic selves, I’m helping them build their own code of ethics in action.  

Dr. Angela Logan

Keri Kei Shibata: When I interviewed with Notre Dame almost 20 years ago, it was the people that sold me. Every leader I met with or even just encountered was all about Notre Dame – about this community, taking care of its people and ensuring its success. As I’ve moved into different roles over those 20 years, what I’ve seen is that they meant what they said. 

Rob Kelly: One of the many benefits of working for an institution with a mission like ours is that we’re always focusing on the long term. When we’re thinking through big decisions — a new team structure, a new building, a new initiative — we’re building off a long history of decisions that have been made with thoughtful, intergenerational consideration. We aren’t just trying to meet a goal at the end of the quarter. It was apparent from our very first days as a college, even before students were here. In a letter that our founder Fr. Sorin wrote to Fr. Moreau in 1842 upon arriving at the land that would become Notre Dame, he shared that ‘this college cannot fail to succeed…Before long, it will develop on a large scale…it will be one of the most powerful means for good in this country.’ We think of our students as a community of future business leaders. Our job is to heighten their awareness and their fortitude to be the sorts of leaders their future selves will want them to be in moments that test their values.

What is the consequence if ethical leadership is not placed front and center at your organization? 

Angela Logan: As a nonprofit leader who is often working with people who are on the margins, who are historically under-resourced, or historically on the outside, if we don't show up and honor their ethics and humanity and utilize ethical approaches, the outcomes are much more grave. In nonprofit situations, people can literally die. 

Keri Kei Shibata: Most importantly, we always have to remember the inherent dignity of every person. You’re often helping people on the worst day of their lives and so you're leading them through whatever they're going through to the extent that you can. In the Police Academy, it really stuck with me when they said that’s why you’re called an officer. You’re going to have to make decisions and they need to be good ones. 

Most importantly, we always have to remember the inherent dignity of every person.

Keri Kei Shibata

How do you make a tough decision as an ethical leader? 

Ryan Retartha: The University’s mission and Catholic social tradition offer a deep reservoir of ethical grounding, reminding me that our work is ultimately about pursuing knowledge, human dignity and being a force for good in the world. I also seek insight from trusted colleagues, mentors and my team. In moments of uncertainty, I’ve found that a culture that encourages open conversation and moral rigor is the most valuable asset. Finally, over the years, I've often taken some of my most challenging ethical dilemmas to our campus' sacred spaces, where I ask myself, what would Fr. Ted [Hesburgh] do?

Micki Kidder: Be kind, be humble, be respectful. Oftentimes, if you do those three things, you're going to emerge as an ethical leader even without a formal title or organizational distinction. 

What To Do Next

Want to get your team talking about what it means to be an ethical leader? Here are three discussion starters: 

• Can you share an example of the most inspiring ethical leader you’ve ever encountered — either in your professional or personal life? What are some of the values that this person demonstrated? 

• What values do you use to make a tough decision in your organization? How do you know if you’ve made the right choice? If you feel comfortable, share an example. 

• How is your organization’s mission reflected in everyday decisions and actions? How does your mission inform the ways you lead others?