020. Mary Gentile: Giving Voice To Values

Mary Gentile is the Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, and senior adviser at the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program. She is the creator and director of Giving Voice to Values, a pioneering business curriculum for values-driven leadership, which has been featured in publications such as, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and piloted in over 1200 business schools and organizations globally. Mary is the author of the award-winning Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What's Right. In her ten-year tenure at Harvard Business School, Mary was one of the principal architects of the school’s Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Responsibility curriculum.

In this episode of Leading Transformational Change, Mary shares how the Enron scandal and a self-defense course made her rethink the way ethics was taught in business school and led to the Giving Voice to Values experiment. She realized that we do not merely need ways of theoretically discerning the ethical course of action based on philosophical models, but knowing what is the right thing to do, how would we actually go about doing it? Mary shares the main reasons why we do not voice our values in the business world and how we can build a framework for doing it in a thoughtful and strategic way. She shares practical examples of how the Giving Voice to Values framework has been implemented in companies like McKinsey and Unilever and why it needs to be a part of the leadership development strategy and not merely an HR issue.