Advanced Ethical Leadership Program
Supporting ethical awareness, analysis and action

The Advanced Ethics in Leadership Program (AELP) team is expertly positioned to design and deliver a unique leadership training program to senior leaders in various professional and organizational contexts, both in for-profit and not-for-profit settings. We assemble independent topics tied to a consistent skill-development orientation, and we have significant experience in the development and delivery of a modular curriculum that includes facilitated discussions around leadership topics, high participant engagement, case studies, and individual and group exercises. 

The AELP’s curriculum and approach facilitates the ability to discern ethical tensions that arise either through interpersonal interactions or organizational conflicts to arrive at the proper decision given the goals, mission, and values of the organization. It also provides the training to act strategically to change culture and habits so that leadership decisions are not simply ad hoc.

Through our development of the AELP’s Triple-A Framework, our program provides a practical eight-step approach for leading through ethical challenges that can be applied to a variety of different topic areas. In fact, we have successfully shown how a consistent ethical leadership methodology can create better habits for approaching diverse challenges.

The AELP uses a successful and proven methodology that is ideally suited to professional leaders’ goals. Our program is successful by focusing on three key reasons:

1. development of tools and skills as much as on knowledge acquisition, providing participants with tangible strategies to bring back to their own institutions.
2. building a cohort of colleagues, creating a support network outside each participant’s institution with whom participants can seek guidance and share best ethical practices.
3. active participation, which ensures that participants are engaged and enjoying themselves.
   

Our programs include detailed facilitation guides, facilitated discussions focused on key leadership topics, high participant engagement, case studies, personal assessments, and individual and group exercises. Upon completion of the program, participants will have learned and practiced dynamic skills and leadership competencies to address management and leadership challenges, build an inclusive community, and manage change in alignment with core values.

By the end of one of our programs, participants will be able to 

1. Define and describe ethical leadership, leveraging scholarship in ethics, sociology, psychology, and team science.
2. Apply knowledge of the Triple-A Framework™ to scenarios involving organizational decision-making and implementation.  
3. Recognize the unique ways participants – as individual leaders – can respond to ethical and organizational challenges in multifaceted organizations with diverse and sometimes conflicting obligations. 
4. Utilize their knowledge and skills of ethical awareness, analysis, and action as values-driven leaders in real-life situations.

Our methodology will benefit existing and rising leaders from various professional and organizational domains, such as lawyers and legal professionals, health care professionals, academic deans and leadership teams, and corporate and non-profit leaders, etc.

We can offer programs of various length, depending on an organization’s needs and interests. By the end of a program, participants will have learned and practiced the AELP Triple-A Framework for making principled decisions that align with their own values and the values of their profession or industry. This workshop is also intended to foster a sense of community, safety, and support among participants, which not only facilitates learning from each other throughout the day but also creates the potential for ongoing mutual support in the practice of ethical leadership as participants grow in their careers.

Below is a typical agenda for a 1-day program.  Longer programs would include additional cases and talks and/or other workshops. Shorter programs would include fewer cases.

Here is a sample list of cases that that we have created and facilitated in previous programs. The AELP team can work with you on developing tailored real-world cases that are most relevant to your group.

Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Data Management

• Sharing “big” clinical data: implications for trust and transparency
• Artificial Intelligence and Unintended Consequences
• “Let Me Know How I Can Help!” (case related to using a chatbot)
• This Algorithm Is Biased: Should We Use it Anyway?

Community and Supporting Local Area of Operation

• Should your hospital have a special program to support hiring and retaining people from the local community?

Coverage and Compensation

• Wait, that’s not what “cost-sharing” is supposed to mean… (case related to FQHCs and dental care)

Discrimination, Social Justice, and Undocumented Patients

• Should performance metrics be risk adjusted for patient race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status?
• Establishing a policy on racist requests from patients
• Complicity and conscience in a rural clinic
• Organizational responsibilities and decision making regarding the social determinants of health
• Developing a system of care for patients injured while entering the US
• Who’s in charge here -- the lawyers or the ethicists? (case related to care for undocumented workers)
• Phoning It In: Equity and Telehealth
• “He’s Untouchable.” Workplace Sexual Harassment in Medicine

HR and Operations

• Teamwork and accountability: if everyone is in charge, is no one really in charge?
• When you know what to do, but aren’t sure how to do it…
• Creating organizational alignment in a for-profit/not-for-profit acquisition
• Creating organizational alignment in a “cross-cultural” acquisition
• Ethical Performance Measurement Systems for Health Care

Law, Politics and Religion

• The ethics and politics of fundraising
• Working to prevent extremist violence while maintaining the trust of your community
• Who Decides When Abortions are “Medically Necessary”?
• “Um, Wait?! Is He Supposed to Be in Here?” (case related to police officers in the emergency department)
• Responding to a Governor’s “Request” to Stop Providing Gender-Affirming Care
• How should a religiously-affiliated hospital that serves a diverse community manage requests for assisted dying?

Moral Distress

• When professional obligations and personal conscience clash
• Whistleblowing in a small town
• “That’s Not my Job!” (case related to pandemic, Palliative Care, and Moral Injury

Patient Care

• Standardization and guidelines-based care versus person-centeredness

Pharmacy and Drug Costs

• Would you put this very expensive drug on your hospital formulary
• Is there an obligation to tell patients about drug shortages?
• Giving patients more ‘skin in the game’ as a way to discourage use of more expensive drug options

Research and Quality Improvement Projects

• Informed consent for patient participation in QI
• Should you permit research on cannabis despite an uncertain legal and regulatory environment?

Resource Allocation

• When is it ethical to restrict a service to some so it can be more available to others?
• Putting Resources Where They Are Most Needed, or Where They are Best Reimbursed?

Safety, Risk and Medical Errors

• Ethics of risk adjustment under the ACA
• Apology in a community hospital
• There’s transparency, and then there’s transparency: how far should your organization go in sharing quality and safety data?
• Should you adopt an ‘early disclosure and offer’ program?
  
  
  
  

Matthew Wynia is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado. His career has included developing a research institute and training programs focusing on bioethics, professionalism, and policy issues and founding the American Medical Association's Center for Patient Safety. His research has focused on novel uses of survey data to inform and improve the practical management of ethical issues in health care and public policy. He has led projects on a wide variety of topics related to ethics and professionalism, including understanding and measuring the ethical climate of health care organizations and systems; ethics and quality improvement; communication, team-based care, and engaging patients as members of the team; defining physician professionalism; public health and disaster ethics; medicine and the Holocaust (with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum); and inequities in health and health care. He has served on committees, expert panels, and as a reviewer for the Institute of Medicine, The Joint Commission, the Hastings Center, the American Board of Medical Specialties, federal agencies, and other organizations. Dr. Wynia is a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and has chaired the Ethics Forum of the American Public Health Association and the Ethics Committee of the Society for General Internal Medicine.


Ira Bedzow is the Executive Director of the Emory Purpose Project, one of the signature elements of Emory University’s Student Flourishing Initiative, whose mission is to unite diverse partners across the Emory community in providing opportunities for students to develop a muscle for reflection on purpose and meaning. Bedzow is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, a core faculty member of Emory’s Center for Ethics, a senior fellow in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, and the unit head of the International Chair in Bioethics at Emory University. His interests relate to understanding the ethical implications of biotechnology and healthcare policy as well as how organizations can create an ethical culture through values-driven leadership. When it comes to ethical leadership, he tries to show that making a values-driven decision and implementing it effectively consist of different skills and face different challenges. Understanding the difference between asking “what to do” and “how can I act on my values successfully” is key to leadership and organizational success. Bedzow is also Senior Scholar of the Aspen Center for Social Values, co-director of the Ferencz Institute for Ethics, Human Rights and the Holocaust, and a regular contributor in Forbes. He is also an Orthodox rabbi (yoreh yoreh, yadin yadin).