James R. Detert

Churchill and Lincoln deliberately solicited the opinions of those who were willing to challenge them. Leaders may be best advised to evaluate where loyalty lies: the leader’s self-interest or the organization’s mission? Professor Detert discusses courageous leadership — necessary to get us through COVID-19.

Football is typically a major source of revenue for university athletics departments — so when game attendance shrinks, money’s left on the table. In this case in point, Professors Sean Martin and Jim Detert discuss ideas UVA explored to energize the fan base, as well as tenets of any strategic turnaround.

These insights from Darden Ideas to Action articles unveil the value of ethical considerations from a variety of standpoints and in a variety of sectors. They contain lessons for business leaders, employees and consumers.

Darden Professor Jim Detert studies courage in the workplace — the kind of courage it takes to disagree with your boss, put forth a new plan, confront a negligent co-worker or hold a difficult client to account.

Darden Ideas to Action offers words of wisdom from six experts for graduates (and anyone else) on how real people with a real sense of purpose can make the workplace more productive, responsible and, well, happy.

When we unconsciously want to justify self-interested choices, we may rationalize with “moral disengagement.” Darden Professors Jim Detert and Sean Martin have studied eight common verbal cues that may indicate we’re disengaging.

Darden Professor Jim Detert and Ph.D. candidate Evan Bruno have developed the Workplace Courage Acts Index (WCAI) to measure how courageous each of numerous workplace behaviors is seen as being in respondents’ own work environments, and how frequently each occurs when opportunities arise.

People can accumulate lots of sophisticated tools in an expensive, impressive-looking toolkit, and even know which tools are useful for addressing which kinds of managerial problems, but ultimately this won’t be worth much if they don’t have the courage to use those tools.