The majority of managers in Germany has an academic degree. However, leadership, and in particular leadership responsibilities and leadership ethics hardly play a role during their studies (mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology). The joint project “Leadership Ethics as Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities” is funded by the Carl Zeiss Foundation and aims at addressing this gap. With a revised definition of leadership and a self-developed concept for teaching ethics in the natural sciences, the research project has been offering seminars at the universities of the project partners since fall of 2020.

The goal of the joint project is to develop a range of courses, which discuss leadership ethics in STEM subjects (mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology).The aim of the project’s teaching-learning formats is to identify and develop a teaching and learning arrangement that imparts competencies and knowledge required for ethical leadership to students in the STEM field. Thus, the project’s target group has specific requirements. It is necessary to take into account the organisational framework of the involved universities. A challenge will be to meet student’s interests as well as to prepare teaching methods and content for the targeted audience. Hence, the project’s solid foundation is a close cooperation between didactic in science and applied ethics which includes practical teaching experience.

Positive learning experiences are in close relation to the evaluation of their successes. Yet, this is a particular challenge in the area of "soft" competences. Therefore, the project has developed an empirically founded, theory-based and practice-oriented competence model as well as corresponding measuring instruments, which makes it possible to measure the effectiveness of teaching competences in leadership ethics. Both the teaching-learning arrangements and the evaluation instruments will be tested in form of pilot projects as part of the project.