Ethical Fitness® Process

The one-day Ethical Fitness® Seminar (EFS) is the nucleus of CCE's training program. Based on Dr. Rushworth Kidder's landmark book, How Good People Make Tough Choices, the EFS has been experienced by thousands of people worldwide in a wide variety of workplace environments.

In the last few years, the ethics responsibilities of business leaders have grown significantly beyond compliance to include the mandate to build ethical cultures, where trust can grow and thrive and where employees themselves become the security network for corporate ethics.

The core of CCE's approach to growing ethical cultures is the Ethical Fitness® Seminar. The EFS is positive, non-threatening, and highly interactive. Participants claim greater awareness of ethical issues, higher levels of decision-making confidence, and a high degree of relevance to their job responsibilties. Some have told us that the EFS was a life-changing experience; others say that the impact of their EFS experience has grown over time, rather than diminished. Most are content to share their gratitude for a disciplined way to approach life's very difficult decisions.

The learning objectives for the EFS include the following:

  • Recognizing why ethics matters—for individuals, for organizations, for the future
  • Understanding trust—What is it?  What encourages trust?  What kills it?
  • Tasking leadership with trust—What can leaders do to create a trust environment?
  • Defining ethical values—Whose values?  How are they applied in the workplace?
  • Analyzing ethical dilemmas—Right versus wrong?  Right versus right?
  • Resolving dilemmas—Which principles best apply?

IGE's work assumes that fundamental, shared values can be discovered and applied. We also assume that individuals and organizations are capable of developing what we call “ethical fitness”—which, like physical fitness, keeps you in mental and moral shape to recognize and address ethical dilemmas.  Participants will leave our seminar with the methods and confidence required for resolving ethical dilemmas—equipped to confront issues that face them every day, at work and at home.

Our typical four-session seminar comprises discussions of Moral Awareness, Values Definition, Ethical Analysis, and Dilemma Resolution, using a mixture of lectures, group discussions, and small-group exercises.  All dilemmas examined during the seminar are drawn not from written case studies but from fresh, individual experiences shared by the participants in the seminar.

The Ethical Fitness® Seminar is an innovative learning process that is difficult to describe because the participants bring much of the action and content to the Ethical Fitness framework.  It is not a lecture.  Each seminar is distinguished from others and underlined by the experiences shared by the participants.  However, the learning is consistent and the personal drama tends to heighten the impact of the learning. 

Additional modules are available, including leadership, trust building, moral courage, and operationalizing ethical values for the unique workplace environment.

To learn more about this service, please contact the Institute at or e-mail .