Michael DeWilde
Koeze Business Ethics Initiative Director
Professor of Management
Seidman College of Business, Grand Valley State University
About Michael
Michael DeWilde is the Koeze Business Ethics Initiative Director and Professor of Management at the Seidman College of Business, Grand Valley State University (Grand Rapids, Michigan). He teaches in the MBA and Executive MBA programs, with a focus on courses in ethics and leadership.
He began his career teaching in GVSU’s Philosophy department, offering courses on human nature, eastern philosophy, and service-learning. His Community Working Classics seminar received a national award for “Excellence in Philosophy Programs” from the American Philosophical Association and was the recipient of a major grant from the Kellogg Foundation.
DeWilde is a winner of both a Pew Teaching Excellence award and a Graduate Students Excellence in Teaching award. He has been a featured speaker at universities and businesses in North America, India, and Europe, giving talks on moral psychology, business ethics, and the ways current science is changing our understanding of ethics. He has published widely.
DeWilde has consulted with West Michigan businesses and organizations as an executive coach for over 29 years. He is currently in residence at Corewell Health, where he focuses on the culture of surgery. His work has been featured in the New York Times and Inc. Magazine, among other places. He holds degrees from Harvard University and Grand Valley State University.
Select Publications
-
The Business of the Humanities
The Chronicle of Higher Education
-
Social Capital, Economic Diversity, and Civic Well-Being in Flint and Grand Rapids
Seidman Business Review
-
A Business Ethics Center Rethinks Its Role
Philosophy Documentation Center
-
Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration (book chapter)
PhilPapers
Featured Talks
Teaching
In his compelling 2015 book Humans Are Underrated Geoff Colvin quotes Meg Bear from Oracle as saying that “empathy is the critical 21st- century skill.” This is in the context of understanding what computers, robots and AI are evolving to do, and as an answer to the question, essentially, of what humans will still be “good for” once robots have taken over many of our tasks (including a fair bit of thinking).
Humans will still be valuable – even increasingly so, says Colvin, because we will be “freed up to build relationships, lead, and relate to others” with increasing attention. We will be liberated to attend to our “deepest social natures.”
Sounds promising, but there is a problem. If Colvin and Bear are right (and he cites many other examples as well) that the soft skills – especially cognitive empathy – are what we should be focusing on cultivating in students and employees, that those skills will be in greatest demand, their assertion then runs into another piece of important research that suggests an uphill battle. Sara Konrath and her associates at the University of Michigan conducted one of the largest studies on the prevalence of empathy across generations and reported the following: “We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000… college kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”
So assuming both Colvin and Konrath are correct, we end up with a scissors chart – an increasing demand for a trait that is in increasingly short supply.
I, in concert with others, have devoted some time to thinking about this dilemma, and to the question of whether or not a particular form of role-playing – a pedagogical technique I use in the classroom and in my consulting work –might play a part in increasing empathetic responses in students, managers, and leaders. Based on our observations from the classroom and workplaces, I started arguing for a particular kind of “affective education,” one which uses innovative role-playing techniques coupled with insights from the evolutionary and social sciences to help those who would seek to increase the capacity for empathy (again, particularly cognitive empathy, but occasionally emotional empathy as well) in those they work and study with. Some pilot studies and my observations from years in the classroom corroborate, unfortunately, Konrath’s findings that empathy is in relatively shorter supply these days. There is, for example a scenario we use that brings out a tendency in participants to default to firing people (or at least to want to) as a response to a subordinate who presents challenges unfamiliar to a young manager, even when the subordinate is experiencing severe distress or trauma beyond that person’s control. We have seen, too regularly, that there is a growing inability to empathize with those who can’t but help “bring their problems to work.” We think the work we’ve been doing will help explain this phenomenon in specific, relatable ways, and then give reasons (including scientific ones) for managers and educators to consider what a more “affective,” i.e., emotionally engaging, training for prospective mangers and leaders might accomplish. Stay tuned.
Executive Coaching
I have consulted with West Michigan businesses and organizations as an executive coach for over 29 years. I am currently in residence at Corewell Health West, where I’ve been working with individuals and with two departments of surgery.
Over my career as a consultant – tangential to my teaching, service, and research at Grand Valley, and a career I came to accidentally – I have worked with nine separate companies over four different industries. I consult with individuals who are on last-chance agreements (people with communication issues, blind spots, attribution errors, lack of empathy, inappropriate language, etc.), those on leadership paths who still need to develop certain skills (reading and addressing varied audiences, managing up, self-awareness, executive presence, etc.) and those just trying to do their jobs (conducting audits and 360s, initiating and facilitating difficult conversations, figuring out how to address passive-aggressive employees, how not to be completely exhausted and stressed out after every day, etc.).
I am not a psychotherapist or organizational psychologist, though am sometimes mistaken for one. I make it clear that if I encounter a situation in which I think a licensed professional counselor or therapist is indicated that is what I will recommend. My work focuses on ethical behaviors, articulation of values and principles, and working through difficult situations by role playing and reflecting on better and worse responses to common managerial and leadership dilemmas.
My influences run from Socrates and the Buddha to Dostoevsky and Kundera, from Adrienne Rich to Nancy Fisher, from Stephen Pinker to Robert Sapolsky. And yes, some Freud (look, he was right about transference, and most of my clients see that right away). Mine is an inquiry-based approach, not so dissimilar from what I (try to) do in the classroom. Curiosity – intellectual but also psychological, emotional, literary, and political – is the road to something like informed humility, and worthy of cultivation.
From left: Jeff Padnos, Russell Shorto, and Michael DeWilde