What if high-quality, virtue-based leadership development could reach anyone, anywhere? Leading with Character, a free online course, has begun to scale character-based leadership training across cultures and continents.

The course is a collaboration between the Oxford Character Project, Legatum, and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. Its roots, however, stretch back to the pandemic, when the sudden shift to online learning created both a challenge and an opportunity.

“There seemed to be an opportunity to develop an online resource that could help people think about leadership and their leadership role,” said Ed Brooks, Executive Director of the Oxford Character Project.

Maria Horning, Vice President for Leadership Development at the Legatum Foundation agreed, “The challenge was basically to build an online course that could advance this philosophy of character-based leadership in the world.”

The course consists of a series of modules that include interviews, reflections, and robust discussion forums. It begins with Why Lead?—a module that combines familiar themes of purpose and responsibility with a deeper exploration of virtue. From there, participants engage with three central virtues—courage, love, and hope—each highlighting an important aspect of leadership.

“We’re appealing to an intuition about what good leadership involves,” Brooks explains. “We offer these three key virtues, and we’re asking people to join us on a journey.”

The design reflects what Horning describes as “three concentric circles of leadership: leading self, leading together, and leading for change—and the virtues most relevant to each.”

Some choices, like including the virtue “love,” faced initial resistance. “It doesn’t fit with the way we often talk and think about leadership,” Brooks said. “But leadership is interpersonal. And we think the best virtue to capture that is love.”

This is where the international team of individuals who worked together to build the course was helpful. “A lot of our colleagues from around the world were strong advocates for including love,” Horning said. Their diversity of perspectives helped ensure that the course content would be both relevant and accessible across cultures, a strength reflected in the strong global response to the course so far. 

“We’ve had 2,400 people sign up for the course from 120 countries, with just shy of 400 completions,” said Horning—numbers that continue to grow. 

This wide appeal is due in part to the program’s broad definition of leadership, which reflects a deeper conviction that character matters for everyone.

“This is a way of engaging around character aspirationally,” Brooks said. “There are approaches to character development that are remedial—which I think are of limited use. By engaging with leadership, we’re tapping into the aspiration of a generation that wants to lead with values and do good in the world—and that’s where character comes in.”

Plans are underway to translate the content into French, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, and Swahili—languages that together reach half the world’s population. In addition, facilitator guides and cohort-based models are being developed to help groups move through the material together, expanding both reach and impact.

“It’s amazing that there is such a wealth of opportunity and funding around virtue and character development in places like the US,” Brooks reflects. “This doesn’t exist in many other places around the world, but there is still the same desire and need for these resources.”

As the program expands globally, its vision is clear: to equip people everywhere, regardless of role or location, with the character to lead with courage, love, and hope.