#AskAdaMarie: How do you practice ethical leadership before you’re officially a leader?
“I mentor interns informally and want to do right by them. How do you practice ethical leadership before you’re officially a leader?”
First, you already are a leader. Leadership was never the title; it’s whether people are learning, growing, and doing better work because you’re in the room. By that measure, you crossed the line a while ago. The fact that you’re asking this question at all tells us those interns are in good hands.
So let’s talk about what doing right by them looks like.
Give them real work, then give them the credit for it.
The fastest way to fail an early-career person is to hand them busywork; the second fastest is to let their good work disappear into yours.
Ethical leadership before you have authority often comes down to a single discipline: making sure the people above you know whose idea that was. Say their name in the meeting they’re not in. Put it in writing. Credit travels upward by default unless someone deliberately sends it back down and that someone can be you.
Be honest with care, not just kind.
It’s tempting, when you want to be liked and you have no formal standing, to soften every piece of feedback into mush. But the most generous thing you can do for someone early in their career is tell them the truth about their work clearly enough that they can act on it and do it in a way that leaves their confidence intact. Kindness and honesty aren’t opposites. Withholding real feedback to stay comfortable isn’t mentorship; it’s a missed gift.
Model the boundaries you’d want them to have.
Interns and early-career folks watch what you do far more than they absorb what you say. If you answer Slack at midnight, skip lunch, and apologize for taking a sick day, you’re quietly teaching them that’s the price of belonging.
Protect your own boundaries out loud. “I’m logging off now, this can wait until tomorrow” is a leadership act, because it gives them permission to be human too.
Don’t let your mentorship quietly become free labor you depend on.
This is the subtle one. There’s a line between giving someone meaningful, growth-building work and leaning on them because they’re too eager to say no. Check yourself honestly: is this project serving their development, or just lightening your load?
If the scope keeps growing, name it and advocate for them to be recognized, credited, or compensated accordingly. Doing right by someone sometimes means being the person who says, “this has become real work, and it deserves to be treated that way.”
Keep their confidences, and admit what you don’t know.
Two small habits that build enormous trust: when they tell you something in confidence, keep it there. And when they ask you something you don’t have the answer to, say “I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together” instead of bluffing.
Early-career people are so often surrounded by people performing certainty. Being the one adult in their orbit who models honest not-knowing is a quiet revolution.
Here’s the thing to hold onto: ethical leadership isn’t a switch that flips on when you get the title. It’s a set of small, mostly invisible choices you make when no one’s watching and no org chart requires it. You’re already making them.
Keep going and know that the way you show up for these interns now is very likely the leader you’ll be when the title finally catches up to you.
With care,
AdaMarie
Have a career question you have been sitting with? Submit it using #AskAdaMarie and we may feature it in an upcoming post. AdaMarie is a professional network built for early-career and career-changing STEM professionals. Join us for access to more conversations, resources and programming that answers questions like these.
