Leadership, Character, and the Integrated Life with Ann Phelps

Ann Phelps didn’t set out to run a character formation program at a major university — she set out to prove she could survive a cubicle job. A Nebraska native with a background in theology, the arts, and a decade as a professional musician, Ann arrived at Wake Forest in 2019 alongside her husband Kenneth Townsend and their mutual best friend Michael Lamb, the program’s founder, to help build something that didn’t yet exist: the Program for Leadership and Character. What started as a trio working out of borrowed space has grown into a team of more than forty, with Ann overseeing the Leadership and Character Scholars — a cohort of students she accompanies, ten per year, across all four years of their undergraduate lives.In this first of several conversations, Ann and I explore what character formation actually means — and why it matters now more than ever. We talk about the seven strategies the program uses to move the needle on character, from friendships of accountability to engagement with virtuous exemplars, and why those strategies are less revolutionary than they are intentional. We dig into the gendered history of the word “virtue” and why it lands so differently on women than on men. And we examine what Ann calls the integrated life — the idea that for people with a true calling, there is no clocking in and clocking out, only the ongoing, sometimes messy, always meaningful work of composing a life.