In
this essay, I provide a synopsis of my booklet on spiritual leadership in
business. In the text, I suggest that while it may convenient in the business
world to conceptualize spiritual leadership as being essentially ethical in
nature, this convenient tactic does not do justice to the distinctly religious
basis and connotations of spirituality. By religion, I do not mean only theism,
or even just organized religion (i.e., religious organizations); rather, I have
in mind religious experience—whether through prayer, meditation, worship, or
another means that is oriented to yearning beyond the limits of cognition,
sentiment, and perception—as if an inherently limited human brain were
nonetheless “hard-wired” for beyondness itself whether or not a transcendent
religious object (e.g., a deity) exists. Rather than expunging spiritual from its native terrain and
reconfiguring it to fit within a secular context as ethics, we can relate the
religious sense of spirituality to the secular world of business with due
deference to their respective natures rather than muddling them into something
murky.[1]
The
question would then be whether the sacred and profane can co-exist at such
close quarters. The vaunted, high-perched stature of leadership in the business
world has a veneer approaching sacredness, while the practice of management is
regarded as quite pedestrian, even profane.
“Management tasks are intellectual and skills-based tasked asking the
team leader to learn how to manage others and know the laws, rules, and
procedures, and the tools, needs, and requirements for program success.”[2] In contrast, leadership “is a
complex of spirit, intellect, and physical skill in action, and leader acts out
of this complex.”[3] The spirit aspect of leadership—as
distinct from spiritual leadership—likely has to do with charisma, a word that
comes from charismata, which means a
power gifted by the Holy Spirit. Charismatic leaders tend to have a presence
more deeply rooted than the designated role and the context. My focus in regard
to spiritual leadership here is not on charisma; instead, I want to highlight
the effects of religious experience—not beliefs—on spiritual leadership in
business.
I
begin with spirituality in order to find cleave distinctive nature off any
reduction to ethics. In distinguishing spirituality from ethics, I look at
religious experience of transcendence as a more suitable basis for
spirituality. Next, I’ll look at the business literature on spiritual
leadership—scholarship that conflates such leadership with ethical leadership.
I extract residue from that extant literature that can serve as a launching pad
for an account of spiritual leadership that is grounded in transcendent
religious experience. If my account is correct, spiritual leadership is really
much subtler and less motivational or goal-oriented than the literature lets
on.
The
spiritual business leader who searches for personal and professional
integration is the chief beneficiary of this booklet, which can also be taken
for a way to promulgate meagerly a new theory on the phenomenon of religion that
stresses its uniqueness and distinctiveness. It is as if religionists have
historically spent so much time in other—albeit superficially related—gardens,
such as those of the Houses of Ethics, Astronomy/Cosmology, Metaphysics,
History, Psychology, Law, etc., that in the neglected garden of religion the
native fauna can scarcely be recognized from the thicket of weeds that have
thrived in the absence of the wandering, aggrandizing religionists. The
Christian Gospels were not written to be historical accounts, a scientific
treatise, or an ethical theory. Religious faith is sui generis (i.e., of its own type) in being oriented to a referant
point or religious object that inherently
extends beyond the limits of cognition, sentimentality, perception, and
even gut-level intuition. The first task back to this basis of religion is to
get the religionists back to their own garden from directing other sectors’
gardens; then religionists can finally set about determining just what is inherently and uniquely religious so weeding may proceed. This text is just a
part of getting the religionists out of other gardens by distinguishing
religion from ethics and laying down some broad brush-strokes on the core of
religiosity and even spirituality.
Spiritual Leadership
in Business: Transcending the Ethical is
available at Amazon in
print and as an
ebook.
Taoist, Buddhist, and Judeo-Christian principles applicable to leadership comprise part two in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.
Taoist, Buddhist, and Judeo-Christian principles applicable to leadership comprise part two in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.
[1]. By analogy, the notion that Jesus Christ is fully
human and fully divine—a theory coined at the Council of Nicea in 325
C.E.—involves taking the human as human and the divine as divine rather than
reconfiguring one term to suit the other. Just as one essence, or ousia, has a human element and a divine
element, spiritual leadership can be reckoned as having a religious and a
secular element. One essence can contain a notion of spirituality that is
religious in nature and a theory of leadership that is been derived in a
secular context.
[2]. Gilbert W. Fairholm, Capturing the Heart of Leadership: Spirituality and Community in the
New American Workplace (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997): 152.
[3]. Fairholm, Capturing
the Heart, 152.
