Spirituality and Leadership: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

André L. DelbecqSanta Clara University

Santa Clara, CA 95053-0390adelbecq@scu.edu

© 11/11

An Opening Aspiration

We are God’s stake in human history.

We are the dawn and the dusk;the challenge and the test.

How strange to be a (Chosen Child of God)and to go astray on God’s perilous errands.

We have been offered as a pattern of worshipand as prey for scorn,but there is still more in our destiny.

We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gates of heaven.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Setting

• The Participants – 500+ Working Professional MBAs

• Average Age 34• Religiously Diverse• Divided Equally - Men and Women• High Achieving Scientific, Engineering, Functional Mgrs.

– 350 Senior Executives• Average Age 55• Technology (1/3) and Health Care (2/3)

– Directors, Vice-Presidents, CEO, Board Chairs

Science Based Intense Business Settings

• At best unleash creativity in a decentralized, loosely-coupled, self-directed organizational culture

• At worst can be a destructive stew of hubris, greed, opportunism and activism Dangerous Places for the Psychologically/Spiritually Immature

Why Elect the Seminar

• Intensity of Knowledge Work

• Disillusioned with Darkness

• Cut loose from Societal Anchors

• Middle Age Crisis– ABOVE ALL SEARCH FOR MEANING

Avoidance of dualism

Learn Meditation

The Topics

• Orientation– Work and Faith Movement/Impact of Religious Practice, Cultural Tensions and

Challenges

• Central Topics– Transformational Leadership Requires Spiritual Maturity

– Career/Job Modified if Becomes Vocation/Calling

– Distortions of Power and Greed Can Be Offset by Spiritual Awareness and Practice

– The Mystery of Suffering and Leadership Can Be Moderated by

– Spiritual Maturity

The Interdisciplinary Design

Pivotal Leadership Struggles Addressed Through 2 Perspectives

• A social science lens: psychology, sociology, economics, management science & biography

• A spiritual lens: inclusive of inter-religious quotes and readings

• Subsequent Assignments Refracts Experience Through– Readings and Lectures relating to work place experience

– Meditation: impact on work place experience

Model

Leadership Dilemma, Distortion, Challenge

Social Sciences Sp Spiritual Insights

Managerial Sciences Spiritual Practice

Biography

Two Brief Examples

• Calling/Vocation

• Distortions of Power

Calling As A Career Modifier

• Much Quoted Lilly Foundation Grants

– The place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need”

Buechner

Steve Jobs

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. So don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

Empirical Managerial andPsychological Literature

• Greater Intrinsic Motivation– Finding sustained meaning in work– Bringing more purposeful values– Higher performance– Higher satisfaction

• Different Level of Commitment– Ability to endure difficulties– Less burnout and cynicism– Lower turnover

Critical to Knowledge Work

But Imagine Yourself At 25-45- or any age

• In A Complex but Constrained Role

• Reporting to Difficult Superordinate

• Within A Toxic Organizational Culture

• Facing Job Insecurity or Loss

• Limited Short Term Options

Idealized Discussions of “Calling”

Often Not a Source of Consolation

In These Cases “Calling” Literature Seems To Imply

• Undue Certainty

• Unrealistic “Self-Control”

• Absence of Mystery

• Avoidance of Suffering Amplified by the Need for Continuous Daily Discernment

Extended Life Expectancy, Career Mobility

Leadership Biography AHelpful Step Into Realism

• Ghandi

• Eisenhower

• Eleanor Roosevelt

• Oppenheimer

• Business Biography Lives of the Saints/Biblical Stories/Biography

Key Lessons from Biography

• Long periods of preparation/Uncertain horizons– Delayed gratification – Eisenhower/Summit

– Uncertain/erroneous career paths/ Palmer

• Setbacks and Failures– Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, ML King

• Unpredictable Twists and Turns– Ghandi/ Grove/ Jobs

Theological Reflections

• Coping With Uncertainty – Focus on Be-coming; Allow Do-ing to Unfold

by listening to gentle “calling”

Our first work is not really our job today or tomorrow.

Our first work is our heart and how our mind is brought down into our hearts when whatever we do is really for Him, in Him, and most especially into Him

Father Simeon, Abbot, St. Isaac of Syria Skete

Be-Coming Precedes Do-ing

Shaped by Contributory Behavior

The Requirement of Patience

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are, quite naturally impatient in everything to

reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something

unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by

passing through some stages of instability;

and that it may take a very long time.

 

Pierre Teilhard deChardin,S.J.

Speaking to The Impatient “Internet” Generation

• Two Sources of Hope– Called by Name

• “I have you by name, you are mine” Isa 43:1

• “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world” Paul: Cor 1-5

– Endowed With Gifts• “Special graces called ‘charisms’ given for the well-

being of the community” CCC 2003

The BE-coming and DO-ingAre Enacted the “Now”

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come.

We have only today.

Mother Theresa

• God is always choosing people. First impressions aside, God is not primarily choosing them for a role or a task, although it might appear that way. God is really choosing them to be himself in this world.

Richard Rohr

The Eternal “Bulls Eye”

• The primacy of the “primary group”

• The mystery of “indirect” leadership

• The witness to light in imperfect organizations

Direct or Indirect Leadershipin the “Now”-Empirically

People are not inspired simply by position or expertise

They are inspired to act by:– Who you are– Your integrity as a person Before they care what you know they must know that you care

Kouzes and Posner

Relating Spiritual Disciplines

• Meditation on Light and Darkness in Organization

• Practice of Presence

• The “Examen”

Returning to the Triangulated Perspective

Professional Dilemma, Distortion, Challenge

Case Histories Self Reports

Conceptual Reflection Meditation Reflection

Social Science, Sp Spiritual Insight

Managerial Science Spiritual Practice

Practice

Biography

2nd Example:Distortions of Power

• Aspects Of The Executive Personality We Celebrate That May Lead To Arrogance– Quickness Of Intellect– Visionary Capacity– Verbal Facility– Action/Risk Orientation

Subtle Temptation From Strength

Reinforcing Attributes Of Office

• Prestige of Office– Deference To Power

• Associated Financial Rewards - Deference to Social Status

• Symbols And Perks– Select Clubs of Rich and Famous

- Celebrity Symbols

Studies of SituationalNarcissism

• Self Aggrandizement• Organizational Boasting Rituals• Self Flattering Explanations• Denial And Felt Invulnerability• Rationalization• Sense Of Entitlement

Off-setting Spiritual Wisdom

• Humility– Learned by “humiliation” - Harvard Studies

• Love– Dealing with human imperfection

Undistorted Servant Leadership

Depends on Centrality of Spiritual Disciplines

• Requires High Level Of Psychological And

Moral Development– The Paradox of “Gravitas” Coupled to

“Humility”

The Movement Through Apohophatic Meditation

• Stepping away from false self

• Focus

• Patience

• Listening

• Stress Reduction– Etc.

Reducing the 70 % Failure of Strategic Decisions

• Acting out of fear and impatience

• Relying on past practices rather than patient discoveryFailing to incorporate stakeholder voices

• Separating heart and mind

• Not instituting double-loop learning

Spiritual Growth

• “I focused on contributing to organizational light and found my day more rewarding”

• “I have longed for a sense of purpose and now see it is both received and can be offered”

• “My relationship with God has been deteriorating as I separated my spiritual life from my work”

• “If I am going to give that much of myself to work it needs to have purpose and meaning”

• “The problem has not been my work but my approach to it”

A Movement Toward LeadershipMaturity

• A Variety of Meditation/Spiritual Practices Incorporated Into the Leadership Day

• Resultant Spiritual Awareness Understood As a Continuing Journey

• Significant Shift in Self-Reported Satisfaction With Leadership Role

• Significant Impact on Collegial Relations, Productivity, Satisfaction.

Two Provocations:

I. I have long thought that there is a lacuna in the ecclesiology with which

most of the churches, especially the Catholic Church, function. The

lacuna is that the churches are often full of people uniquely gifted with

the Spirit. But this tends to be seldom adverted to because they usually

exercise their gifts beyond the boundaries of congregational life. ….

Without intending it, the impression is given that participation in the

activities of the congregation is primary and the leavening of faith in the

world, secondary.

John Haughey, “Originality and Faith in the Commons”,

Woodstock Report, No 100, June, 2011 pp

 

Two Provocations

II. Why should there not be groups vowed to the task of exemplifying by their lives the general sanctification of human endeavor; those who would devote themselves in the fields of thought, art, business and politics, etc. to carrying out, in the sublime spirit these demand, the basic tasks which form the bone work of human society?”

  Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, 1960

Calling Internalized

We are God’s stake in human history.

We are the dawn and the dusk;the challenge and the test.

How strange to be a (Chosen Child of God)and to go astray on God’s perilous errands.

We have been offered as a pattern of worshipand as prey for scorn,but there is still more in our destiny.

We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gates of heaven.

Abraham Joshua Heschel