Maximizing the Triple Bottom Line Through Spiritual Leadership

Louis W. Fry, Melissa Sadler Nisiewicz

• Publisher: Stanford Business Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804784290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Leadership

Maximizing the Triple Bottom Line through Spiritual Leadership draws on the emerging fields of workplace spirituality and spiritual leadership to teach leaders and their constituencies how to develop business models that address issues of ethical leadership, employee well-being, sustainability, and social responsibility without sacrificing profitability, growth, and other metrics of performance excellence.

While this text identifies and discusses the characteristics necessary to be a leader, its major focus is on leadership —engaging stakeholders and enabling groups of people to work together in the most meaningful ways. The authors offer real-world examples of for-profit and non-profit organizations that have spiritual leaders and which have implemented organizational spiritual leadership. These cases are based on over ten years of research, supported by the International Institute of Spiritual Leadership, that demonstrates the value of the Spiritual Leadership Balanced Scorecard Business Model presented in the book. "Pracademic" in its orientation, the book presents a general process and tools for implementing the model.

Chapter One

MAXIMIZING THE TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE: THE NEED FOR A NEW BUSINESS MODEL

In 1965 Robert Ouimet bought J. René Ouimet Holding Inc. (OHI) and became president of a leading Canadian frozen-food processing company. Today OHI is Canada’s largest manufacturer of low-cost frozen dinners and entrées. From the beginning, Robert envisioned leading a company based on spiritual principles. This vision is the core management philosophy of OHI, and Robert Ouimet has demonstrated that his company can generate profits while simultaneously improving the lives of employees and the communities in which they operate—what has come to be called the Triple Bottom Line, with an integrated focus on people, planet, and profit (Mele and Corrales 2005).

However, before he could bring such unity to his company, Robert discovered that he needed to first find unity in himself. Since his childhood, he had carried with him a nagging, obsessive, and recurring sense of guilt about being a “privileged” person because of his father’s business success. Based on that sense of guilt and on his early working experiences, Robert became certain that there is an inner longing in every person’s heart, regardless of their spiritual or religious orientation, for the Infinite or the Absolute, and he felt compelled to make a difference in the way he did business (Ouimet 2009).

Robert’s personal dilemma—how to succeed in business and honor his and his employees’ spiritual longings—drove Robert to meet with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who had served some of the poorest and most afflicted people on earth. Robert had always admired Mother Teresa because he thought she was doing “so many beautiful things on earth.” He felt called to seek her spiritual guidance and wrote her a letter; he told her what he was doing in trying to manage his company on spiritual principles and asked for a brief audience, which took place on April 16, 1983, in Calcutta.

He only asked her one question: “Should I give away everything I have, Mother?”

She immediately replied: “You cannot give it, it has never been yours. It has been loaned to you by God. If you want, you can try to manage it . . . with Him . . . which is very different than ‘for Him.’ And if you want to manage ‘with Him,’ you have to follow His hierarchy of Love. . . . So, for you, His hierarchy of Love is: First Him; second, your wife; third, your four children; fourth, the four hundred employees and their families; and in that order. Not first the employees, and last the wife” (Ouimet 2009).In that moment, Mother Teresa radically changed the priorities of Robert Ouimet’s life. His real calling was not to give away his riches and responsibilities as a business leader but instead to love and serve his God, his family, his employees, and others through his various business interests. Mother Teresa told Robert to not try to manage with God without praying a lot; she suggested the motto Orare ad gerendum in Deo (“Pray to manage in God”) for his company.

Through this window to inner unity and through his subsequent personal spiritual journey, Robert created the possibility of reconciling human development and economic success (“Our Project: Reconciliation of Human Well-Being with Productivity and Profits” n.d.). This unification was made possible by the model of organizational spiritual leadership that Robert experimented with and put into practice.

Like Robert, many leaders today want to implement business models that accentuate and promote the Triple Bottom Line that focuses on people, planet, and profit. Organizations are increasingly being held responsible for the impact their activities have on their employees, suppliers, customers, and communities. They must account not only to shareholders and investors but also to politicians, the media, employees, community groups, government agencies, environmentalists, and human rights organizations. This trend has fundamentally changed the operating environment for organizational leaders.

This shift, along with the Fortune 500 scandals of the last decade and the current world financial crisis, has only served to increase the pressure on corporate leaders to reevaluate current business models in an attempt to find answers that might solve these problems. Companies such as SAS Institute, Google, Shell Oil Company, NEC Corporation, and Procter & Gamble have committed their organizations to implementing new business models that accentuate ethical leadership, employee well-being, sustainability, and social responsibility without sacrificing profitability, revenue growth, and other areas of financial and performance excellence.

In a recent survey of 900 global corporations conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 80 percent of CEOs said they believe “sustainability” is or soon will be vital to the profitability of their company, and 71 percent said they would consider sacrificing short-term profits to move their company toward sustainability (Savitz and Weber 2006). One of the greatest challenges facing leaders of both large and small organizations today is to develop business models that can achieve this holistic balance.

One answer to this call to maximize the Triple Bottom Line lies in the implementation of spiritual leadership. Drawing on workplace spirituality, spiritual leadership, and conscious capitalism, the International Institute of Spiritual Leadership has developed and refined two models—the Spiritual Leadership Model and the Spiritual Leadership Balanced Scorecard Business Model. The two models have been developed based on years of research on diverse organizations, including government agencies, municipalities, military units, schools, manufacturers, and retailers. These research efforts form the foundation of this book.

You may have asked when you read the title of this book: What is spiritual leadership? Is it about religion? If not, how is it different? Why do I need to know about this approach to leadership? The answer is simple: regardless of your spiritual or religious tradition or whether you are an atheist or an agnostic, and if you are a CEO, an entrepreneur, a small business owner, or just someone who believes that the old ways of leading don’t work and you want to be part of creating a sustainable world that works for everyone, an understanding of Spiritual Leadership is necessary to be effective in the twenty-first century. Maximizing the Triple Bottom Line Through Spiritual Leadership offers case examples that will give you this understanding, plus tools we have developed through years of scientific research to help you achieve your vision both for yourself personally and at work.

This chapter will provide a general overview of the Models for Personal and Organizational Spiritual Leadership plus the Spiritual Leadership Balanced Scorecard Business Model. In addition, we discuss the importance of workplace spirituality, the distinction between spirituality and religion, and the relationship between corporate culture and leadership as important contexts for performance excellence and maximizing the Triple Bottom Line.

SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP: THE DRIVER OF THE TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE

What is spiritual leadership anyway? Spiritual leadership involves intrinsically motivating and inspiring workers through hope/faith in a vision of service to key stakeholders and a corporate culture based on altruistic love. While there are innumerable theological and scholarly definitions of love, we focus here on a definition based on the Golden Rule. We define altruistic love in spiritual leadership as “a sense of wholeness harmony and well-being produced through care, concern, and appreciation of both self and others.”

The purpose of spiritual leadership is to tap into the fundamental needs of both leader and follower for spiritual well-being through calling and membership; to create vision and value congruence across several levels—the individual, the empowered team, and the organization as a whole; and, ultimately, to foster higher levels of employee well-being, organizational commitment, financial performance, and social responsibility—in short, the Triple Bottom Line.

Essential to spiritual leadership are the key processes of:

Creating a vision in which leaders and followers experience a sense of calling so that their lives have meaning and make a difference.

Establishing a social/organizational culture based on the values of altruistic love whereby leaders and followers have a sense of membership, feel understood and appreciated, and have genuine care, concern, and appreciation for both self and others.

As shown in Figure 1.1, the source of spiritual leadership is an inner-life practice—possibilities range from spending time in nature to prayer, religious practice, meditation, reading, yoga, or writing in a journal. An inner-life practice positively influences spiritual leadership through the development of hope and faith in a transcendent vision of service to key stakeholders that keeps followers looking forward to the future. Hope/faith in a clear, compelling vision produces a sense of calling—the part of spiritual well-being that gives one a sense of making a difference and, therefore, a sense that one’s life has meaning.

FIGURE 1.1 Model of Organizational Spiritual Leadership

Source: International Institute for Spiritual Leadership

Spiritual leadership also requires that the organization’s culture be based on the values of altruistic love. Leaders must model these values through their attitudes and behavior, which creates a sense of membership—the part of spiritual well-being that gives one a sense of being understood and appreciated. The dimensions of spiritual leadership and the process of satisfying spiritual needs then positively influence the key individual and organizational outcomes that comprise the Triple Bottom Line.

THE CONTEXT FOR WORKPLACE SPIRITUALITY

Spiritual Leadership can be viewed as an emerging paradigm within the broader context of workplace spirituality and an even broader framework of sustainable models of twenty-first-century business (Fry, “Toward a Theory of Spiritual Leadership” 2003). A person’s spirit is the intangible, life-affirming force in all human beings. As part of their spiritual journey, people are struggling with what this force means and how it can be applied to their work. A major change is also taking place in the personal and professional lives of leaders as many of them attempt to integrate their spirituality and their work (Benefiel 2005).

Many people agree that this integration leads to very positive changes in workplace relationships and in their effectiveness as leaders (Neal 2001). There is also evidence that workplace spirituality programs counteract the trend toward seeing “employees as expendable resources”, leading not only to beneficial personal outcomes, such as increased employee health and psychological well-being, but also to improved employee organizational commitment, productivity, and reduced absenteeism and turnover (Fry and Cohen 2009). There is mounting proof that a spiritual workplace is not only more productive but also more flexible and creative, and that it is a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Initial research on spiritual leadership to date in schools, municipal governments, police, for-profit organizations, and active-duty military units found that the spiritual leadership model predicted between 45 percent and 60 percent of variance in productivity, 60 percent to 80 percent variance in organizational commitment, 20 percent in life satisfaction, 32 percent in social responsibility, and 13 percent in sales growth.

The power of spirituality is increasingly impacting our personal lives and is spreading into the workplace to foster a moral transformation of organizations. This trend has been identified as “a spiritual awakening in the American workplace.” Patricia Aburdene states in Megatrends 2010 (Aburdene 2005) that the focus on spirituality in business is becoming so pervasive that it stands as “today’s greatest megatrend.” She contends that more people are making choices in the marketplace as “values-driven consumers.”

Spirituality in the Workplace on the Rise

For many of us, work serves as an integral part of our self-concept and greatly affects the quality of our lives both at work and at home. As the two-decade trend to spend more time at work increases, we actively seek opportunities for meaning, purpose, and a sense of connection and belonging from our work. Employees have come to expect their employers to provide these opportunities. Unfortunately, the tumultuous social and business changes brought on by the Internet age and globalization have led employees to believe they are viewed as expendable resources rather than as valued human beings. This has led to increasing distrust in organizations and leaders.

One reason the interest in workplace spirituality is increasing is the desire by some organizations to nurture employees’ dedication to their work and connection to the workplace. Another is that global awareness has brought on a growing social/spiritual consciousness. People are increasingly motivated by their spiritual needs to serve others. According to George Platt, CEO of ViewCast Corporation, “People don’t come to work to be Number 1 or 2 or to get a twenty-five percent return on net operating income. They want a sense of purpose and come to work to get meaning from their lives” (Aburdene 2005).

Organizational scholars have begun to study this rising interest in workplace spirituality, arguing that the spirit-work connection is based on definable and measurable aspects of the work environment.

In their Handbook of Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Performance, Giacalone and Jurkiewicz define workplace spirituality as “a framework of organizational values evidenced in the culture that promotes employees’ experience of transcendence through the work process, facilitating their sense of being connected to others in a way that provides feelings of completeness and joy” (Giacalone and Jurkiewicz 2003).

Subsequently, a special issue of The Leadership Quarterly on spiritual leadership found that what is required for the emergence of workplace spirituality is an inner life that nourishes and is nourished by calling or transcendence of self within the context of a community based on the values of altruistic love. Employees who view their work as a “calling” and the workplace as a source of community approach their work very differently from employees who see work primarily as a means to satisfy their pecuniary needs.

Workplace spirituality incorporates those values that lead to a sense of transcendence and interconnectedness such that workers experience personal fulfillment on the job. This sense of transcendence and the need for a sense of belonging, community, or social connection through membership are essential for both workplace spirituality and spiritual leadership.

Spirituality and Religion

In his book Ethics for the New Millennium, the Dalai Lama speaks to the relationship between spirituality and religion:

Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is the acceptance of some form of heaven or nirvana. Connected with this are religious teachings ...