SPIRITUAL VALUES IN THE WORK PLACE

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS                                                       

In my research on spirituality and organizations, I chanced upon a book, The New Bottom Line: Bringing Heart and Soul to Business, co-edited by John Renesch, an authority on transformative leadership, and Bill DeFoore, described as an author, psychotherapist, consultant and president of the Institute for Personal and Professional Development.

The book is actually a compilation of articles about spiritual values (not to be confused with religion) and the world of commerce. For this week’s column, I have taken notes on lessons and insights which can be useful in thinking about spiritual values both in business and development work.

The Foreword says that the book, rather than focus on individual spirituality, offers instead “new insights on what constitutes a spiritual workplace and what it can mean both for individuals and corporations in terms of fulfillment and accomplishment.”

Its Preface notes that “the study of larger philosophic issues involving the universe, human destiny and creative futures has been encroaching on the business community for the past several years.” Starting in the 1990s, organizational development theory and related disciplines have been invading, as it were, traditional business circles.

The Introduction, written by the co-editors, states that over the last two hundred and fifty years, materialism-based capitalism has become the dominant force in society, particularly in the industrialized world. It notes that in the mid-1700s, “society was presumed to be a moral, compassionate and relatively frugal marketplace, dependent on much less efficient means of production than the present day.”

In those days, business was presumed “to have a conscience and, even if it didn’t, there was limited negative effect it could have on the rest of society.” Travel and communication took months or years. Manufacturing was considered a craftsman’s art.

Over the past couple of centuries, however, “the Industrial Age has created a huge production-consumption system that is so complex, so vast, that it finds itself pulling all the industrialized world along its tracks.”

This system has become insatiable: “It has become an engine – a machine- that has only one goal: to produce the most profit for the owners of the enterprises of commerce. That is what it does best.” The Introduction quotes Roger Terry, author of Economic Insanity:

“Capitalism no matter whose model you like, requires a constantly expanding market, requires that luxuries become necessities, that we constantly improve and replace products in an endless upward spiral, that we extract an increasing amount of profit, and that we infuse new money regularly into the economic flow. Everyone agrees on this. These are the assumptions behind everyone’s solutions. No one questions the insanity of the system at its most fundamental levels.”

Industrialization requires people to think and act more like machines. The human spirit faces extinction. This phenomenon has been referred to as spiritual bankruptcy.  “It is the result of a loss of meaning in our lives and in our work,” the co-editors Renesch and DeFoore further assert in the Introduction to this landmark anthology, which further observes:

“As these two models overlap – consciousness and commerce – a new bottom line is being born. This new bottom line puts people and nature ahead of profits. It is not anti-business, nor against profit-making. However, some may see this kind of shift in priorities as a threat – a threat to the system that has become so powerful that nothing has been able to slow it down so far.”

Amidst the growing disparity between the “haves” and “have-nots” in the US and the world, “the human spirit reminds our consciousness of our humanness – of our rootedness as spiritual beings. The new bottom live values meaning, diversity, integrity, caring, service, community, connectedness, creativity, intuition, balance and grace. It challenges the old bottom line values of toughness, wealth-amassing for its own sake, stress, domination, control and individual heroes.”

The rest of the 350-page hardbound edition of the book presents the views and insights of 30 contributors who have explained and documented in the process this emerging trend to reflect spiritual values in the market-place, in the world of business and mega capitalism.

Let’s try to pick some gems from this valuable collection of insights and lessons on spiritual values in the work-place:

In business, energy comes from many different sources familiar to most us – ambition, the many forms of security, recognition, self-satisfaction, and completion.  Spirituality or adherence to spiritual values is a “lesser understood source,” which is not to be equated with the promotion of specific religions in the work-place. In a Workplace Values Survey done in the US, a majority of those surveyed “acknowledged some form of spiritual ritual – prayer, meditation, or services of some kind.

A remarkable fifty-five percent claimed to have experienced ‘personal transformation,’ or epiphany of some sort, mostly in the past five years.”  This indicates a hunger for spiritual values in the work-place.

On the subject of business spirituality, the article quotes this passage from a book co-edited by Renesch and Bill DeFoore: “To us, ‘business spirituality,’ may sound like an oxymoron, but if the ancient insight that business has its own divine patronage is difficult for us to comprehend, it only shows us how far we have moved away from religion. Business has found meaning and relevance to us as individuals and as a society, more profound than a secular mind might be capable of imagining.”

The book further asserts: “The relationship between business and community whether local or global, is so serious as to touch upon ultimate values. The business person who seeks only to exploit the relationship for personal gains fails to perceive theological roots of business, the fact that business is deeply involved in matters of ultimate meaning. Ethics in business is not a tangential concern, but speaks to the very heart of business life.”

Here is what the book says on profit: “Sometimes when I speak to business people about the soul in their work, they ask anxiously about profit, the bottom line. If we make profit the ultimate concern of our work, then the soul has no recourse but to appear in negative ways – as low morale, symptoms among workers, conflict society and even poor quality of products.”

Renesch further says in this article on Spirity & Work : “Spiritual values, intuition, community, openness, trust, love and caring, reflection, holistic or systems thinking – these ideals are bridging gaps that have grown wider over the past couple of centuries. As bridges, they will help us reunite with those parts of ourselves that we have kept separate so we can begin to bring all of ourselves to work everyday. When this integration occuse, we find renewed passion and meaning in our work.”

The contributors in this book are talking about spiritual values in the work-place, with focus on business enterprises, but their insights may help us in our reflection on how spiritual values can reinvigorate our development work. This is to say that development planners and implementors may consider how infusion of spirituality may also succeed to enhance the sustainability of projects. It may infuse added energy in undertaking activities and link more effectively the work of project planners to not only to the hearts and minds of the poor, but to their soul as well.

While reading the book, half of brain was thinking about this darkness that continues to hover over us as a country, the greed and indifference of our political leaders and the elite classes. The forthcoming political exercise provides as an opportunity to instill spirituality in our businesses and development work that we may find the courage to fight evil wherever it manifests itself to obstruct the divine spirit in all of us.

We must build strong work teams and organizations with core spiritual values. In his article, The Spirit of Team, Barry Heermann, writes:

“Modern organizations stand at the edge of an abyss. Never before has change pressed in so unmercifully: from rapidly changing markets, doing more with less, multicultural business contexts and downsizing to constantly changing technologies. Simultaneously, organization stakeholders are expecting and demanding effective response to the upheavals of the day: from the environmental crisis, the breakdown of the family, and the widening gap between rich and poor to a multitude of stresses in modern life. A fundamental shift in organizational capacity and capability must be brought forth.”

That shift will require affirming spiritual values in the work-place, business and development work, as articulated in a speech by Vaclav Havel, president of Czechoslovakia:

“Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe towards which this world is headed – be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization – will be unavoidable… The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.”

Indeed spirituality in the work-place is needed. Now I rest my case. #Spiritualityinbusines

NMP/19 Dec 2015/5.30 a.m.