Creative Edge
Spirituality
at Work
By David Cornfield, Creative Edge
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You and I live in a secular society. By secular I mean a society
where spiritual pursuits are intentionally kept separate from worldly pursuits. One of the
places that our secularism can be seen most clearly is in the separation between
spirituality and business. It makes sense. If you are going to separate the spiritual from
the worldly, what could possibly be more worldly than the pursuit of business? So when
people ask what I have been up to lately, and I proceed to talk about the various ways
that my partner and I have been involved in bringing spirituality to the workplace, I
often get puzzled looks. The message conveyed by those looks is clear: the word spirituality and the word work don’t belong in the same sentence.
Spirituality at work is an oxymoron.
In our secular society, people expect that when they show up for
work, they have to check their spirituality at the door. While they may conduct themselves
in accordance with spiritual principles, they think of spirituality as a personal concern.
They do not assume that talking about spiritual issues is acceptable in a work context.
They avoid using spiritual language at work even where they perceive spiritual issues to
be at stake.
For many people, the idea that their employer might take more
than a passing interest in their spiritual well-being stretches the bounds of what they
imagine to be possible. I have to reassure them that I am not kidding when I tell them
there are corporations, some of them very large and well known, that are taking an
interest in spirituality at work, to the point of sponsoring and attending international
conferences on the topic as well as taking steps to institute programs that bring
spirituality to the workplace.
When my questioners realize that spirituality at work is gaining
credibility in the corporate world, their puzzled looks are often followed by expressions
of concern. The fear is that any attempt to bring spirituality into the workplace is going
to involve pressuring people to pursue a particular brand of spirituality. This concern
has a historical foundation. We are not a secular society for no reason. Secularism
emerged out of the desire to protect religious freedom. Many of the first European
immigrants to North America came here because the existence of a state-sanctioned religion
in their country of origin encouraged religious intolerance. Secularism was an attempt to
avoid that kind of intolerance by placing a wall between religion and the state. First
adopted as public policy in the United States, but later taken up by many other countries
around the world, secularism established each person’s legal right to choose his or
her own religious beliefs without interference from government and then purported to
guarantee that religious freedom by separating church and state. Separation between church
and state quickly became the norm and, by implication, was extended into the world of
business, forming the template for our secular society.
The problem with secularism is that it protects
religious freedom by disemboweling it. Spirituality loses its significance when it is
treated as something separate and apart from the actions we take in the world. A
compartmentalized spirituality that is acknowledged on weekends and holidays but not
recognized in the day to day living out of our lives, is a spirituality that is empty and
hypocritical. And a world cut off from spirituality becomes a wasteland where our daily
lives feel devoid of meaning.
The question then becomes: if we are going to reintegrate
spirituality and daily life, and in particular if we are going to bring spirituality into
the workplace, can we do so without infringing on religious freedom? To address that
question, let’s look first at what we mean by spirituality. Victor Frankl, Carl Jung
and many others have told us that one of the most basic of human needs, right up there on
the list of priorities with the need for food and the need for love, is the need for
meaning. Spirituality is about the search for meaning. As long as spirituality at work is
simply about legitimizing the search for meaning in the context of work, then religious
intolerance is not an issue. If spirituality is just about the search, then everyone is
free to conduct their own search in their own way. The problem of religious intolerance
arises when spirituality is not just about the search but extends to the answers found in
that search. It is one thing to encourage the raising of spiritual questions in the
context of work. It is quite another to impose a particular set of answers to those
spiritual questions. The former increases religious freedom. The latter restricts it.
Let’s unpack that a bit more. Search for meaning. What does
that mean? Well, there is no meaning without context. To give something meaning is to see
where it fits into some larger scheme. The cells in my body are given meaning by the
context of my body. The functions performed by the cells in my liver have meaning because
they are essential to support the viability of the body of which they form a part. In the
same way, my existence as a human being becomes meaningful only if I can see myself as
having a role to play in the unfolding of the larger context of which I form a part.
Meaningfulness is not just about noticing that our lives are
acted out on a larger stage. A life that amounts to no more than a random set of unrelated
events, disconnected with whatever else is happening on the larger stage, is not a
meaningful life. For there to be meaning, there has to be some sense of playing a role in
the development of a story that has a plot with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Searching for the meaning of our lives involves an assumption that we are here on this
earth for a reason. There is something we are meant to be doing, some package we are
supposed to deliver. We are not here to do what we want to do when we want to do it. We
are here to do what our lives are asking us to do because our lives need us to do it. In
other words, we each have a role to play, it makes a difference whether or not we carry
out that task, and we feel our lives to be meaningful when we are doing what we are meant
to be doing.
Since each of us is unique, it follows that the role we are each
being asked to play in the larger scheme of things is also unique. My role is different
from your role, and my role shifts in response to changing circumstances as time passes.
This implies that the search for meaning is necessarily a quest that is both ongoing and
personal. There is no single all-purpose one-size-fits-all meaning that applies to
everyone at all times. When we attempt to answer the question “what is the meaning of
life?”, we have to begin by asking “whose life?” and “at what stage in
that life?”. We each have to discover our own evolving purpose as our lives play out
from moment to moment.
When spirituality is seen as an ongoing quest for a meaning
unique to each individual, religious intolerance becomes irrelevant. If we are each called
to our own unique purpose, my answer about what will give my life meaning is not going to
work for you, and it makes no sense at all for me to attempt to impose my answers on you.
On the other hand, given that we spend so much of our lives doing what we do to earn a
living, and given that our work is most often the place where we make a contribution to
the world, what does make sense is that we be encouraged to bring these considerations to
the workplace.
The next question comes from employers. They want to know what
effect bringing spirituality to the workplace is going to have on their bottom line. My
answer is that it can only have a positive effect. Employees, like every other human
being, have a longing for meaning. They want to feel that their work makes a positive
contribution. They want to take pride in what they do. When employers ignore these needs,
employees lose interest in their work. It is not enough to have a good salary, a benefit
package and a safe and congenial workplace. Employees who spend their day in a workplace
where their longing for meaning goes unfulfilled feel empty. Rather than drown in that
emptiness, they deny their longing for meaning by shutting down. They end up in a state of
chronic low-level depression, unable to find their enthusiasm, resenting their tasks,
doing the minimum they need to do to get by without being fired, and cut off from feeling
their own needs to the point where they do not even know what they need to help themselves
feel better. The result is a society where 80 to 90% of the workforce hates their work.
Ultimately every organization is in the business of delivering
service. You cannot deliver first class service if the people in your organization are
depressed and hate their work. Contrariwise, when people are doing work that feels
meaningful to them, they are energetic, enthusiastic, even passionate about their work.
And the difference is palpable. Customers notice. Above all, they go away feeling that the
people who deal with them care about serving their needs. Customers who feel cared about
come back, and they refer their friends. The results cannot help but be reflected in the
bottom line.
At some point in the discussion, the word ‘flakey’
generally rears its ugly head. It is here that we begin to see the damage inflicted by
secularism. The split between spirituality and work generates two camps, both of which
have some measure of disdain for the other. On the one hand you have the realists who put
down spiritual types as impractical, head in the clouds, non-contenders - all neatly
summed up in the word ‘flakes’. And on the other hand you have the spiritual
types who are just as contemptuous, taking the moral high ground relative to realists who
they deride as money grubbing, lacking in principles, lacking in soul. Neither wants
anything to do with the other.
While both sides demonstrate their own brand of arrogance, the
criticisms they level at each other are not without merit. When spirituality is divorced
from the real world, both spirituality and the real world suffer. It is as if the head and
the body each had a separate existence, with the body ridiculing the head as idealistic
because it has no arms and legs to put its ideals into practice, and the head accusing the
body of blindness because it has no eyes to see where it is going. Both are right. A head
without a body is no better than a body without a head. Body and head need each other to
be complete. A spirituality not manifested in the real world is indeed impractical. At the
same time, a real world without spirituality is a world without vision. Spirituality needs
the real world as the place to enact its vision; the real world needs spirituality for a
vision of what to enact and why.
Now the questions begin coming thick and fast. How do you get
head and body to work together as a team when each is disdainful of the other? How do you
get skeptical business types to open up to the idea that spirituality may have something
to offer them when their first reaction is to write spirituality off as flakey? How do you
get self-righteous spiritual types to come down off the mountain and get their hands dirty
in the real world of business? How do you deal with the fear that bringing spirituality to
the workplace means that someone else’s religion is going to be shoved down your
throat? And how do you get people who are feeling the lack of spirituality in their work
to come out of the closet and make their needs known when they are afraid that they are
going to lose respect if they do so?
Truth to tell, there are no pat answers to these questions. The
whole field of spirituality at work is in its infancy. Anyone who takes on the issues at
this stage of the game has to have the courage to break new ground, going where no one has
gone before, trusting their own resourcefulness to come up with innovative solutions as
the need emerges. This is true whether you are an individual making your spiritual needs
known in the workplace, a manager taking on the issue of spirituality in the workplace on
behalf of your organization, or a consultant putting yourself forward as willing and able
to facilitate whatever process is needed to bring spirit to work. We are improvising the
answers as we go along. There is no road until we make a path.
This is not to say that nothing is happening. A lot is happening. More and more people are waking up to the spiritual bankruptcy of the secular society. A lot of those people are reading books like Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore and Taking Your Soul to Work by Tanis Halliwell, and deciding, as a personal initiative, to bring their spiritual issues to work. Without fanfare, without waiting for approval, they are beautifying their work space to make it more soulful, taking the risk of speaking out about their spiritual needs in spiritual terms, and creating private rituals that serve to help them remember what is meaningful about what they do.
There is, of course, a limit to what the individual employee can
do to influence the corporate culture. Significant change in this area will only come
about when the corporation itself embraces the idea that integrating spirituality into
work serves their stakeholders. And corporations are sitting up and taking notice. People
in the business world are beginning to suspect that spirituality at work might be the next
cutting edge in organizational development and they are keen to know more about it.
Secularism is an experiment that failed. Designed to prevent religious intolerance, it produced a society lacking in heart and soul. The movement towards bringing spirituality into work signals the death of secularism, and the creation of a world where spirituality is integrated into daily life, where each individual is supported in his or her search for meaning in every context, including work, and where as a consequence we care more about what we do to earn a living. Spirituality at work: an idea whose time has come.
David Cornfield, Creative Edge
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Spirituality at Work was first published as the cover story for the September, 1999 issue of Eye for the Future.
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