Leadership & spirituality: a winning connection

Leadership & spirituality, a combination that warrants considerable performance advantages is the starting point for this article.

What is spirituality?

To begin with, while there is probably widespread agreement on the concept of leadership, I am sure that spirituality is widely misunderstood. In fact, for many people, spiritual is practically synonymous with religious. The spirituality-religion equation is very widespread and is responsible for a fatal misunderstanding that prevents spiritual aspects from being addressed in many fields.

It is much more than that, as my mentor, Prof. Piero P. Giorgi, PhD, of the University of Brisbane, taught me many years ago. Spirituality is an innate characteristic of human beings. It relates to the need/desire to seek meaning in one’s own existence and in the world around us. Spirituality, therefore, is the search for a broader perspective on life and its events in order to give meaning to the existence and actions of individuals, either alone or in groups.

Spirituality is NOT religion

Religion, on the other hand, is something invented by human beings to give shape to their need for spirituality. This is why there are so many religions; we could say, with Gandhi, that there are as many religions as there are human beings. Perhaps the Mahatma was exaggerating a little, but it is true that every religion, for as much as it may try to standardise its rules, will have within it a multiplicity of ways of understanding and practising it.

Treating the two concepts as equivalent or synonymous creates a huge misunderstanding, sometimes encouraged by religious institutions in order to claim a monopoly on spirituality. This results in spirituality being excluded from many areas of social and even personal life, as it is considered inappropriate. This is especially true in the predominantly secular cultures of the Western world.

In the field of business, if all goes well, we associate it with the social doctrine of the Church and its reflections on economics. While we share some aspects of this doctrine (even if the term ‘doctrine’ makes me shudder), when we talk about spirituality, we go far beyond that.

The example of Adriano Olivetti

In Italy, we once had a businessman, an entrepreneur, who approached his role with a spiritual outlook. I am talking about Adriano Olivetti, who is often quoted, often inappropriately and, above all, in a very limited way. Of course, it is always better to cite Adriano as a role model than mr Agnelli of (formerly) FIAT or his successors.

However, limiting Olivetti’s legacy to the concept of corporate and entrepreneurial social responsibility is truly limiting. In his case, leadership and spirituality truly went hand in hand.

Adriano Olivetti was a spiritual man, since he questioned himself and sought solutions in search of meaning in the life of the factory he ran. And for the destination of the wealth he created – something that made him disliked by part of his own family.

The fulfilment of Man through work

For Olivetti, work was an opportunity for the fulfilment of Man in his entirety: materially, humanly and, indeed, spiritually. Therefore, for Adriano, the company had to provide not only useful solutions for the lives of its customers, but also opportunities for multidimensional development for its employees.

This led to Olivetti’s projects, which are still unrivalled and unsurpassed today: social housing designed by great architects, factories such as the one in Pozzuoli, built in such a way as to maintain the spiritual connection between workers and their rural origins, and educational activities (not just training) aimed at and available to workers and their families. We should remember that part of the – once excellent – Italy’s welfare for workers was born at Olivetti.

Without wishing to retell the story of Adriano and his Olivetti company, as this is not the place to do so, his company pursued the realisation of the meaning of life through work and business activity. For this reason, Adriano Olivetti’s leadership can rightly be defined as spiritual leadership.

The misunderstanding of purpose

Marketing is a kind of counterpoint to the touch of the mythical King Midas: everything it touches turns into… rubbish, let’s say, for the sake of modesty. For some years now, the concept of purpose has crept into the discourse of marketing communication. The term is innocent in its own language: it simply means the ‘goal’ of one activity.

It has now unfortunately become the new mantra for clearing any empty advertising chatter through the barrier of critical thinking. The noble term ‘sustainability’ is now sadly on the wane, having been stretched so far in all directions that it no longer means anything. The easily misinterpreted ‘circular’ is barely holding out, because it expresses such an evanescent concept that it goes with everything, like black.

Purpose, on the other hand, perhaps placed alongside the evergreen wane and wane, now justifies any praise, any award, any wickedness in products, processes and human relationships committed for the sole and unique (you may wonder) purpose of maximum profit.

Why do we exist?

When leadership and spirituality are combined, the question of meaning immediately takes on greater depth. For entrepreneurs who ask themselves “why do we exist as a business”, or “what legitimises my profit”, the glittering word purpose of marketing is no longer enough. You only need to read a few examples (with the usual commendable exceptions that prove the rule…) to understand this. It’s like missions and visions: just read some to be amazed (or to be stunned) and to believe.

A company is, in fact, a group of men and women who ‘accomplish something together’. It is organised to accomplish something useful, something that the people gathered in the organisation must perceive as meaningful. They must also feel that this meaning is in the direction of the overall improvement of the human condition. Of course, if the company produces, say, toilet brushes, it may seem difficult to find a particularly profound meaning in that. But shall we try to do the exercise for a moment? I can find the meaning in a few moments, can you?

Leadership and spirituality for motivation

People who undertake any endeavour together must feel a sense of belonging, a team spirit. Leaders must care about the well-being of each employee; the goal of improving the quality of life of the wider community must go hand in hand with that of each employee’s life.

Hence, as in the case of Olivetti, the attention and opportunities that must be offered to people to grow spiritually, humanly, socially and not only professionally.

And mind you: taking care of people is not philanthropy that weighs on the company’s accounts. It is in the entrepreneur’s best interest, as the level of professional performance of employees is more than proportional to their motivation. It begets what is expressed effectively in the idiomatic expression walking the extra mile. A leader able to transmit to his/her people the feeling of belonging, of being important and so on, will get the best performance.

The employees of a leader who expresses spiritually oriented leadership will always willingly make the effort necessary to walk the extra mile. This is simply because we Homo Sapiens are social animals and common well-being is the strongest of motivations. With all due respect to the theorists of homo economicus.

The CASE® Method leadership and spirituality

At this point, before leaving you, I feel compelled to connect the CASE® Method approach with spiritual leadership.

It’s simple: the CASE® Method, based on the Basic Needs of human beings, inherently incorporates a holistic vision of the meaning of human existence. Furthermore, thanks to the theoretical development carried out in its conception, CASE® also considers the Basic Needs of the organisation, as if the latter were a living being.

In practice, the CASE® Method promotes the development of the enterprise through a combined approach of leadership and spirituality to fill with meaning all the activities of the human group that ‘accomplishes the enterprise together’. Try it for yourself, as long as you are willing to truly look inside yourself and ask ‘why do we exist?’. Avoid the trap of fake purpose to achieve real, lasting and meaningful results.

Write to me if you want to find out more

To find out more, simply send me an email at federico@federicofioretto.biz and ask me for a free appointment so we can discuss whether and how I and CASE® can help you.

Have a good life,