This article is the first of a series on spirituality in enterprises. It intends to highlight the subject while avoiding preconceived ideas.

The purpose of the first article is to explain why spirituality is necessary within a company.
The articles that will appear over the following months will expound on the ways to develop this spirituality, both on an individual and a collective basis.

The initial requests of most individual coaching sessions center on the development of leadership and look for answers to certain questions, such as: how do I manage my emotions in meetings where there is a lot at stake or in stressful situations; how do I handle changes in the outside world while still focusing on my professional and personal life; how can I earn the proper recognition of my colleagues and my bosses; how can I take a further step in my career….

After spending many years dealing with such requests, I have reached the conclusion that the keystone of a powerful leadership is the ability to enhance one’s spirituality, one’s inner life.

Spirituality today

The word spirituality comes from the Latin spiritus, which means spirit, breath, life force.
Developing our spirituality enables us to enrich our lives through life force and creative impetus. Nowadays, developing our spirituality is not a self-indulgent luxury or an attitude of detachment from life, but a necessary step to improve our personal and professional life.

Leadership and spirituality

To be a leader today means to continue to be innovative, effective and a driving force in an ever changing and complex world. Even when under pressure and facing harsh conditions, a leader must be creative and ensure a climate that is both positive and stimulating for the leader himself, his colleagues, his family and his human environment in general.

To achieve and preserve this balance, a leader must be able to handle his inner compass.

Trying to grasp the complexity of our spirit and consequently to enrich it, will facilitate our perception of the subtleties of a situation and of the reactions and qualms of its participants. As Gandhi rightly said: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world”. In other words, our feelings, our thoughts and our actions have a major impact on our environment and on others.

It follows that our capacity to nurture our spirit and our life force is a key factor in creating a positive leadership in our entourage.

Leadership and spirituality: the different stages of development, especially vertical development

Recent studies on leadership have focused on a notion close to the idea of spirituality, as we mean it here: vertical development.

Whereas horizontal development entails increasing the volume and variety of the individual’s knowledge and competence in different fields, vertical development is the individual’s in-depth knowledge of himself, of his inner life. Vertical development expands one’s own view, what one can pay attention to and what one can integrate. It enables to make meaning in a broader way that gradually evolves to include self and other, self and the world rather than just self.

Other studies have highlighted the different stages of adult development as they evolve over time within the realm of vertical development.

The more an adult advances through the different stages of development, the more he improves his leadership thanks to a deeper, subtler and more perceptive vision of his environment.

The first three development stages are referred to as “conventional”. These stages are known as “Diplomat”, “Expert”, “Achiever”. 80% of managers usually reach them. These stages of development lead to a very practical and uniform vision of reality.

For example, Experts consider a project as just a series of tasks to be accomplished, results can only be attained in one way, usually my way; Achievers are more focused on their goals, and they pay attention to their inner and outer world according to them.

These stages are followed by three stages known as “post-conventional”. They are called “Pluralist”, “Strategist” and “Magician”.
These stages of development help us move towards a deeper and subtler understanding of the complex and many-faceted world, of others and of ourselves. Spirituality becomes therefore a key factor of our emotional balance and our life flow and enables us at the same time to question and accept ourselves as an active and pertinent part of this world.

Post-conventional stages are better suited for people who need to master this ability to cope with the many facets of the world and of other individuals with the aid of the spirit and of their life force. They make it possible to unite a wealth of truths and intuitions, to adapt to and anticipate evolutions or reversals of trends, to team build common projects, by multiplying the contribution of each participant, thus generating innovation and in-depth changes.

Companies and the development of spirituality

In today’s and future companies, it is essential to have both managers at the conventional stages of development and managers who have reached more advanced stages of vertical development.

The company cannot – and should not – force a member of its staff to achieve spiritual development or control him while he is working on the process of this development.

Management programs or sequential coaching sessions in which everybody must get involved and adhere to company values, are at best limited to horizontal development, in accordance with the development stages known as “conventional”.

To facilitate – without imposing – a more profound and spiritual development of their teams, managers should in the first place agree to let go of some of their control over colleagues. Companies and their managers need to create environments where their colleagues want to seek spiritual development, while at the same time giving them complete freedom to adopt or reject an approach. This should come from a profound individual yearning rather than from a wish to conform to company standards.

This approach, implicating both the company and its managers, will succeed provided the business strategy and the management style are compatible with the overall spiritual development, which is positive both for the staff and the external environment (suppliers, customers, etc.).

The next articles will deal with:
• Developing our spirituality on an individual basis
• Ways in which companies can foster and encourage co-workers’ personal development so as to contribute to the company’s success and attainment of harmony within its environment.

Bibliography

CCL article « Vertical Leadership » by Nick Petrie, 2013.

Harvard Business Review : Seven Tranformations of Leadership, April 2005 ; Making Business Personal, April 2014; The Deliberately Developmental Organization, by Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, Matthew Miller, and Inna Markus, Way to Grow, Inc. 2014.