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The Conference Board Review® Article
Faith at Work
Redrawing the line between religion and business.
By Theodore Kinni
Theodore Kinni is editor of The Business Reader Review and has authored and ghostwritten seven business books, including the forthcoming No Substitute for Victory: Lessons in Strategy and Leadership From General Douglas MacArthur (FT/Prentice-Hall). He wrote "Have We Run Out of Big Ideas?", the March/April cover story.
Corporate chaplains, Jesus as a leadership model, biblical stories as a source for employee development, employee prayer groups, faith-based e-mail networks: clear signs of a growing openness to the expression of personal religious beliefs at work.
Of course, faith at work is nothing new. We've long heard about companies such as ServiceMaster, Chick-fil-A, and 1st Pacific Bank of California--organizations founded and molded from the top down by entrepreneurs with strong religious orientations. But a growing religiosity is bubbling up into the corporate mainstream. Managers and employees are exhibiting their religious beliefs in major companies--among them, Ford, Merrill Lynch, and Texas Instruments--that have been neither historically nor overtly religious.
Observers are, predictably, divided about this development. Some see religious values and ethics as an answer to moral lapses in the world of business; others point to recent scandals in religious institutions and suggest that they live up to their codes of conduct no better than their secular counterparts. Some see an employee's freedom to bring his faith to work as an opportunity to become a more holistic, productive person; others view religions as de facto exclusionary and intolerant of nonbelievers.
People have debated the separation of the secular and spiritual realms for years, in an argument that appears unresolvable, by this or any magazine article. But the line separating the two realms seems to be blurring, and it's worth asking why. Is the infusion of religion a temporary reaction to unexpected, traumatic events, or the beginnings of a permanent transformation?
In short: Are we seeing the end of mainstream companies' longstanding "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to religion?
Diversity Provides Cover
The capitalist explanation of why we are seeing a greater expression of religion in the workplace: A greater demand--and ripe conditions--produce a larger supply. Developments inside the corporate arena, the world at large, and, perhaps most significantly, the lives of employees themselves have created an environment that supports the "faith at work" movement, in the phrase of David Miller, an ordained Presbyterian minister and the recently appointed executive director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
Miller pegs the concept of employees as a corporation's most valuable asset--a concept that emerged in the mid-1980s and has become virtually a cliché--as a primary factor in the movement's growth. "Smart business leaders and corporate executives are realizing that the whole person matters," he says. "And the happier and healthier people are in their so-called private life or personal life, the happier and healthier they will be in their corporate life. This is one more recognition of that." Thinking of people as assets rather than expenses has contributed to the encouragement of spirituality at work.
Spirituality is a broad concept that could be defined as the need to find one's higher purpose and align one's life with it. Religion--or, more precisely, the set of personal religious beliefs that constitute a person's faith--obviously provides that purpose in many people's lives and so, in that sense, can be seen as a subset of spirituality. (Nearly everyone interviewed preferred faith to religion, a word they see as more emotionally charged and bound to formal institutions.)
Another contributor is the concept of diversity, the recognition of the value to be gained by tapping into people's differences to create a more productive, creative workplace. Today, diversity is the rubric that shelters most manifestations of faith at work. "As diversity becomes a bigger and bigger buzzword, it opens the doors to people sharing their faith," says Clifton Lambreth, a retail marketing manager in Ford's Parts and Service Division who also recruits for Ford at schools such as Cornell and Wharton.
Lambreth's personal mission is to "live a life of continuous improvement and act in a way that would make Jesus smile on a daily basis and allow others to see Jesus through me." The devout Baptist says, "At Ford, we've got about 168,000 people in North America--people from every culture and every background, and from every religious group. What the company has done under the umbrella of diversity is allow us to be who we are in the workplace. And if that means you share your faith, you do."
The recent corporate scandals provide a less intentional reason for companies' new openness to faith. Talking about companies like Enron is like beating a dead horse, but the fact that that company had a 65-page "Code of Ethics" (now a collectible traded on eBay) says something about the effectiveness of boardroom-generated ethics and values.
"When you see things like WorldCom and Enron," Lambreth says, "I think the board of directors of any company would say, ‘Listen, if we are going to err, let's err on the other side. If our employees have strong religious beliefs in faith, honesty, and integrity, that is consistent with our corporate mission, values, and guiding principles.'"
In fact, some industries--particularly those working to overcome customer mistrust, such as financial services--might find religiosity a welcome employee characteristic. "Just in the last three years in my business--where some of the unethical practices of Corporate America have been uncovered and the distrust of some of the financial markets has come to the fore--having demonstrable ethical values has become even more important," says Linda Stirling, a San Diego-based investment adviser for Merrill Lynch and an active participant in the Bible-based Horizon Christian Fellowship.
Comments? Write a letter to the editor.
Return to the November/December 2003 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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