Spirituality Leadership Management 98

Spiritual Leadership in Action: The CEL Story is designed for thoughtful leaders working in the complexity and messiness of their daily organizational lives. It is a book first and foremost about people, about the ways they find purpose, creativity and meaning in their professional work; how they thrive in community and fulfill their deep desire to be of service to others against seemingly impossible odds and limitations. A study of how full human potential and creativity is released, how the spirit within, and without, can be experienced and manifested. It is also story of ordinary people achieving extraordinary results, individually and collectively; of people becoming more than they thought was possible; and having fun along the way. This is a practical book with reflections, legacy and “lessons learnt” to support and guide busy leaders who are looking for wisdom and to learn from the experiences and mistakes of others. Spiritual Leadership in Action: The CEL Story is the result of serious and rigorous academic research. It is a case study containing features, dilemmas and opportunities facing all leaders today. A leadership narrative of a professional community who learned to live and work together with respect and harmony. It is also the story of a CEO leader and the integration of her spiritual yearning and fulfillment manifested through her professional vocation and calling. In particular it explores how: • To create effective collaborative partnerships • To deliver outstanding value for money on limited resources in complex contexts • To develop excellent commercial practices within a public sector organization • To nurture the spirit, high energy and performance of everyone involved to ensure outstanding success on the triple bottom line This book challenges the reader to be bold, creative, reflective, trusting, even more allowing of their own spirit and leadership path, and to rise to even greater achievements; but most of all to fulfill their own deepest yearnings and potential and to become the very best of what they are meant to be, both as a leader and as a human being. An important feature in this book is that spirituality and religion are distinct, and that organizational spiritual leadership can be inclusive or exclusive of religious theory and practice. The Centre for Excellence in Leadership (CEL) serves as a role model for maximizing the triple bottom line through both personal and organizational spiritual leadership. CEL is a stellar example of an organization that embraced organizational spiritual leadership, the values of altruistic love, employee well-being, and sustainability while maintaining high levels of financial performance. Spiritual Leadership in Action: The CEL Story chronicles how, as CEO, Lynne Sedgmore led CEL through its spiritual journey, including several “Dark Nights of the Soul,” to a place of pre-eminence in the United Kingdom’s Learning and Skills sector.

In tracing the intellectual roots of business leadership over the last one hundred years, award winning author Gilbert W. Fairholm argues that until recently, spirit and soul have been absent from the major models. After outlining the elements of the five major ideas about leadership, he goes on to define and make operational a new focus that must exist in order to truly understand the leaders' role in relation to workers. The study begins with scientific management and traces the evolution of leadership ideas through the quality movement, on to values-, culture-, and trust-based leadership models, and concluding with an emphasis on spirit in the workplace. It suggests that the leader in the twenty-first century will need to embrace a leadership style based on the main premise of each model along with a focus on ethics, community, service, and spirituality.

The book goes beyond theory to offer tools and suggestions for developing emerging leaders. Inspired by the pioneering work of leadership scholar Andre Delbecq, this book points towards an expanded model of leadership that incorporates an active inner life, and posits that such fully human models of leadership will be essential to meet the profound challenges of the 21st Century. Without presuming to provide definitive answers, the text explores central questions such as: What is the added value of spiritual maturity to leadership? Would the integration of mature spirituality with well-developed intellectual and emotional capacities produce more beneficial leadership outcomes for organizations and individuals? What would a spiritually and developmentally mature emerging leader look like in 10 to 20 years? How do we prepare emerging leaders for the challenges they may face; and how do we model spiritually and developmentally mature leadership in ways that resonate with them? Professor Andre Delbecq (1936-2016) of the University of Santa Clara created the heuristic of “spiritually and developmentally mature leaders” to encapsulate his observation that outstanding leaders often seemed to draw strength and wisdom from sources that are not typically studied or taught in leadership courses. Thirty scholars and practitioners accepted Delbecq’s heuristic as the starting point to explore spiritual components of leadership that do not easily lend themselves to quantification or clear causal links. The analysis of their disciplined engagement with the heuristic forms the foundation of an exploratory, fully human understanding of leadership. This analysis is supported by literature reviews, including an overview of Andre Delbecq’s relevant work. Ultimately, the authors call for further collaboration across disciplines and between research and practice to build on the conceptual constructs offered here, and, especially, to create pedagogies for the training of spiritually and developmentally mature leaders

This book seeks to promote a new spiritual approach to organizational leadership that goes beyond visionary management to a new focus on the spiritual for both leader and led. Reflecting on the current crisis of meaning in America, this book takes up the search for significance in peoples' worklives—in the products they produce and in the services they offer. Recognizing that the new corporation has become the dominant community for many— commanding most of our waking hours by providing a focus for life, a measure of personal success, and a network of personal relationships—Fairholm calls on business leaders to focus their attention on the processes of community among their stakeholders: wholeness, integrity, stewardship, and morality. Spiritual leadership is seen here as a dynamic, interactive process. Successful leadership in the new American workplace, therefore, is dependent on a recognition that leadership is a relationship, not a skill or a personal attribute. Leaders are leaders only as far as they develop relationships with their followers, relationships that help all concerned to achieve their spiritual, as well as economic and social, fulfillment.

"Soul in the workplace is not a theological abstraction, but a way of being and doing. Each of the organizations Benefiel profiles...describes the profound role that awareness of soul, or spirituality, can play in leadership and organizational life." -- P. [4] of cover.

Maximizing the Triple Bottom Line through Spiritual Leadership draws on the emerging fields of workplace spirituality and spiritual leadership to teach leaders and their constituencies how to develop business models that address issues of ethical leadership, employee well-being, sustainability, and social responsibility without sacrificing profitability, growth, and other metrics of performance excellence. While this text identifies and discusses the characteristics necessary to be a leader, its major focus is on leadership—engaging stakeholders and enabling groups of people to work together in the most meaningful ways. The authors offer real-world examples of for-profit and non-profit organizations that have spiritual leaders and which have implemented organizational spiritual leadership. These cases are based on over ten years of research, supported by the International Institute of Spiritual Leadership, that demonstrates the value of the Spiritual Leadership Balanced Scorecard Business Model presented in the book. "Pracademic" in its orientation, the book presents a general process and tools for implementing the model.