Why Organizational Spirituality Seems Extra

Mention personal wellness to an organizational leader, and I predict they’ll give you something between a nod and a grimace. They’ll nod, because, yes, they and their team members have a yearning for purpose, a need to be present, a longing to be generous. They’ll grimace, because they have bills to pay, and those bills don’t take the currency of contemplative prayer.

My own experience of nodding and grimacing comes from research interviews in which I asked social entrepreneurs what spirituality was doing in their organizations. I might have sought out high-profile CEOs or academic deans at R1 universities or leaders in governmental agencies. But my hunch was that in the world of large-scale organizations, spirituality often gets categorized as self-care. When spirituality’s primarily about my inner life and your inner life and her inner life and his over there, well, that preoccupation with inwardness tends to widen the gap between the nod and the grimace.

So my research turned instead to leaders running tiny, fragile, plucky, missional organizations and asked them slow, sifting questions about spiritual life in their workplaces and communities. I wrote up what I learned in my recently published book Why Spiritual Capital Matters.

But here’s a takeaway from that research. These leaders sought a unified life in which what they do at work, what they do at home, what they do at church, what they do in their own neighborhood cohere. But all too often that sort of organizational spirituality ends up contributing to a segregation of inner life from outer life.

(Just to be clear, I don’t believe this dualism is essential to organizational life and leadership, but I did find it to be commonly assumed.)

Inner life conversations provoked talk about what values these leaders espoused, what contemplative practices they took on, what awareness they cultivated. I often felt encouraged by these exchanges, which proved to be the most enlivening interviews of my career. As far as I could tell from people’s responses, they also found the exchanges energizing and even happiness-making. It just feels good to talk about spiritual things in a world that skitters across what should be the depths of human life.

But alongside this eager nod to the inner life was a persistent grimace about what we might call the outer life. These leaders’ reservations about spiritual life came from the fact that they not only wanted inner peace, but also needed to find institutional resources. They had to find investors and donors. They had to curate company stories for their constituents. They had to capture client attention. In short, they had bluntly practical work that seemed to preclude prayer and meditation and journaling and retreats and sabbath.

Quite a few of them, though, pointed to a different sort of spiritual awareness, not for the dynamics of the life within, nor for the economic forces of the life without, but for the hidden generosity of the life among.

These conversations compelled me to reformulate what I thought about organizational spirituality. Instead of seeing it as a way to prepare one’s inner life for long hours of dealing with resistless problems, I came to see organizational spirituality as a way to animate latent goods in workplace communities and their neighborhoods.

But before you can animate hidden gifts, you have to see them. Most of us miss most of what’s going on most of the time. Life is so intricate, and it moves at such speeds, that it’s enormously difficult to see what’s in front of us. For these social entrepreneurs, seeing and then circulating the unobvious capital of their communities required a shared awareness — I want to say a spiritual awareness — for what is always zipping on by and around us. I take heart from their example that it’s possible to learn to see the resources that are usually overlooked. Like abandoned buildings in West Baltimore now rehabbed for the community’s good. Like quiet philanthropy moving millions of dollars in low-income neighborhoods in Indianapolis. Like a community center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania built on the very grounds where White folks once effaced African American graves.

What narrows the gap between the nod and the grimace about organizational spirituality is not about what is inside me or inside you, but about what is among us all. Learning to spot those subtle gifts in our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our teams requires spiritual attentiveness, not just for individualized and inward wellbeing but also for the unobvious capital that may need a fuller circulation, but which is nonetheless already there for the common good. That’s why, I’ve come to think, spiritual capital matters.