Faith-based leadership models (1)

Through Faiths in London's Economy I am working on ideas for a seminar exploring the place of faith in the development of leadership. The target audience being HR professionals, interfaith practitioners, and people of faith in (or with an interest in) employment. This would be the second in an ongoing series of seminars that began with the 'Ethics in a Global Economy' seminar.
This, together with hearing Brian Draper speak on Spiritual Intelligence at the Everyday Icons event this past weekend, reminded me of a paper (which I shall post in this series) that I wrote on faith-based leadership models for Faith Regen Foundation as part of the Faith Communities Toolkit that we prepared for the Centre for Excellence in Leadership to make available to the Learning & Skills Sector nationally. This Toolkit remains available online and can be found by clicking here.

Lynne Sedgemore, then Chief Executive of the Centre for Excellence in Leadership, who commissioned Faith Regen to develop a Faith Communities Toolkit for the learning and skills sector said, “I believe that faith issues should have more of a high profile within leadership dialogue in the 21st Century.”

“In the current global, national and local contexts,” Sedgemore said, “I feel that our sector’s leaders need support, advice and information on dealing with faith especially since the recent Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003 came into force.” Recent events across the world linked to religions and faith issues, she thought, supported this view which involves looking at faith from a diversity perspective as well as a legal one.

She is not alone. In 2003 the Roffey Park Institute published research which claimed that nearly three-quarters of workers are interested in "learning to live the spiritual side of their values." An increasing number of books, consultancies and websites are emerging which deal with spiritual leadership within the workplace. The Bahá'í business writer, George Starcher, has argued that a new spiritual paradigm of management is emerging from the current context. He sees this paradigm as involving communicating vision, balancing economics and ethics and developing social responsibility.

My paper sought to summarises strands of teaching from each of the major world religions that could contribute to this new paradigm.

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The Clash - Clampdown.