Faith-based leadership models (2)

The Management Agenda 2003, produced by Roffey Park, claimed that nearly three-quarters of workers are interested in "learning to live the spiritual side of their values". The report also claimed that more than 40% of UK managers would value the opportunity to discuss workplace spirituality with their colleagues and that 53% were experiencing tensions between "the spiritual side of their values and their work."

George Starcher, in a paper entitled ‘Towards a New Paradigm of Management’ available from the European Bahá'í Business Forum, argues that a new paradigm of management is emerging from the current context. A paradigm involving:

• the formulation and communication of purpose, vision, and process (leadership);
• the balancing of economic and material goals with spiritual and human values; and
• the recognition by growing numbers of organisations of a social responsibility as well as an economic mission.

Starcher suggests that Bahá’ís feel that this new paradigm must inevitably reflect the new spiritual values and teachings inspired by Bahá'u'lláh. But each of the faith communities contains resources for leadership. Sometimes these come through the teaching of these communities and sometimes through the examples of past or current leaders within the communities. In recent years such teaching and examples have been increasingly applied to the realm of work with the result that a broadly-based Spirituality at Work movement has emerged in this country to provide additional resources relating to leadership.

This series of posts tries to summarise and signpost people to some of the resources for leadership that the faith communities and the Spirituality at Work movement contain. The range of resources now available for aspects of management and leadership from these sources is vast and this section can do no more than dip a toe into the ocean. The fact that each heading in subsequent posts does not contain resources from each faith group is not an indication that those faith groups not mentioned have no resources in that area.

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After The Fire - One Rule For You.