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Is it possible to find the meaning of life at work?

Spiritual satisfaction

Mark Abernathy
Published in Business Express Magazine March 05

There shouldn't be too many distinguishing features that an oil company and a bank have in common, however, Woodside Petroleum (Woodside) and ANZ Banking Group (ANZ) have the unlikely inclusion of corporate meditation rooms in common.

Woodside and ANZ, along with other large organisations such as Vodafone Australia and New South Wales Police are some of the big names looking to 'spiritual intelligence' to create better workplaces. At a time when many organisations are facing record absenteeism, unsustainable levels of workplace stress and high staff turnover, a new breed of consultants is engaging the troops in personal development.

"The big issue in organisations at the moment is the epidemic of demoralisation" says the owner of business consultancy INTEG Solutions, Ron Laurie. "There are organisations where the whole environment is about threats, recrimination and poor leadership. The energy is right down, people have no sense of purpose, individuals are demoralised and the talent is leaving".

Laurie says medical experts are starting to recognise demoralisation as a human condition, distinct from depression but equally powerful.

"Meaning and purpose are the hidden motivators in organisations but they are the important ones. Once you lose them the workplace becomes demoralised."

Enter the personal development consultants and their spiritual intelligence. In its most basic sense spiritual intelligence is the feeling of 'meaning' or 'purpose' that a person derives from what they are doing. Organisations see a correlation between employees with a sense of 'meaning' in their work and the fortunes of the business as a whole. Not only are employees more productive in an environment where 'meaning; is high, but the environment engenders a whole cycle of success: other smart people want to work there, the success grows and more smart people want to work there.

In the high-profile cases of Vodafone Australia and ANZ Banking Group, the use of personal development strategies to remake the entire corporate culture has been a success. At ANZ, Chief Executive Officer, John McFarlane has credited the spiritual and emotional approaches to personal development as the drivers that have taken ANZ from a Colonial-hierarchy mindset to one of the world's most modern and efficient banks in less than seven years. Vodafone Chief Executive, Graham Maher has remade the corporate and leadership culture of the mobile phone company with the use of spiritual and emotional programs, and has a complete turnaround from a loss-making to a profit-making company to show for it.

Both of these leaders use the word 'transformation' and both have stated that their ideal workplace culture is one where employees can be the same person at work as they are with their friends and family - it's the 'whole person' approach.

A bit of history
Laurie says spiritual intelligence staggered along in the 1990s before suddenly being talked about in the early part of this century. "The word 'spiritual' is powerful in Western culture and people are either turned off by what they think it means or they are scared about where it will take them". He says many large organisations are now using spiritual intelligence techniques but they prefer to keep the word 'spiritual' out of the discussion.

Laurie keeps the approach simple. Instead of defining what 'meaning' feels like, he conducts workshops where people are encouraged to develop multiple perspectives: the ability to see all sides of a story.

First, employees come to grips with who they are, then they come to an understanding of who colleagues and clients/customers are, which leads to a point where the person has enough perspective to adapt to other personalities while still maintaining a core self and goals.

He says the goal is to have people with mature communication styles. "Smart organisations know that if they can increase the ability of people to pass on information in a non-aggressive and non-judgmental way, they'll keep their best people. The talented employees already communicate this way".

This began in World War II when personality testing made the leap from military officer selection into manager development with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBIT). It assigned psychological profiles such as 'extrovert-intuitive' to employees but it was in the early 1970's that American firm Human Synergistics developed systems for correcting bad attitudes when it introduced Life Styles Inventory (LSI). In the early 1990's American academics John Mayer and Peter Salovey wrote about emotional intelligence (EQ) and a few years later, American academics Dana Zohar and Ian Marshall came out with spiritual intelligence (SQ) - an approach that said that IQ and EQ was no enough and that mastery of purpose and a strong sense of meaning were the strengths that could drive 'transformation'.

Laurie believes that several factors have coalesced to make spiritual intelligence big news right now; post-modernism and its attendant spectre of post-religion; work becoming all pervading and melding into other areas of life; and the domination of the Knowledge Economy by Generation X and Y who are quite prepared to move to another job in order to avoid toxic workplaces.

Here to Stay
Executive director of the Spiritual Leadership and Management Network (SLAM_, Steve McDonald, says that spiritual solutions will be a necessity in a few years. "A lot of organisations have worked out that the old approach to management is not working. Downshifting has become a driving force in our economy - 23 percent of adults deliberately took lower paying employment in the past 10 years. They were looking for fulfilment.

"You're seeing the old system in its last throes - just look at some of the corporate collapses and the ethical problems in the leadership. Some organisations are not going to survive while others are focused on the future and it's already showing in the bottom lines".

He says spirituality is not a religion but a search for the 'authentic self' - the one thing most people can't be when they're on the job.

"There's a legitimate question with organisational spirituality and that us: 'what place does this have in my work?" The answer is that employees' spiritual dimension will have to be looked after in the workplace because work is spilling into their lives".

How all this works is the fun part. Nicholas Oddy, from Industry Consulting Services, says the first step in injecting some spiritual meaning into a workplace is to have people listening to one another. "The organisation has to create a series of forums. Management talks about the kind of culture they want and then the employees say what they want. These forums have to be safe places where people can say what they want without recriminations. Secondly, management has to listen - if its all about lip service then you end up with an even more demoralised workplace." Results from these forums include meditating rooms, paid days off to do charity or community work, environmental sustainable programs and documented shared values among the employees.

Oddy - who is now doing a PhD in organisational spirituality at Melbourne's Swinburne University - says the issue is not whether organisations will embrace spiritual intelligence as a strategy during the next decade, but how they will balance the personal development of individuals with the goals and aspirations of the organisation as a collective.

"This is here to stay and there are organisations that are trying but still not getting there" he says. "IN the end it comes down to the leadership and how much they want a fulfilled work force".