The Spiritual Face of Leadership

Not religion. Not a specific spiritual path. But spirituality, Goodness, care, compassion, letting go of fear, or at least letting in the light of care so that your leadership creates opportunities instead of lockdowns - connections instead of resentments.

Do you want lower attrition and higher engagement? More rules won't do it. The approaches that work are, I admit, counterintuitive. But the choice is a simple one of either using approaches that work, or going on with the "solutions" you have on hand, which continuously create the problems that keep you awake at night!

Attrition happens because people are unhappy with management? People are unhappy with management because management isn't approaching them as human beings, but as widgets in a big machine that must give management the numbers they want.

No human has EVER been motivated by such goals. We human beings are motivated by meaning and personal, emotional investment, and connection to goals of meaning.

It's very simple at its core. But we have to get out of the habit of thinking mechanically.

A long time ago, business opted to base its operations on the example of the Prussian Army. The Army structure seemed the best way to mimic the amazing productivity of the invention of the industrial age with its machines of such awe-inspiring strength and speed.

Surely the machine was greater than the human.

But that became our norm - to see ourselves as "only" human - inferior to the machine - forgetting that we were the ones who created that machine, and that we had far greater abilities still to come.

What kind of manager do you want to be? Do you want to suffer your way through your day being miserable because numbers have dominated you and continue to elude you, no matter how much pressure you have put on your people? Or would you prefer to enlist colleagues, friends, to help you figure out the best ways, the most human- and meaning-inspired ways to get things done - and keep them around because they can't wait to see how the next level of meaning will unfold?