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This book seeks to promote a new spiritual approach to organizational leadership that goes beyond visionary management to a new focus on the spiritual for both leader and led. Reflecting on the current crisis of meaning in America, this book takes up the search for significance in peoples' worklives-in the products they produce and in the services they offer. Recognizing that the new corporation has become the dominant community for many- commanding most of our waking hours by providing a focus for life, a measure of personal success, and a network of personal relationships-Fairholm calls on business leaders to focus their attention on the processes of community among their stakeholders: wholeness, integrity, stewardship, and morality.
Spiritual leadership is seen here as a dynamic, interactive process. Successful leadership in the new American workplace, therefore, is dependent on a recognition that leadership is a relationship, not a skill or a personal attribute. Leaders are leaders only as far as they develop relationships with their followers, relationships that help all concerned to achieve their spiritual, as well as economic and social, fulfillment.
List of contents
Preface
The Soul of Leadership
The Place of Spirit in Our Work Lives
Defining Spiritual Leadership
Problems with the Current Leadership Situation
Pressures that Focus Our Spirit Self at Work
A Shift to a Spiritual Focus for Leadership
Understanding Spirit at Work
Spiritual Leadership at Work
The Search for a New Leadership
The Spiritual Leadership Process
Spiritual Leadership Task Competence
Spiritual Leadership Visioning
The Spiritual Leadership Dynamics of Servanthood
Emerging Spiritual Leadership Technologies
Building Community and Individual Wholeness
Spiritual Leadership: Setting a Higher Moral Standard
Stewardship
The Leader's Goal: Continuous Improvement
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Gilbert W. Fairholm is emeritus professor of leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.
