Capturing the Heart of Leadership: Spirituality and Community in the New American Workplace

Gilbert W. Fairholm

Mar 1997 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

About this ebook

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.

About the author

GILBERT W. FAIRHOLM is Associate Professor of Public Administration at Virginia Commonwealth University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Leadership at the University of Richmond. In addition to his academic appointments, he has over 20 years of management experience in state and local government. His previous award-winning books include Leadership and the Culture of Trust (1994), Organizational Power Politics (1993), and Values Leadership (1991), all published by Praeger.