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

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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' worklivesin 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 relationshipsFairholm 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.

Reviews

Fairholm's insights and awareness of the issues of spirituality in the workplace are the most thorough of any publication available on the topic.-Choice
Gilbert W. Fairholm's is not a book to be read by people frightened of change....Nor is it a manual or a how-to treatment. Rather it is a challenge to think about "spirit," based on observation and potential reality. It provides the reader with real food for thought and contemplation.-IJCM
"Fairholm's insights and awareness of the issues of spirituality in the workplace are the most thorough of any publication available on the topic."-Choice
"Gilbert W. Fairholm's is not a book to be read by people frightened of change....Nor is it a manual or a how-to treatment. Rather it is a challenge to think about "spirit," based on observation and potential reality. It provides the reader with real food for thought and contemplation."-IJCM

Author Bio

GILBERT W. FAIRHOLM is Associate Professor of Public Administration at Virginia Commonwealth University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Leadership at the University of Richmond./e 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.