Leadership

The Wisdom of the World and the Beatitudes

Daniel Lowery

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781666726343
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This engaging text examines the complex interface that exists between a Christian's faith commitments on the one hand and the exercise of his or her responsibilities as a manager or nominal leader on the other. In doing so, it brings the wisdom of the world concerning management and leadership into conversation with the wisdom of the Beatitudes proclaimed in Matthew's Gospel.

Chapter 1

The Management Challenge for Christians

Work can hold great meaning in our lives. There is broad agreement on this point. The existential psychologist Viktor Frankl (1905–97) argued, for instance, that work and other kinds of creative acts represent one of three ways in which individuals can experience a profound sense of meaning.1 The Lutheran theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich (1886–1965) pointed to work as one of several opportunities for “spiritual self-affirmation.”2 The existential psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) referred, instead, to “productive affairs”3; and the philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) introduced the more general term “practice” and defined it as “any more or less stable configuration of shared activity whose shape is defined by a certain pattern of dos and don’ts.”4 As a particular venue in which we can exercise our creativity, work can, indeed, engender a profound sense of meaning.

This is particularly so in the case of managerial work. The rich combination of mission, strategy, team-building, and problem-solving can serve as a vibrant pallet from which we can draw in crafting a meaningful life. It is no wonder then that we invest so much of our time, talent, emotional energy, and effort in this defining aspect of our lives.

Management can be debilitating and destructive, too, however. Indeed, it is remarkable how many managers leave their employment relationships under less than ideal circumstances. In far too many instances, a manager’s career ends with an unanticipated summons to the human resources office and an escort out of the building. In others, careers in management wind down in disappointment, disillusionment, or bitterness. At best, it seems, careers in management tend to end as “unfinished symphonies,” a turn of phrase the great Jesuit scholar Karl Rahner (1904–2004) applied to life more generally.5

It is remarkable, as well, how often careers in management can be experienced as sources of spiritual discontent. This can range from low-level discomfort to a disconcerting sense of dissonance or guilt over decisions made and actions taken. Careers in management can even be experienced as the locus of existential crisis. Indeed, work—most notably, managerial work—is a frequent topic in spiritual direction. This should not be surprising in the case of committed Christians. As affirmed by William A. Barry, “for Christian believers, any experience can have a religious dimension because they believe that God is not only transcendent to, but also immanent in, his created universe . . . Because I believe in God, I discover in my experience more than what, at first blush, seemed to be there and name that mysterious ‘more’ God.”6 As affirmed by St. Paul, committed Christians hope to experience God as “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28), and this includes our work.

This text is written with this concern in mind. It is written for Christians who are searching for a way to better integrate their faith commitments and their work as managers and nominal leaders. As we shall see, this requires virtue, a moral concept that has been substantially de-valued in recent centuries. Virtue is presented in this text as the privileged means through which managers can become true leaders. An argument for virtue is laid out in part I, and a tried-and-true path for forming oneself in virtue is presented in part II.

Our purposes in this chapter are more circumscribed: first, to describe the nature of the problem before us in experiential terms; second, to share a useful way of thinking about management problems; third, to examine some of the very different and sometimes conflicting ways in which the Christian tradition has regarded secular work; and, fourth, to consider whether or not it is even possible for today’s managers to think about work as a spiritual concern.

The argument advanced in part I of this text is based substantially on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929), a moral philosopher whose seminal work After Virtue (1981) has contributed significantly to the revival of virtue ethics over the course of the last thirty to forty years. In this text, we are focused more narrowly on managerial work and will draw more explicitly on Christian values and Christian intellectual commitments, but the basic argument is the same: a sustained commitment to moral virtue is needed if our work in organizations is to be experienced as an integrated whole.

After Virtue begins with a powerful critique of all kinds of contemporary organizations. According to MacIntyre, organizations are oriented today to instrumental ends. There is no place in most of them for any consideration of ends external to the organization. This includes a concern for people as anything other than inputs, constraints, or variables; and it pertains, as well, to any moral thinking that extends beyond that which is legal. According to MacIntyre, there is little room in the boardroom or the management suite or on the shop floor, for that matter, for any consideration of moral virtue.

MacIntyre’s critique is quite broad, indeed, and extends to all aspects of modern life, including the public square. Because of the developments he cites, lives are increasingly experienced as fractured or compartmentalized. “Modernity partitions each human life into a variety of segments, each with its own norms and modes of behavior . . . And all these separations have been achieved so that it is the distinctiveness of each and not the unity of the life of the individual who passes through those parts in terms of which we are taught to think and feel . . . Life comes to appear as nothing but a series of unconnected episodes—a liquidation of the self.”7 As a result, those who serve in organizations experience their professional lives as roles or as characters, “a very special type of social role which places a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality of those who inhabit them.”8 MacIntyre argues further that the identities we take on in contemporary organizations include not just moral constraints, but moral imperatives, too, all of which are oriented to the instrumental ends of the organization. Indeed, “characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies.”9

According to MacIntyre, this can engender considerable dissonance and considerable dysfunction, too. “[E]ach of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing toward others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experiences arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited.”10

According to MacIntyre, there is little room in contemporary organizations for a consideration of virtue, and this can be experienced as a great loss, indeed, as a kind of rending of the true self. “The liquidation of the self into a set of demarcated areas of role-playing allows no scope for the exercise of dispositions which could genuinely be accounted virtues . . . For a virtue is not a disposition that makes for success only in some one particular type of situation.”11 As a result, those who labor in contemporary organizations can be cut adrift from any deeper sense of meaning, including any sense of meaning anchored in one’s faith.

According to Charles Taylor, this existential drift can be amplified in those who are not grounded in any substantial way in a faith tradition. “What does it mean to say that for me fullness comes from a power which is beyond me, that I have to receive it, etc.? Today, it is likely to mean something like this: the best sense I can make of my conflicting moral and spiritual experience is captured by a theological view of this kind. That is, my own experience, in prayer, in moments of fullness, in experiences of exile overcome, in what I seem to observe around me in other people’s lives—lives of exceptional spiritual fullness, or lives of maximum self-enclosedness, lives of demonic evil, etc.—this seems to be the picture that emerges. But I am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all doubt, untroubled by some objection—by some experience which won’t fit, some lives w...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The Management Challenge for Christians
• Chapter 2: Management Theory and Models
• Chapter 3: Servant Leadership and the Search for Meaning
• Chapter 4: The Case for Moral Virtue
• Chapter 5: The Public Square
• Part II
• Chapter 6: “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit” & “Blessed Are They Who Mourn”
• Chapter 7: “Blessed Are the Meek”
• Chapter 8: “Blessed Are They Who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness” & “Blessed Are the Merciful”
• Chapter 9: “Blessed Are the Clean of Heart”
• Chapter 10: “Blessed Are the Peacemakers” & “Blessed Are They Who Are Persecuted for the Sake of Righteousness”
• Chapter 11: An Exemplar
• Chapter 12: Implications for Key Societal Institutions and Practices
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography