Leadership doesn’t begin with strategy or authority; it begins with the inner work that shapes who you are and what you stand for. One of the most overlooked ways leaders do that inner work is prayer.
“Uh oh,” you might be thinking, “he’s getting ready to pour a cold bucket of old-timey religion over my head. Cue the gospel music!” Hardly. The public workplace is no place for proselytizing, in my modest opinion.
Your Spiritual Center Is Personal
You’re not going to hear me tell you what to believe. I’ll leave that up to your pastor, rabbi, or spiritual guide. You also won’t hear me tell you how much my church can beat yours in a holy rumble, or how my denomination is heaven’s favorite, or that if you don’t do exactly what I tell you, you’ll end up under a dark sky that rains molten lava. Nope, you won’t be getting a chalice full of judgment from me – there ain’t no fun in fundamentalism. Instead, the purpose of this chapter is to simply emphasize the importance of having a spiritual center from which your leadership should operate.
You don’t often read about prayer and spirituality in secular leadership books. Maybe it’s because authors are sensitive to coming off as virtue signaling. Or maybe it’s because some readers view the topics as too vague or too soft or at odds with the ruthlessness that business sometimes requires. My take, though, is that it is not enough to limit your leadership and personal development to just those things that strengthen or inform your thoughts and actions. Being a complete person and an effective leader requires a holistic approach that also factors in the development of your spiritual sensibilities. Who you are as a leader is directly related to who you are spiritually. Your spiritual self will have a big impact on your approach to leading and how you view and treat people.
The Connection Between Spirituality and Leadership
While most leadership authors avoid the topic altogether or tiptoe around it, some notable luminaries have been quite candid about the important connection between spirituality and leadership. Dr. Stephen Covey and Ken Blanchard come to mind, the latter devoting much of his career to advancing the idea of Servant Leadership, which rejects the old school ‘you work for me’ Machiavellian leadership attitude in favor of a more benevolent and altruistic serve you’ approach.
To keep things from getting complicated, it may help to think of your spiritual self as your internal voice, the conscience that lets you know when you’ve done something right or when you’ve done something wrong. It’s the inner wisdom that talks you out of doing something tempting but bad or talks you into doing something hard but good. Part of life’s progression involves learning to trust this voice as it becomes more mature, insistent, and accurate. This voice will live within you for the duration of your life, right up until your last breath, so you’ll do well to make friends with it and learn to heed its wise counsel!
Spirituality and leadership are both aspirational concepts, meaning there will always be a gap between who you are, as a spiritual being and as a leader, and who you aim to be. On your best days, the gap should be small. You’re closing the gap and being your highest spiritual self, for example, when you’re acting with a high degree of self-awareness, integrity, confidence, humility, and gratitude. Those are the same indicators, of course, that you are being your best leader self. Both your spiritual self and your leader self are grounded in your values, ideals, conscience, and inner goodness – your integrity. Thus, your spiritual fitness is connected to how fit you are to lead.
Leadership Flows From the Inside Out
You can study strategy, master management practices, and sharpen your communication skills. All of those things matter. But none of them matter as much as the condition of the person doing the leading. The quiet conversations you have with yourself, through reflection, prayer, meditation, or whatever practice centers you, shape the kind of leader you become.
Those moments help you check your motives. They steady you when pressure mounts. They remind you that the people you lead aren’t just resources or headcount, they’re human beings deserving of dignity, fairness, and care.
So cultivate that inner life. Protect it. Make time for it. However you choose to practice it, your spiritual center will become a compass that keeps you oriented when leadership gets messy, complicated, and uncertain.
When it does, the leaders who stand tallest won’t necessarily be the smartest or the most charismatic. They’ll be the ones who are grounded—leaders whose actions are guided by something deeper than ambition alone. Those are the leaders people trust. Those are the leaders people follow. And those are the leaders who leave things better than they found them.
What practices help you stay connected to the inner voice that guides your integrity—and how does that shape the way you lead?
This post was based on an excerpt from Leadership Two Words at a Time.
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Image by 🌼Christel🌼 from Pixabay
