Conference on spirituality and management

Things are moving forward and I just attended a conference in Montpellier on the theme of 'Spirituality and Management', a rather exceptional event in France which deserves to be celebrated.

Introducing the notion of spirituality into the field of management and leadership is an idea that comes to us from the Anglo-Saxon world and appeared about twenty years ago, notably with the work of Zohar. The spiritual approach has been explored in the field of management and leadership, but also in psychology with the notion of multiple intelligences.

The fundamentals are simple and I will summarize them for you. Based on the principle that everything is interconnected, that the world is complex (it always has been, but we are only beginning to understand it through environmental crises), and that the search for meaning is inherent in human nature, the so-called 'learning' company asks itself the question, not of what its direct customers want, but of society in general in a given space-time. The question of "For whom" (we produce) has been replaced by the question of "For what" (What need does my company meet). The company must therefore be flexible to adapt to permanent societal changes. And since several brains are better than one, it calls upon collective intelligence, that of its internal partners (employees, etc.) or external partners (subcontractors, consultants, etc.) in a win-win situation. It also uses intuition (or generative listening). This way of proceeding is part of what is called in psychology spiritual intelligence.

The principle is simple, you might say, and it works (see, among others, the example of Airbnb, which revisited the notion of housing supply). So why has spirituality remained a taboo subject in France until today, thus depriving leaders and managers of the use of innovative management techniques, due to a lack of awareness that they exist? In my opinion, because we are faced with a paradox: Spirituality is historically the preserve of religions; Given the excesses of these and their political instrumentalization, secularism was then elevated in France to the level of dogma and the word 'spirituality' banned. And during the conference, this paradox resurfaced with:

• The difficulty of defining the word spirituality, which was often confused with compassion, forgetting rigor and intuition (transcendence), the other two pillars of spirituality;
• The intervention of speakers who talk about their religion and have difficulty freeing themselves from their own beliefs. Yet stepping back from these beliefs as representations of the world is one of the hallmarks of spiritual intelligence, as evoked by existentialists in philosophy and phenomenologists in psychology;
• The confusion between the search for well-being at work and the search for meaning or spirituality; if the two searches can converge, they are indeed two different approaches; one can also question the fact of wanting to make professional places places of well-being.

But things are moving, and even if the subject is new and needs to be worked on, the door is open as far as universities are concerned.

High-quality workshops took place during this conference, during which we discussed values (including the Schwartz model that I mentioned on my blog), personality typology (self-knowledge and identification of each person's role in society according to their personality), consciousness and spiritual intelligence, archetypes (works of Jung or Campbell), societal evolution ('Spiral Dynamics' by Graves) but also innovative approaches based on ancient traditions and... applied to industrial processes.

To be continued....