Real Leadership: How Spiritual Values Give Leadership Meaning

A person's values are the most powerful factor defining his or her actions; everyone has a value system or a spiritual component that triggers their behavior. Our personal values are a more powerful force upon individual action than corporate policy, procedures, tradition or peer pressure. Since the work environment is where the typical worker will spend the most time—more than at home with family, with friends, or at church—it is reasonable that workers will have spiritual demands as well as economic needs from their work lives. Unfortunately, this is a task managers are not prepared to meet.

Real Leadership: How Spiritual Values Give Leadership Meaning argues that values-based—i.e., spiritual—leadership is the only way to do leadership in today's globalized, multi-differentiated world. The author traces the development of real leadership through five generations of theory, then builds a strong case for the values leadership strategy because of its ability to unify workers… and because it allows them to find personal meaning in the workplace task at hand.