CHAPTER 11: Spiritual Leadership

When one thinks of the fast food industry, it is easy to imagine an endless string of short-timing, surly teenagers spitting on burgers and upending bags of French fries. Few of the images associated with fast food call to mind higher callings, enlightenment, or strivings for spiritual perfection. Unless you are infatuated by potatoes and breaded, fried, patty-shaped comestibles, your time in fast food joints is likely to be most enjoyable when it is brief. This extends to employees as well, with annual turnover in the fast food industry among hourly workers fluctuating around 107%. However, the chicken-focused fast food company, Chick-fil-A, boasts a substantially lower turnover rate of 60%, along with strong growth and profits (Schmall, 2007). What makes Chick-fil-A different? Something seems to create a unique working environment that defies some of what ails the rest of its industry. As someone who worked at a fast food franchise for a total of three days before quitting, I may not be the best person to speak on this matter. However, the fact that I was offered a managerial position in my brief time cooking burgers highlights the fact that it is hard to find dedicated talent in the fast food industry. Perhaps frying chicken patties is less mindlessly mechanical than assembling burgers, but this seems to be an unlikely explanation of the vast differences in employee retention between Chickfil-A and its industry benchmarks. As those who have stopped by a Chickfil-A restaurant on a Sunday evening only to find it dark and lifeless can attest, the management of Chick-fil-A is willing to forego business and profit in order to serve other interests. In Chick-fil-A’s case, those interests are staunch religious beliefs, which lead not only to closure on Sundays, but also to numerous other practices that infuse the workplace with the presence of concerns that transcend a focus on profitability. For example, Chick-fil-A sponsors foster homes and Bible study classes. Although not everyone who works for this company values the Christianity promoted by its ownership, all things being equal, it is tempting to examine Chick-fil-A as a case study of the impact of spiritually-driven leadership. A relatively recent development in leadership theory, spiritual leadership explicitly focuses on ultimate human concerns such as morality, meaning in life, and transcendent values. At the same time, spiritual leadership shares many common features with earlier leadership theories. This chapter will use transformational leadership as a platform for a review of spiritual leadership in the context of workplace spirituality. It will be argued that central to the pursuit of spiritually-inspired leadership is the importance of acting in accordance with one’s beliefs and values and laying out a clear shared vision for one’s organization.