Work Ethic: New Center at Yale Focuses on Workplace Spirituality
Mary E. O’Leary (New Haven Register, 12 October 2003)

NEW HAVEN — Bridging the divide between spirituality and work is the latest frontier for corporate America, and a new center at the Yale Divinity School hopes to provide some direction.

Over the past 50 years, the workplace has responded to societal pressures to incorporate new policies that are race, gender and family friendly.

“I think we are seeing now in the late ’90s and ’00s that the next natural progression is to be faith friendly, with all the complications that go with that,” said David Miller, executive director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at the divinity school.

A former IBM official and investment banker, Miller is an ordained Presbyterian minister who moves comfortably between the boardroom and the halls of academia.

He is heading the new Ethics and Spirituality in the Workplace program at the school to help “people integrate the claims of their faith with the demands of their work.”

Miller is essentially transferring and expanding the mission of The Avodah Institute, which he co-founded in 1999 in Princeton, N.J.

Avodah, which comes from the Hebrew word for worship and work, seeks to help business leaders apply their faith to meet the challenges of the corporate world.

The idea is to integrate “the often separated worlds of the university, the marketplace and the church,” he said.

“There is an increasing body of research coming out … that companies that have a sort of spiritual dimension to them, tend to have employees that have higher morale, lower absenteeism, more creativity, a better ability to adapt to change and a tendency to have higher ethical standards,” Miller said.

The spirituality that Miller refers to, points, on the one hand, to helping executives set an ethical tone, as well as getting them to recognize the spiritual dimension of their employees.

“If you are treated with dignity and respect, if your whole identity is honored, race, gender, spiritual identity, you are probably going to feel pretty good about going into that workplace,” Miller said.

He said scholars are realizing that sociology, psychology and technology alone are not going to solve all of society’s problems.

“For several years we have cut religion out of the debate, and now people are realizing that theological traditions do have something to contribute to the conversation,” he said.

Miller’s expertise is in leading discussions with corporate executives, who he said “find it really exciting” to come together with others in their same orbit “and let their hair down.”

Can these kinds of discussions help avoid future Enrons?

“If people understand that the big boss really cares about certain issues, it gives other people empowerment” to make the right decisions, he said.

At the same time that corporate managers are tapping their faith traditions for more meaningful connections with their work, business students are crying out for more ethical direction from their professors.

A survey commissioned by the Aspen Institute found that today’s business students are more interested in values-based decision making.

Delivering the bottom line at all costs no longer flies, Miller said.

“There is a sort of value neutral, almost an amorality to the teaching (in business schools), and they are very critical of that,” Miller said of the survey.

Miller said students are looking for guidance from their professors. He said wise executives and teachers can get students thinking about the bigger issues of social justice and treating people fairly, in addition to competently running a company.

Then, “hopefully when they are out there leading organizations, they can have something more than maximizing profits as a mantra to turn to,” he said.

Miller, who brings 16 years of senior management expertise to the conversation, said he is not implying that tapping into your faith makes every business decision easy.

“I don’t think there are simplistic answers. I think it is complicated and messy and tricky” when executives are faced with tough decisions, such as layoffs, he said.

The important thing is to treat people with dignity and respect and “hopefully mitigate the pain of transition.”

“I don’t want in any way to minimize that (a layoff) is a hard thing, but like a lot of hard things in life, how you do it is sometimes more important than what you are doing,” he said.

Miller said he was struck by all the stories about the happy companies in the Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, with their pool tables and wine and cheese parties.

Then, when they ran out of money, “we heard all these horrible stories of how people were fired within seconds and treated like trash.”

He attributes some of it to a lack of maturity, but they were also places “where faith might have mattered” if the executives were “motivated not just by fun and by money, but by trying to treat your people as well as you can, even in hard times.”

Ethics and Spirituality in the Workplace aims to:

~ Develop models for living ethically in the marketplace.
~ Convene conferences and seminars and conduct research.
~ Hold a multiyear conference on moral leadership, in conjunction with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
~ Integrate the often separated worlds of the university, the marketplace and the church.
~ Work with companies to help them develop faith-centered mission statements. Miller is currently working with Tyson Foods.