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.