Do Organizations have a Soul?

The Concept

We often think of our human souls. It’s not common to entertain the concept that organizations have one. And if morale and team spirit is really more a measure of an organization’s emotional Intelligence, then what is it’s spiritual center? It’s more than just it’s ethical guardrails, isn’t it?

Each organization has a sense of character. Just get past the lobby and visit for a day. Watching the organism at work, processing orders, making decisions and dealing with exceptions of any size, tells us much about its confidence of self, belief and value systems, and what it really cares about.

I believe we will see more surveys measuring spirituality in the future. I believe we will see more management and employee groups within organizations that represent the center of an organization’s soul, nurturing and developing it.

I can see the group purposefully designed as a cross section of the hierarchy (not its antithesis) that addresses instances when the arm or the heart is suffering and aids in mending it. And the benefits of cross pollination are enormous.

An organization’s integrity, sense of loyalty and constancy of purpose, can go a long way to build individual and corporate spiritual intelligence. But it needs tending. And a few MBA classes and government regulation are ineffectual vehicles; they strengthen the pen with the gate open.

Regulation

No law or regulation, regardless of its intricacy, stops a lawyer from over charging their client, or a thief from stealing, or a banker from risking your money. The reasons are simple. First, they need irreverence (both for themselves and you). No law can supply it. Second, they must believe they will not get caught. What criminal believes that?

There is one simple instance when regulation helps; retribution. When the horses have got out of the barn, the law is long due for serious correction. First, it has not caught up with the service economy we live in. The fellow who steals $100 from the 7-Eleven at the point of a .22 is likely to receive a longer sentence than the man who defrauds $500 million from a trust in a position of fiduciary duty, leaving thousands of people destitute for the rest of their lives. We could have a healthy discussion about which person was more violent.

Contrary to present practice, I would rather see simpler regulations in cases of breach of fiduciary duty. Here’s a suggestion; all directors and above in those departments in an organization found fraudulent should be found culpable. It is their duty to take care. Ignorance is not a defense in top management. After all, “Do no Harm” is a large corporation’s first priority for executives, and the primary reason they are so dearly paid.

Government regulation would not be needed here. Boards and organizations are free to write up employment contracts however they wish.

Example: The Widget Company

You make widgets that are used by 1000 other firms as a small component of their final product. Your market position is as the low price leader. There is no value to adding technology. “Commodity,” you say. “Hardly significant.”

But the spirit is not enhanced by the nature of the work, but how the work is approached and performed. People do not find meaning in things, but the motives and ideas behind them.

Will you then build the widgets with the loving devotion of an artisan, the best low end priced widget in the world? You may not be able to accomplish it if the factory and offices are adorned like a cathedral. Your overhead costs will be high and your colleagues, employees and suppliers and customers will consider you a hypocrite, laying emotional impediments to negotiation, sales, and proposals.

And what stories, what ceremonies, shall you choose to record and celebrate? Where will the historical story book be kept, and who shall tend it, recounting the great successes of the organization? Be careful which stories you choose. Certainly not the one where your sales person was able to sell at the highest price! The themes and designs of the stories will signify and define the soul of the company.

What rituals will the company adopt? What shall its vacation policy, its morning banter, its treatment of family holidays, say about the hallowed hallways and offices and factories that enclose and surround the soul of the organization when everyone has gone home for the night? What significance will your Associates, suppliers and customers take from your billing, defective, return, and delivery rituals? Will they be the story of the simple, honest widget maker?

What stories shall others recount, regardless of the stories you have written in your book? Institutional spirituality is not built in a day. An organization’s soul must be nurtured consistently over time. But know one thing. The spiritual significance of the work and doing it well is the single largest impediment to fraud, and if it is lacking, its largest tit-for-tat rationalization.