Why vigour and virtue both matter at work
Phil and Tez reflect on working life
The two of us have been studying the workplace together for several years, now. Phil Hanson ran IBM’s Manufacturing Consultancy business before retiring and retraining as a (rural) vicar. Terry Young worked in R&D and then became a university professor before setting up his own consulting company and then retiring. Both of us believe in aligning what we are and do at work with what we are and do at home and what we are and do at church. We have both failed many times and on many fronts.
Mind the gap
We believe there is a gap in Christian thinking around the workplace. There is plenty of material around being effective at work, or building effective businesses and some of it is written from a faith based, even Christian standpoint. There is plenty about ethical behaviour, and some of that comes from a Christian standpoint, too.
What there is much less of is guidance from Christians who care passionately about work and have a clear ethical framework for work. Most preachers left the workplace to go full time and so most messages about the workplace tackle fairly basic scenarios around integrity and personal relationships.
Mark Green’s seminal Thank God it’s Monday (see here) and the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity (see here) have promoted a more informed dialogue around Christians and the workplace. By and large, such material focuses more on the ladders than the snakes or the dice. It’s possible that a more forensic or critical analysis is needed. Perhaps as a result, there has been more than one high profile example in the past year of a prominent Christian high up in an organisation whose ethical behaviour has been challenged.
The entrepreneurial contribution
Another group shedding fresh light on the ethics of employment are Christian entrepreneurs and their investment partners. We have recently published two pieces with BAM – Business as Mission (see here). Entrepreneurs are great, but they are hopelessly optimistic and would fail if they listened to all the negative messages around them. Nonetheless, the optimistic bias of much of the Christian literature around business ethics means that while the gap has been partially addressed, it has yet to be properly closed.
In the first piece – Kingdom Business: The Intentional Pursuit of Virtue and Excellence (read here) – we explore a very simple idea – that excellence in business is not the same as virtue.
We accept that the two are not completely decoupled, but there are enough toxic workplaces making plenty of money and enough well-intentioned companies that don’t, to justify our crossed axes. We discuss this more in the article.
The second piece is, Virtue is priceless: For Everything Else, There’s Excellence (read here). As suggested by the title – and with a nod to Mastercard’s famous ad campaign – we looked at tag lines to see how even secular companies aspire to offering us reliability, relationship, and renewal – even if the reality or the totality of their contribution is far from what the strapline promises.
We connected these quasi-religious ideas from secular businesses back to an ancient and overtly Christian framework – faith, hope and love – in our booklet, How to merge Kingdom and business: the most excellent way (see here), where we overlaid this triplet on some of the best business models around. These focus on process, people and purpose and lead to insightful overlaps with a Christian ethic. The upshot was the RR3 Framework, which we will refer to from time to time in these posts and which we explain in the Virtue is priceless… article above.
Problem solving
Our contribution to date has been skeletal at best, with a few connections and some broad thinking, but we believe there is scope to build on this. To show the power of this framework, let’s consider two tricky problems, one work-related one theological that are more tractable under the lens we’re proposing than under more traditional analysis.
Faith or works
Perhaps one of the reasons this is such a contentious divide in Christendom is because it’s been framed by theologians. From a workplace perspective, it’s clear that a business without excellence is on the road to becoming a non-business with or without virtue, and that without virtue, a business is on the road to toxicity with or without excellence. If forced by a theologian to pick one side to the exclusion of the other, you’re sunk.
Protest or engagement
This false dichotomy in the secular workplace pitches Christians either into going with the flow, on the one hand, or abstaining or running their own businesses (and there are Christians who are self-employed for exactly that reason), on the other.
The RR3 framework, properly understood, gives Christians a voice that says:
· This problem isn’t just a matter of personal conscience
· Here’s what’s wrong in both ethical and business terms
· Here are some ways to fix it
Over the coming weeks, we plan to post of workplace issues, identifying some of the issues around snakes and dice that aren’t always discussed, as well as the ladders of opportunity.
In summary, virtue and excellence are independent variables but surprisingly, faith hope and love are quite tightly connected to modern main business excellence models. By mastering this thinking, you might have more to say at work and better ways to say it.
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