October 11, 2006
Faith in the Workplace
CareerJournal offers another well written article covering a topic of interest to us – Managing by the (Good) Book Some Mix Business with Faith. As Christians, we have been in many discussions about faith in the workplace. We are strong supporters of it and do not believe that there needs to be this distinct difference between work life and spiritual life. In fact, it is impossible to separate faith from any aspect of life.
I was not aware of this group:
And C12 Group — a network of executives, like Mr. Dillon, who meet monthly to discuss management trends and the tricky intersections of religion and commerce — has grown from three sets of 12 Christian business executives in 1992 to nearly 550 members today.
Judeo-Christian principles provide a bountiful resource for directing sound business doctrine. An example that I have personally used was articulated in the article:
Mr. Dillon became uncomfortable with the company’s habit of paying its bills a few weeks late, even as it pushed customers to pay on time.
I have worked for companies in the past that have completely subscribed to this hypocrisy. One of the small companies that I worked for required that the salespeople collect on past-due invoices. However, the company purposely delayed paying its bills per the owner’s directive.
One part of the article I found amusing was this sentence:
And lawyers say it’s generally not a problem to run a public company on faith-based principles, as long as the executives make those principles clear to shareholders, and make sure they don’t follow faith to the exclusion of investor interests.
Apparently lawyers have the final say about matters of faith in the work world. Some people would find irony in that statement (I put that in here for some of my lawyer friends). Nonetheless, it is a fair article that discusses a topic that all-too-often is viewed as taboo in business.