 |
About Woodstock | Programs | Publications | Search |
Msgr. Richard Liddy and Rev. John Haughey, S.J.IN FOCUS: Catholic CEOs Gather for an
"Exploration of Vocation"Seminar Marks Collaboration Between Woodstock and Seton Hall University
The executives filed into the meeting room and began talking business. But they were not there to discuss the quarterly earnings picture or the latest plan for increasing market share. These executives - nearly two-dozen heads of companies - had come to reflect on how their faith and businesses interact in their lives and work.
The occasion was a July 15-16, 2004, seminar presented by the Center for Catholic Studies and Institute on Work at Seton Hall University together with the Woodstock Theological Center. It was titled, "The Vocation of the Catholic CEO: The Future of Corporate Leadership," and drew extensively on Woodstock's approach to theological reflection and spiritual discernment.
For Woodstock, the seminar illustrated renewed efforts to partner with kindred organizations in sharing its methods of reflection and in particular group reflection. The collaboration with Seton Hall in South Orange, New Jersey, also highlighted renewed activity by Woodstock's Arrupe Program for Social Ethics in Business, under the direction of Terry Armstrong (see sidebar).
Held at an executive retreat center in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, the gathering gave high-level executives an opportunity to reflect on their experiences in the corporate world, in a relaxed and off-the-record - as well as prayerful - atmosphere. If there was a single consensus reached there, it was that recent failures of business ethics - dramatically highlighted by corporate accounting scandals - are in essence failures of ethical leadership.
Companies may have high-minded mission statements, but lower-level managers and employees will always take their cues from the words and especially the actions of senior management, according to executives who attended the seminar. As the chairman of a financial services company said during one exchange, "People do not listen with their ears. They listen with their eyes."
The executives felt free to share their own ethical quandaries. One executive, as a young personnel manager, was told to fire an employee on Christmas Eve. He followed the order. "I had to - I had a wife and seven kids," he explained. But he added that ever since, "It's kind of haunted me."
The discussions, initially focusing on personal ethical dilemmas, gradually turned to larger questions related to nurturing an ethical business environment and pursuing business as a vocation.
Bridging those two themes of personal vocation and business culture, one CEO said he believes the role of a firm is to help people develop their careers while harmonizing their work and family lives. This executive, who runs an engineering and environmental services firm, said he tells his employees: "We're not here to have you end up divorced. You have to strike a balance. We don't want to make you a successful business person and an unsuccessful person."
Such dialogue among corporate executives is unusual, said William Toth, a theologian and former business owner who co-directs Seton Hall's Institute on Work. He told the Woodstock Report that conferences on business ethics are generally "dog and pony shows" in which prominent speakers appear before passive audiences of business executives.
"We generally don't engage CEOs," said Toth, speaking of the typical business ethics gathering. "They [the executives] usually don't go through the process of unveiling themselves. They're in uniform. They're not relaxed." He added, "What we want to do is get them into settings where they are relaxed, where they can open up and tell their stories. The narrative approach is very important here."
That is where the Woodstock Center comes in, said Toth, noting Woodstock's many years of encouraging theological reflection among leaders in business as well as other professional arenas.
He said Seton Hall has initiated the latest dialogue effort among CEOs with funding from the Lilly Endowment in support of "theological exploration on vocation." And, he said Woodstock has offered up models and methodologies of such exploration through (among other initiatives) its seminars on business ethics. Those seminars featured extensive dialogues on a range of concrete issues such as corporate takeovers and managed healthcare.
Toth pointed in particular to Woodstock's 1990 publication, Creating and Maintaining an Ethical Corporate Climate (Georgetown University Press). That consensus statement emanated from two years of reflection among business leaders, what the publication described as "an investigation into the influence of a corporate environment upon an individual's ethical behavior."
Besides Toth and Woodstock's Armstrong, facilitators of the seminar included Msgr. Richard Liddy, director of the Center for Catholic Studies and a Woodstock fellow; Gasper Lo Biondo, S.J., Woodstock's director; John Haughey, S.J., a Woodstock senior fellow; and Andrew O'Connor, CEO of A.J. O'Connor Associates in Florham Park, New Jersey.
The seminar began with a reception and dinner, followed by a discussion of "ethical leadership skills and tools," and continued through the next morning and early afternoon with sessions on corporate culture, faith-based leadership, and future challenges. Most of those who signed up for the seminar head small or mid-sized
The gathering ended with Father Lo Biondo leading the CEOs through an "Examen," a prayerful exercise of reflection developed by St. Ignatius Loyola. They recollected the conversations and their feelings at particular moments of the dialogue, in a spirit of thanksgiving.
The business leaders expressed a feeling that even apart from the content of conversations, the process of group reflection is valuable by itself.
"It's powerful when people come together and speak about their destiny, share about their purpose," said one CEO. "You can't put your finger on it and measure it, but it's powerful. You know it when you see it. It's a discernment."
Both Woodstock and its Seton Hall partners look at the seminar as the start of a collaboration involving core groups of Catholic business executives. Plans are underway to continue the conversation with an emphasis on promoting the idea of a business vocation.
Events Highlight Woodstock Business Programs
"The Vocation of the Catholic CEO" was the first of three major events underlining the Woodstock Theological Center's work in the field of business ethics and spirituality.
As the Woodstock Report went to press, the Center was also preparing to conduct a three-day retreat in Pennsylvania for business executives and their spouses. That was to be followed by an evening discussion in Washington on the recent crisis of corporate governance in America.
The October 8-10 retreat, titled "Building God's Kingdom at Work: Is Business a Calling?" was to be hosted by The Jesuit Center for Spiritual Growth in Wernersville, Pennsylvania.
Involving spouses in such an event is one way of helping the couples better integrate their family and work lives, said Terry Armstrong, who directs Woodstock's Arrupe Program for Social Ethics in Business.
Armstrong recalled that as an organizational consultant in the late 1970s and 1980s, he was involved in career counseling for high-level executives. He soon began to realize that the executives were "getting their careers in order - and their marriages were breaking up. They were too career-centric."
So Armstrong and his wife, Anne Marie, began offering workshops titled "Planning to Stay Together," which involved spouses in career and life counseling.
The Wernersville retreat extends this idea into spiritual counseling and discernment, focusing on "the vocation that each of us has and how receiving and accepting God's grace frees us from the abusive aspects of work such as workaholism and busyness," says the event brochure.
Retreat co-directors included Woodstock fellow John C. Haughey, S.J., former Woodstock director James L. Connor, S.J., marketing consultant Thomas J. Danks and investment adviser George Limbach, as well as Armstrong. Both Danks and Limbach are involved in the Philadelphia chapter of the Woodstock Business Conference, which is made up of 18 local groups nationwide and is also coordinated by Armstrong.
The October 12 evening of conversation, titled "A Crisis of Corporate Governance," was scheduled to feature Richard Thornburgh, a former U.S. Attorney General and Pennsylvania governor. Thornburgh has served as the court-appointed examiner in the WorldCom bankruptcy proceedings, and he was to be joined by two other presenters, former Catholic University of America president and economist William J. Byron, S.J., and Thomas Saporito, senior vice president of RHR International. James L. Nolan, former director of the Woodstock Business Conference, was tapped as the moderator.
The invitation-only event was to be held in the Woodstock Theological Center Library at Georgetown University, under the joint sponsorship of Woodstock and the Georgetown University Law Center.
