The Spiritual Skills Every Leader Needs: Presence, Purpose, and Compassion, with William Miller
What’s the right way to bring spirituality into workplace conversations when everyone comes from different cultures and comfort levels? Is culture really the problem, or is it more about our ability to adapt and communicate in ways people can genuinely receive? And what about leaders who make tough decisions from a spiritual place, like keeping a 50-year-old who may never find another job while letting go of younger employees who can recover quickly–and even supporting them in finding new roles?
In this episode, Andrew Cohn speaks with William Miller, co-founder of Values Centered Innovation and long-time explorer of the intersection between spirituality, creativity, and corporate leadership. Miller traces his journey back to a pivotal moment in the 1980s when mystical literature unexpectedly illuminated his work in innovation. That spark, he explains, revealed spirituality, business, and creativity as “facets of a single jewel,” a realization that has guided his work for four decades. He describes how ancient wisdom traditions, including the Bhagavad Gita, informed research on what energizes innovation, revealing three universal motivators: intention, connection, and action. These insights helped Miller develop practical models, such as his “creative journey” process, that cultivate psychological safety, courage, and authentic human connection within organizations.
The conversation also explores cultural nuances in discussing spirituality at work, stories of leaders who ground tough decisions in compassion, and the shift from profit-first business models toward purpose-driven ones. Miller introduces his current project, Reclaiming the Soul of Leadership, a program that helps leaders explore their spiritual foundations, express them through values-based leadership, and foster communities rooted in wisdom and love. Ultimately, he emphasizes that spiritual leadership is less about achieving something new and more about awakening to one’s deeper self, responding rather than reacting, leading with authenticity, and recognizing the inherent worth of every person.
Key Takeaways
Spirituality, innovation, and leadership are deeply interconnected.
Ancient wisdom aligns with modern innovation through intention, connection, and action.
People in the workplace are craving deeper spiritual conversations.
Psychological safety grows when individuals feel seen and valued beyond their roles.
Cultural context shapes how spiritual conversations can be introduced.
Compassionate leadership fosters trust and can drive organizational transformation.
Business is shifting from shareholder value to a broader focus on stakeholder wellbeing.
Spiritual leadership comes from responding with calm rather than reacting from fear.
True leadership development begins with inner exploration and reconnecting with the soul.
Spiritual growth is an awakening, not an achievement,
In This Episode:
[00:00] Introduction to spirituality in leadership
[01:26] Introduction to William Miller
[03:43] William Miller's journey
[04:55] The intersection of spirituality and business
[09:03] Implementing spirituality in corporate work
[18:56] Cultural perspectives on spiritual conversations
[19:07] Spiritual conversations being easier in some cultures compared to others
[20:15] Telling the story and the think, act, innovation process
[24:14] The impact of self-worth and external validation
[24:43] Biological and cultural conditioning
[25:27] The control game and spiritual deficits
[26:00] The notion of unconditional love in Christian tradition
[27:13] Spirituality’s role in leadership behavior
[27:48] Research on spirituality among executives
[28:30] Case study: Lars Colon's turnaround at Oticon
[32:47] Purpose of business: from shareholder wealth to stakeholder wellbeing
[35:38] Making a clear distinction between spirituality and religion
[38:09] Reclaiming the soul of leadership
[43:55] The spiritual path in leadership
Resources and Links
Spirituality in Leadership Podcast
William Miller
Website: https://consciousleadershipacademy.org/ / https://vci.global
The Guild website:https://clgleaders.com/
Andrew Cohn
Music:
Watch our Podcast episode
Transcript
William Miller: By realizing that what my work was about was somehow how spirituality and business and innovation and creativity were all simply facets of a single jewel. And I started realizing that in such a way that, well, you know, this mystical transformation literature maybe tells me more about what it takes to transform who we are as we work and as we lead, and who, how do we transform an organization. Perhaps more than the psychological and other kinds of literature that's out there in the management sphere.
Andrew Cohn: So could you please walk us through a little bit of about what that work has been and maybe what that has led you to?
William Miller: I begin to see how the spirituality could be like a, at least an underpinning and what I was gonna be doing in the work.
Andrew Cohn: Welcome to the Spirituality in Leadership podcast. I'm Andrew Cohn. Spirituality and Leadership is a platform for conversations with leaders at all levels about bringing our spiritual dimensions to our leadership, our teams, our workplaces, and all areas of our lives in order to achieve greater success and fulfillment and build and sustain healthier organizations. If you'd like to connect with me to talk further about these topics and or about individual or team coaching leadership workshops or team alignment, please go to my website, lighthouse teams.com. Enjoy the podcast.
In this episode of the Spirituality and Leadership podcast, I'm so pleased to speak with William Miller. William is the co-founder of the Consultancy Values Centered Innovation that's been around for 15 years plus. He has a deep background in corporate innovation. He is also involved deeply in the Global Dharma Center, has written five books about innovation, some of which were bestsellers in their space, and we talk at length about what has meaning, how to create psychological safety, what leaders can do to help people feel seen and accepted at a deeper level. But most importantly, he talks in great detail about his own journey, his own course of learning from curiosity with a religious text to what that led for him in terms of his own search for meaning for himself, and what that meant in terms of engaging other people in conversations about spirituality as they would define it and what that means in terms of leadership and corporate innovation. Very practical, very clear, very culturally broad, which just personally always excites me and, and makes conversations that much more interesting and a wonderful source of wisdom is William Miller. Enjoy the podcast.
Welcome back to the podcast. I'm so happy to have with me today, or perhaps tonight depending on where you're listening, on the podcast, William Miller, and you've been involved in this space, regarding the intersection of spirituality and leadership for a lot of years. I'm really, really happy to have you on the podcast. I'd love to hear who you are, where you've been, what you've learned, what we could learn from you, and we're gonna do all that in a relatively limited amount of time. But primarily, I wanna say thank you so much for being here.
William Miller: Oh, it's a great pleasure to be here with you, Andrew. I really, really, I've been looking forward to this.
Andrew Cohn: Good. Thank you. Me too. So maybe we should start with a little bit of the past leading up to the present and what your journey has been that has brought you to focus on leadership, on spirituality, and on some of the other broader topics that I know you focus on.And I'll let you discuss as you see fit, but tell us a little bit about your journey please.
William Miller: I think a good place to start. It was back in the 1980s when I was the head of the innovation management program at the Stanford Research Institute, and I was flying out to see a client at 3M. I had picked up this book, not quite at the airport bookstore, but very soon before that, called In Search of Excellence, Tom Peter's book and so on, and I'm reading that on the airplane and got through the first chapter and kind of, if I can just say I got a little bored and picked up another book that I had in my briefcase which is about six different, it's called Mystical Saints from the Christian Tradition, Living in the 14, 15, 16, hundreds or so, devoured that book the rest of the way. Got to 3M, did my presentation. I'm putting the books away, putting, I mean, my materials away, my briefcase and my sponsor there saw this old kind of faded purple gold cover. He says, what's this book? And I said, oh, it's about six different saints and mystics from the Christian tradition. He says. Well, why do you have that? Tell me about that. And I said, sure. Well, you know, it's, I'm just interested in those kinds of things. He said, well, let's talk about that because, you know, let's talk about how that's, you know, important part of what you, who you are and what you do.
And I tell that story because what it led to, besides a good conversation there, it was my realizing that what my work was about was somehow how spirituality and business and innovation and creativity were all simply facets of a single jewel. They weren't really like separate topics to me. And I started realizing that in such a way that, well, you know, this mystical transformation literature maybe tells me more about what it takes to transform who we are as we work it, as we lead, and who, how do we transform an organization, perhaps more than the psychological and other kinds of literature that's out there in the management sphere. And so that has informed me now for 40 something years as a through line typically of what my work in the world is all about. And that's really, I think, the focus that we can talk about today.
Andrew Cohn: Wonderful. That's, it's so interesting that you could track that back to a particular interaction and a particular story, and I, for one among probably hundreds of others, are, should be grateful for that person in the room for asking you about the book.
William Miller: It gave me permission to say, okay, this is an okay conversation to have with my corporate clients if they ask about it.
Andrew Cohn:Beautiful. Well, it's interesting. Another guest on this podcast at one point said, you know, spirituality is just the latest thing where more is allowed to talk about at work. Now there are things in the past that we weren't able to talk about. We can talk about them now. And spirituality perhaps broadly defined of course is now on that list, thankfully. So great. So that's guided your work for decades. So could you please walk us through a little bit about what that work has been and maybe But what it's led you to, that's a very big question you could take it however you like.
William Miller: So this all combines, this is back in the 1980s when it talked about Stanford research. It was right during that time when I took my first trip to India on a little bit of a spiritual pilgrimage and went into a particular multi-faith community where you walk in and the logo of it has like a five petal flower with the symbolism of Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism, Islam Zororastrian, and added the Jewish star also, and it was a place where we could begin to explore our own spirituality from the inside out, no matter what path. We had a very, very open community, very open notion of what your spirituality and what your journey was. And that combined with this work that I'm doing in corporate innovation, and like I said, it was like peace. It was like not even components, it was just like an attribute of this single impulse I had to explore.
And I began to see how the spirituality could be like at least an underpinning. What I was gonna be doing in the work. And as I started to explore that early on, I found is this person you were just talking about that while I was hesitant to bring it up, it's like I might bring it up in the second or third day of a workshop. Oh by the way, this whole model of the innovation process has really built upon the heroes journey and the the spiritual literature. And they would say, oh, tell us more about that. Later on this day, you know, that whole part was more interesting than everything else you talked about, you know? And I began to see that I was the one holding back more than some of the people that I was working with want, who were hungry for that conversation.
Now, I think the thing is still true today, that while we have a lot of fear sometimes about, we don't bring spirituality into the corporate conversation because of religion and all these other kinds of things, we don't want divisiveness, we don't wanna put blocks up between people. At the same time, people are hungry for the conversation and because, I mean, we are all, as we live in these times when we maybe feel very separate, you know, from COVID, afterwards, we may feel very sometimes too isolated in these things about who we really are inside, who we know we really are, but we're not able to feel like we can bring those out into the public or into our friends even sometimes.
It's a hunger that's not easy to bring to the foreground sometimes, but I'm finding it's getting easier again. So let me describe a bit, for example, of how we put this underpinning of spirituality into the corporate work. My wife, Deborah and I, we founded Value Centered Innovation together and we were looking for what is it that actually energizes people to be innovative and to put their discretionary time into their work. You know, because they just. They love what they're doing. They love the fact that they even get paid for this because it's such a good project to work on. And so we did an investigation of, well, when you're being innovative and when you're being creative, where does your energy come from? We gave them 160 different kinds of values. You know, things that they might be striving for around, they have a positive vision of wanting to contribute to the world, or they feel connected to people in a certain way, or they feel responsible, wanting to make sure that they're being a fair person and so on. As we analyze the data of asking these types of questions, we found that those energizing motivations fell into three categories, that the values you had around your intentions, the values you had around your connection with people, the heart connection and the values you had around wanting to take action with those intentions and those connections, and found from research that people always had all three, but they tended to lean in one way or the other in terms of what's a primary motivator for them.
We tied that back to something we were, had studied in India, which is the text of the Bhagavad Gita, which talked about three major paths of spiritual development: a path of wisdom or intention, a path of love or connection, and the path of action and responsible action. So we began to see that underpinning what we were coming up with was something much deeper. And while we didn't have to be explicit about that part of the story, 'cause the research stood on its own, we knew it was tapping into something that's deeper, that people can recognize even at a some unconscious level that's nourishing to them, that has a ring of truth to them and that has that power as we help people bring forth the deepest, truest self of who we are underneath, sometimes even our personalities, something even more fundamental to our identity than just our personality.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah, so what a wonderful way to, I was gonna say that this connection between a traditional religious text and the current very contemporary, what motivates people, and their contributions, is that something you would discuss with people? Did you bring in, for example, the Bhagavad Gita notion, or that wasn't necessary because the research we're supporting it?
William Miller: It wasn't necessary, and there were times when we could bring it in. I'll give you one story, gives an example of how easy that can be. So in India, if you ask people, say we were meeting with the board of the National Minerals Development Corporation, about 10 gentlemen typically sitting around the table there, and we ask them just to say what their name was and what the name meant to them.
Now, in the names of India, my name is Ganesh. Okay, well that's also the name of a particular aspect of deity. Aside here is that when you study the Hindu literature, you find that there's only one deity, there's only one God force, but all these other names are really like attributes of that that's been personalized. It's not really like multiple gods, but anyhow, someone would be like a nation, someone who's gonna be Shiva, so on, and they would say their name and it actually had a spiritual meaning, and we could say, well, what does that mean to live by that name? The closest we have in English is, well, my name is Faith. My name is Hope. You know, well what does that mean for you? And so we found that having a spiritual discussion was as simple as asking people what their name was. That's not true in other parts of the world, but the permissions were more open in that kind of culture to talk about these things. And yet, you know, and I want to be respectful 'cause it's not imposing something on people.That's just a matter of if there's an invitation, we'll do that.
Andrew Cohn: And let me ask you then, and forgive me for being very Western left brained operational about this. I'm owning my cultural current bias, but for you, what would be, and I don't have to ask this critically, I'm asking Invitational when you say we could have a spiritual conversation by simply asking about names, and I'm curious to know for you, what was the value of that spiritual conversation? Was it something purely interpersonal? Was it something that would be of value to the business or innovation or something like that in the organization? Tell me what the value was and like if someone were from the outside, like why are you having this conversation? You could say, well here's the impact. I'm curious to know.
William Miller: Yeah. Let me tie that back to Martin Buber for a moment. You know, he was famously had created this notion of our relationships could be I thou or I it. Well, so many times we come into, we in general, and as people come into these meeting rooms and we relate to each other as I, its, what's the role you have? I'll relate to you according to your role. Well, please. It's just that, you know, it's not other kinds of prejudices. But we tend to feel inspired when more of us, there's a psychological safety that I can bring in who I am into the conversation, what's meaningful to me, what's personal. That is what I strive to be in life.
And so when those conversations can get down to that level where people feel I'm feeling, I'm being seen, and I'm being accepted for who I am, there's a much deeper conversation that's able to happen even around business. I'll give you another example of that. I was working with a, um, corporation in Chicago, made automobile parts and was walking into a meeting where we had done a whole culture assessment and we were talking to the senior executives of the company about the results of that culture assessment. And before I walked in, my sponsor there had said, well, you know, by the way, there's a couple of board members, not board members, executives here who are really looking at this whole idea of trying to be more innovative, it's like that's a low priority for them. We should be spending more time on improving quality and or something else. Efficiency. And so what I did there was I led them through a process which models the hero's journey at some level in which we said, okay, if the goal here. We're here to talk about the goal of having to be innovative as a leading company in the industry that you're on, sitting on the forefront of the industry because of your innovative capabilities. Now, with that goal, I'd like you to write down on three by five cards, what excites you about that? What gives you some anxiety or fear about that, and where are you skeptical about that? And we went around the room and gathered all those kinds of pieces of information. But what that did, it gave those people who were feeling reserved or skeptical about this whole notion, permission to be heard and to be accepted right up front. 'cause I've found that when that skepticism gets buried, it surfaces later on as the idea killers that derail the whole decision making process. Mm-hmm. And I get it out early, but I don't stop there. And the next step was. What is it about you as a leadership team and about the company that gives you confidence that you can achieve this goal? Even amidst those worries, skepticism, fears, as well as excitements? What gives you the courage, the inner strength, the willingness to deal with ambiguity. The willingness to not know how it's gonna happen, but you're willing to go into it and try. We did all of that work before we ever got down to saying, here's the results of your culture survey.
So what that echoes in the hero's journey is typically you're the old classic, you know, Odyssey and Iliad kinds of things. You're on a quest and you come to some impassable river, guarded by a demon, and the first thing you do is you step back from the confrontation and you ask the gods for some kind of gift to an empowerment to bestow upon you with which with that courage, you then call the demon out of its cave. And from there you have the battle. You tried this and that you finally befriend, tame, or defeat the demon, who then becomes the ally that assists you across the other barrier, which is the impassable river. And on the other side, you take stock of what it is that you've gained, learned that you're taking on the next part of your journey.
So what I've added is that, okay, once you have a goal, you don't just jump straight to what are we dealing with? What do we have to wrestle with? We had these other two steps. Where are you at with that goal? What gives you the courage and confidence that you can do it? We added those two little steps in there before getting onto what are you gonna wrestle with? How do you wrestle, create the ideas? What decision do you make? Get to the impassable river colored implementation, and somehow the empowerment you've had along the way has to help you across that impassable river. On the other side, you don't just celebrate what you achieved. Okay, we did it. What did we gain? What did we learn along the way? What, how are we different as a result of doing this? And that's how we built the spirituality into the foundation without even having to talk about it unless this story became helpful to them.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. And I hear the spirituality piece coming in terms of what do we bring personal leadership qualities. Super practical. I mean to hear that is a very useful, simple, strategic planning approach, honestly, right? You know, what's our goal? What are the obstacles? What are the strengths that we bring to it? What can we learn along the way? And then we roll that into the next conversation. What did we know to learn the last time we did this tThat'll help us answer these questions this time? Really, really beautiful. And one thing you mentioned earlier is that perhaps these conversations are a little bit easier in some cultures than others. Could you say more about that please? I have some assumptions, but I'd love to hear what your experience is with that.
William Miller: Lemme say it this way. I'll just give you pieces of experiences. One time we were doing work in Europe, and some of the people there did not want to take a personal assessment test because they were afraid they'd be put into their human resources file. It could be used against them later on. They were so suspicious of anything, even looked so psychological. So sometimes you run into that. Sometimes you'll run into a culture in which the individual questions like what excites you is irrelevant in the culture because your culture teaches you the, the collective comes first. It's not what you're up to. And so when you say, what's your personal vision, what do you mean? So you run into cultural stoppages along the way that you just have to find a way to be gentle with, in some ways you can't force this stuff, but at the same time, you can present hopefully a way in which if the story like this, the story of this, what we call the be think, act, innovation process with a creative journey, we call it.
If that story can bring it out without the other conversation. Because it's a culturally correct way to do it is by telling stories. And if you give them the template for telling their story, it feels natural. And it's also, you know, if you look at it this way, that in some ways our Western culture has grown out to be somewhat mechanistic, somewhat individualized, and in some cultures aggressive or perceived as aggressive. Then it's important to be authentic, but still blend with the culture. I know that. Example, the first time I went to Japan, I recognized in myself the old habit I had to get rid of, even when I used to be the manager of corporate training development for a major manufacturing company in the US. Victory equipment, made gas welding products, and I'd find myself on the telephone going, well, John, let's see what we're gonna do about this particular issue that you've raised. And at the very end of the phone call said, by the way, how are you? In fact, because I then found if I tried to be very businesslike and get down to the point with the Japanese. It was like I got the same blank stare because the relationship building had to come first, and so it's important to know that it's not that the culture has barriers, but that you need to have a versatility of your own ability to blend with culture. It's almost like having to speak the language.
Andrew Cohn: I think it's exactly like that. Yeah. And no, it's not a barrier. A barrier makes it sound like a problem. If you come to the edge of a lake or a road to navigate, you figure out how to navigate it. The road's not a problem. When we talk about cultural barriers, to me, it also smacks a little bit of imperialism or judgment or something like that, those barriers over there and those cultures. But we certainly have them here as well.And actually, let me ask you this. In your experience, with the culture here in the US mm-hmm. What do you see as the, if we don't call them barriers, but the cultural dimensions that impact how people can or do, are most willing to tell their stories? What's your experience with that?
William Miller: I'm gonna start that with a little, got another little story. When I was in graduate school. So I was studying in our department. With a master's degree of humanistic psychology was in place in West Georgia, just west of Atlanta. And at the time it only had, it was one of only two schools in the whole country that had a program on humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow and others since then, rather than the behavioral psychology emphasis of that generation. And I overheard just a conversation between one of the professors there, and a woman who had been raised in Thailand, his name was Ted Galvin. And she was talking with the parents and prospective students who'd be coming to the school. And she said, you know, my initial work in psychology was when people who were working with Maslow would come over here and wanted to do psychological investigations with the Thai people and I would help translate and do all that. Got really interested in the work and came back to the United States myself, and became a graduate and a professor in that. But those first months in the USA were very puzzling to me. Because here, these people were incredibly busy, incredibly successful compared to the world I had been in, and yet there was no inner peace. And finally I realized that by and large, the people here in America were living by the thing of, I'm not worth anything until I can prove myself. And then once I proved myself, it's just like last Sunday's football game. I have to go do it again. Then I have to do it again, then I have to do it again. Prove myself by the car I drive, by the job I got, by the spouse I have, by the money I make, whatever it is by what my children do. And she said, where I was raised, we were taught that we were valuable just by being a part of the universe. You couldn't gain it and you couldn't lose it. But there wasn't art to living a life with that truth.
I look around at myself and even in my seventies now, still say, well, am I still trying to prove myself in some way? It's a long road to unhook that. And it can be, I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm just not, I don't see value. And then what is when other people don't see us for value, they see us as someone who's, oh, I'm the consumer to them. You know? As the i it as you, the i, it comes back in, you know, and we, I it ourselves, our culture, yes, it's driven. It's driven by that. And it's also driven by something else. From the time we're an infant, biologically we're raised and culturally we're raised with a notion that turns into a solid belief that if what I feel inside depends upon what's outside of me a baby, I'm hungry inside it must be I need food. But later on it's you make me so angry that makes me so frustrated. This person makes me so happy all the time. We use that language, and even without exactly that language still has the assumption that if I wanna feel happy, I have to get all these people and all these conditions around me to line up according to my desires. And if I can get those desires met, then I'm happy, at least for the while until it turns out to be something else. And so our entire lives at that point, becomes a control game. How do I control the people and shape them in the businesses and whatever else I'm doing? How do I get that to line up either to, so that I can feel satisfied inside or that I can show that I'm, I'm more something than I've had my successes that drives, I'm gonna call 98% of the global economy, but certainly the American culture. And I think both of those are spiritual deficits. There is a notion. I was raised Christian. I loved learning from other spiritual sources as well. But you know, in the Christian tradition, there's the whole notion of love your enemy. And it goes on to say and show that you have the sea, same DNA as the divine, be the children of the father, who lets the son shine on the just, and the unjust and the rainfall and the good and the evil, or something close to that, that the love is unconditional. You can't gain it. You can't lose it. It's just gonna shine. It's going to be. You're in that love all the time. You're valuable. You can't lose it. And ease and notion of love, your enemy means even that which you might feel most opposed to, you know, which is now going to, you're gonna shut off your love because of that. Well then your love becomes like a faucet. You turn it on and off. Whereas the lesson there that was being taught is no, be like the father. Let your love shine. Especially in the places where the love is not shining from anybody else. That's what you have the gift to add. There's that kind of difference of life view that's a spiritual view that could seriously and wonderfully inform and guide people as leaders.
Andrew Cohn: Great. So thank you so much for that. And I love how you're landing that in terms of can guide people as leaders. So could you perhaps share a few examples of how that type of, approach is not the right word, but that type of philosophy or mindset or heart set or spirit set, if there is such a thing that can guide the behavior of leaders. Could you talk about in what ways might that guide leaders, for example, in giving feedback, in setting a vision, in holding people accountable, anything like that? I'll back up on the specifics. What would you share about that?
William Miller: Yeah. Let me say that first of all, that you know, this, that topic. Again, has interested me ever since that time in the eighties with the search of excellence and so on. At that time, I considered myself probably the worst read business consultant because I didn't like business books. But in the early two thousands, my wife and I sponsored some research with two other colleagues, one from Denmark, the senior professor in the Coga Business School, and his wife, who's a major journalist in that country. And we interviewed over three dozen top, top senior executives, senior VP was the lowest, you know, CEO, managing director, board member, chairperson of the board about their spiritual view of life, what it was, how they nourished it, overtly they, this is gonna be public, and tell us stories of how that informed and guided you as he went along. And one of those I'd like to highlight here is a man named Lars Colon. He was a turnaround specialist in Denmark. There was a company called Oticon that had been a premier industry leader in hearing aids, and yet all of a sudden things just fell apart. They lost half their value in one year. Their market share was less than half of what it had been in its premium, and they hired him to turn the company around and he immediately faced a bigger problem than he ever thought. And so what he was faced with is to, first of all, have to do a major layoff. Now to back up, he was a person who was raised in a Christian tradition, really thought that in for himself, his spiritual theme was to love your neighbor as yourself and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So now he's faced with laying people off. So what he did, he says, okay, first of all, I need to identify the top extra 12 people who are absolutely essential to turning this around. They stay next. There's this group of people who have been with the company for a long time, and they're over 50 years old. They stay. And why is that? Because in Denmark at that time, as we were told that if you're over 50 and you're out of a job, you have a very difficult time finding a new one to support your families. He says, I'm not gonna do that to those people. So the first line after his core six or 12 was gonna be the people who had had the easiest time getting a new job after that, which is counterintuitive to our way of let's get rid of the lower branches of this productivity trick. So he didn't do that. He says, and I met with every single person personally, and I had to be in the company of that angst and that uncertainty that they were facing and maybe other feelings that they were having, I was not gonna delegate that to my managers. Met with everyone says, here's what we'll do to help you find a new job. And when its wing was down, he had a core left and somehow they all went, Once they understood what he had done. But that was only the first half. The second half was how he revived the company. And so he spent really a good year or more helping the company decide who it was. 'cause they were always known as the leader in the technology of hearing aids. He says, but we are not in the technology business. What we're in the business of is to give people the life they want with the hearing that they have. That became the actual lens by which they determine what departments have to change, what projects to get let go of or not. Does it add up to giving people the life they want with the hearing that they have?
And not only did the employees rally on that, that had heart and meaning to them. It wasn't just technology. There were people there, but it also enthused their distributors and their customers. Someone gets us within two years, they were profitable. Five years after that, they had increased their revenues by old, this is what the power of that spiritual underpinning, what meant to him, it guided him in a way that would be unconventional and yet was always human based from a spiritual thing, treating his neighbors as he would wanna be treated and loving your neighbors. So that's one good example I can give you right there.
Andrew Cohn: Beautiful, and I can think of that as somebody could describe his ethos, his impact as values based as legacy based as et cetera, that it need not be described as spiritual, and yet it certainly could be, and in his case it would be because he would, he might articulate it that way, that for him. This is where from which the values emerge, is that place within him. And so I love that as an example of something that is from the outside could be relatable as this is just a very powerful mission in the world. This is what we want our impact to be as an organization and someone else could look at it as it's grounded in spirituality and n no one view is, is greater than the other in, in my perception, but rather just to recognize that that which fuels him and provides meaning for him is not only welcome, but benefits the organization and the people in it and the customers, as you said. Of course
William Miller: Yeah. Now, this circles back to in the bigger conversation, what's the purpose of business? Okay. Classically, the purpose of business is to increase shareholder wealth. I remember being at Levi Strauss and hearing about a whole celebration they had of bringing back some of the real old timers that are retired and to meet all together again. Have a reunion. Tell their story and the stories they told her about amazing times they'd worked with this person or that team and what it was like to rally behind a crisis and stuff. No one ever said, this is how they said it. There's no one ever told the tale of, gosh, do you remember that year when we were projected to be 14% growth and we hit 18%? That wasn't what, those are outcomes, but they're not goals for people. And this is a round table, some 6, 10 years ago. Said, you know, we've changed our mind. The purpose of business is not shareholder wealth. It's stakeholder wellbeing that includes shareholders and employees. And I know there was a lot of skepticism by how much that's just gonna be words. And some companies have really tried to live by that. Unilever being one. You know, when Paul Pulson took over as CEO and chairman, you know, he said, we're not gonna do quarterly projections. That derails us. And he, there was a hue and cry for some, and he said, well, listen, you know, if that's gonna make you so unhappy, I'd just politely request you should just take your money somewhere else then that you'll be happier with. If you're gonna be unhappy with us, this is where we're going. He had the courage to stand up against some of those norms, but it's like now you look at companies like Patagonia or others that say, you know, our mission is bigger than what we as a company can do for them, it's to save the earth. For General Motors, Mary, I'm forgetting Mary's last name. The chairman there, you know, she wants to, you know, the purpose of GM is no accidents. No deaths, no congestion, and something else. Mary Barra, I think. Yeah. Mary Barra. There it is. Thank you. But she said something, I'm just paraphrasing, but it was like, our goal overall is to solve and to deal with a bigger issue than just selling automobiles. We can't do that alone, but we can make our contribution to it. This is what inspires younger generations and as people, as business have turned toward not just a mission, but a purpose. Now you're tapping into something deeper, and you could call that spiritual.
Andrew Cohn: Well, it certainly could be fueled by spiritual themes, or at least themes that for some people tap into some spiritual experience or training or background or culture.
William Miller: I would say it's this point of the conversation. Let's really make a clear distinction between spirituality and religion. I mean, spirituality is at the core of how religion was originally founded, whether or not that core really stayed alive amidst all beliefs and traditions and rituals. In groups, now groups, but certainly there's spirituality. There's a perennial wisdom in those different spiritual traditions, but also for some people, they don't need those traditions to tune into what they think is that higher relationship with a source of creation or a relationship among everyone as a field of consciousness or however people want to say that. And so for me, in doing this work on like reclaiming the soul of leadership. And I've mentioned to you before, it's about welcoming the entire group of people who see life in spiritual terms and even those who don't. But looking at the question of the meaning that you find in life and how do you find that and how do you share that? And it makes a big difference between searching for uniformity versus unity. You know, Martin Luther King talked about that. Mary Parker talked about that as the earliest 1920s management consultant. They both made it very clear, uniformity is to try to get rid of diversity. Unity requires diversity to even use the word right.
We don't have the uniformity of America. We don't have the uniform states of America. We have the United States where each state is recognized as having its differences. You need that diversity to even have the word unity, and that's where we can seek a type of unity without looking for uniformity. Let each culture have its tradition, have its differences, find out what weaves this together and it's this conversation about spiritual values or human values, you know, if you wanna use them that term, you can cross over between those very easily. And so that's, I think, a way, again, to frame this conversation when we get into leadership.
Andrew Cohn: Right. Well, and I believe that leaders have an obligation to be inclusive. In fact, it's an imperative if you want buy-in and commitments and high performance from people, that means there's a lot of different kinds of people and they contribute in different ways and again, you know, if people don't weigh in, they won't buy in and it won't be as committed. But I just wanna take in our last few minutes, you touched upon the reclaiming the soul of leadership work. Could we open that up for just a few minutes? Because that I understand, to be a significant part of your current work, if that's true. So could you please talk about what that is and then also just where people can find it,by the way, as I have found it, which is how we found each other. But please talk a bit about that work.
William Miller: Sure. As I mentioned earlier, you know, I've entered into my seventies and it was time to shift gears between the corporate innovation work and putting a lot of that aside and turning to this other work that has been brewing and like I've been talking about, it's been being incorporated more as I call it, the the drum percussion line of the music rather than the melody line in all the work we've been doing. And it just came time for me to say, let's take all of this body of work. The research we've done, the writings we've done, and bring it into the melody line. And so now we've packaged that up as a program called Reclaiming the Soul of Leadership. Right now I'm in the stage of piloting it and carefully done and starting in the next of year, we'll be releasing a program on that from the Conscious Leadership Academy, which is based in Europe. And in continuing to offer it through. Conscious Leadership Guild, which is a professional organization that I belong to, and basically doing it as an online program that lasts about nine sessions. Going through exploring or kind of bringing alive, what is your spiritual view of life? What's your spiritual theme, just like we did with Lars Colon? How do you explore your spirituality from the inside out? How do you take the next steps for you and whatever your path is, whatever your growth is, and then moving into how do you bring that spiritual foundation that you have of who you are into your leadership, especially through values at first 'cause that's the easier conversation to surface. And then how do you bring it more explicitly into, or implicitly even into some of the more major things you're trying to do with your leadership role. And finally, how do you evoke a sense of love and wisdom in a smaller or larger community that you can give to and can give to you to support this so that you're not isolated? And that's the agenda that we're following and drawing upon different writings, drawing upon the interviews, the research we've done before. That's the program. It excites me a great deal. It feels very just like the completion of how is spirituality and business and innovation and creativity, facets of a single jewel. And if I were to name that jewel, I hesitate to do so. I don't want to, but I would call it love. I call it unconditional love, the kind of love that I learned about– let the sun shine on the just and the unjust, the rainfall on the good and the bad. Let that be a perspective where I'm not reacting to the world, I'm responding to the world. I'm even the world of my business, even the world of my clients, even the world of my friends and family. I'm responding from a place that is truly in depth of me, which when I'm in that place, it's peaceful, it's loving. And at that point there's also an access to wisdom that I don't have when I'm reacting.
I will also add this to it. My younger brother passed away in the summer in a way that was very heartbreaking for many of us. And when I was at the funeral, I could feel a deep compassion and a deep peace and still had my tears and my sorrow, grief. And it's that ability to hold even those emotions in a space of love, in a space of peace. Which felt like my soul really rose up to the occasion to allow me to be in a situation that was not easy to be in, but it became easy and became easy to be with others in their grief. And I say it this, I had this story for you because it shows how we can bring this into the most deeply personal parts of our world, and certainly when we're leaders in an organization. I love the way that one executive put it. It was Max, you recognize him, but he said leadership is a serious meddling into other people's lives. Right? And, we can bring that level of depth. This is what Lars Colon did, decide how to foster and nourish the people around him to do some extraordinary resurrection work with the company. And I think that's what we're all capable of doing when we show up. As our true deeper selves and we can be authentically that. And you know, ultimately when you've been around those kind of people, you in general, those are the ones you trust.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah. And there's another significant impact right there.
William Miller: You know, if you earn the trust, not just by what you do, but by who you are. And by being trustworthy, that boy, they can rely on you that what you are inside is what you'll say and what you'll say is what you're gonna do. You know?. When you get that. Then you have earned being a leader.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah. And loyalty and engagement and lower levels of turnover, et cetera. And all that follows. Yeah. That's a beautiful, thank you for, it's a beautiful way to land this conversation. Thank you again. For introducing us to some of these resources and what has contributed to some of these resources, some of this wisdom, and when we post this episode, we'll have some websites available for people to have that information there. Anything else you might want to add just to capstone this conversation?
William Miller: What a nice, open question. I would say, we're not talking about something you have to achieve. We're talking about awakening to who you are. That to me is the whole caps, the spiritual pathway. I sometimes use this in America, the old story of Route 66, 2400 mile highway between Chicago, down through New Mexico and over to Santa Monica, California. And you didn't drive that because you needed to get there fast. You drove it because there were about 2,400 books about all the adventures you could have on Route 66, the places to visit the scenery to see the people you could meet. And it's like if you hustle past all that, like you're trying to get somewhere and achieve something, then you missed it. And instead, to me, the spiritual path in leadership is enjoy the ride, enjoy the moments, don't measure being good or bad at it, you know, it's just each moment when you try to bring that deeper self of you into it. Each moment has its own reward, just like each adventure on Route 66 has its own reward.And that, to me, is the principle behind the whole spiritual journey. And so that's what I offer here at the end.
Andrew Cohn: Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing, to be continued on many levels.
William Miller: Yes.
Andrew Cohn: And,thank you again for your time and your wisdom.
William Miller: Thank you. Thank you so much, Andrew. Really appreciate it.
Outro: Thank you for listening to Spirituality in Leadership. If you want to access this wealth of knowledge and insight on a regular basis, please subscribe to the show. Join the network of leaders who want to do and be better. You can go to the site, spiritualityinleadership.com. Or your preferred podcast platform to catch all the episodes and learn more. Until next time, take good care of yourself.