Course Overview

Spiritual Lives of Leaders engages in a conversation that we seldom have at Harvard Business School – or across Harvard generally – that we believe you’ll find fascinating, inspiring, challenging, and useful. We invite everyone to participate equally in this conversation – whether you describe yourself as interested and curious, spiritual but not religious, an atheist or agnostic, a charismatic believer, or a lapsed fill-in-the-blank.

Students who experienced the three-year J-Term origins of this course came brimming with deeply personal and practical questions: What is spirituality? How can it be cultivated? What does spiritual leadership look like? How can I reconcile apparent tensions between my faith and the demands and aspirations of career and life? What do I need to know about the faith traditions of others to succeed as a leader operating in different communities around the world? Why do the institutions of religion so often fall short – or do real damage, contributing to deep division and conflict?

In Spiritual Lives of Leaders, we aim to create a space apart from the high hurry of our day-to-day lives to explore these questions. We’ve curated an amazing community of leaders, scholars, and thinkers from around the world to help us. Many of the leaders we invite fit us into very crowded calendars precisely because this area is important to them, and yet they don’t often get asked about their deepest commitments and influences that inform their leadership.

Why Should You Take This Course?

The following are questions that students who have taken this course have shared with us. If any of these resonate with you, that’s a pretty good sign that you would find value in joining our conversation and our community:

Living an Integrated, Purposeful Life

• “How do I live an integrated life where I can bring my faith and my own beliefs into the workplace? How do I integrate my career aspirations with my own personal values and personal aspirations?”
• “I’m curious what I can learn from religions not my own to make me a better leader for the future teams I get the opportunity to lead.”

Role of Spirituality in the Lives of Leaders

• “How do senior leaders translate convictions and insights from their private, internal spiritual lives to their public, external leadership?”
• “What is the role of spirituality and religion in the lives of high-pressure decision-makers? Is there a difference between the two?”
• “How can I build deep, enduring relationships with my business partners in other cultures by understanding their spiritual practices and commitments?”

When Faith and Work Collide

• “How can I hold strong to my personal faith while leading in a secular organization?”
• “When is it appropriate for me to talk about my own faith and beliefs in the workplace, while also ensuring that I am being inclusive?”

Bringing Meaning to Work

• “How can we bring meaning and purpose to the day-to-day lives of our employees?”
• “How can an atheist create a bond that seems to automatically exist between spiritual people?”

Repairing the World

• “How can leadership bring people together and away from the current divisive rhetoric and populism? How can leaders, especially young women, navigate challenging power asymmetry situations where there is very little appetite for change from within?”
• “In many contexts, religion and faith traditions appear to create deep division, conflict, and animosity toward others, so is there anything to be done without rejecting spirituality and faith altogether?”

Requirements

• Attend one 2-hour class each week, for 12 weeks across term
• Attend six 90-minute Journey Group sessions across the semester; groups are formed from a small cohort of students drawn from across participating Harvard schools.
• Participate in several optional field trips on selected weekends or evenings across the semester; planned destinations include the Arnold Arboretum, the Harvard Art Museum, the Harvard Dance Center, and a field retreat to a site such as the Society of St. John the Evangelist (just across the river) or Blue Cliff Monastery.
• Volunteer to design and lead sessions with invited guests, who will feature in most of our weekly sessions. Past guests have included Ken Frazier (CEO, Merck), Dr. Lisa Miller (Columbia University), David Brooks (NYT columnist and author), Martha Minow (former dean, Harvard Law School), and Larry Bacow (president, Harvard University).
• Submit a final paper or project reflecting on your spiritual journey and learning across the semester.

Grading

There are two graded requirements:

1. Class participation
2. Final paper/project

Participation is assessed more by quality and intensity of engagement than by simple quantity of classroom comments. We offer numerous opportunities across term to demonstrate engagement with the course and our guests and to help build a sense of community in the classroom and beyond.

Course Premise

Spirituality, faith, and religion play a crucial role in many people’s lives. They undergird convictions about right and wrong, help people to persevere through great hardship, inform people’s self-understanding and meaning-making, and shape people’s worldviews. In the best case, spirituality, faith, and religion can bring people together. In the worst case, so recently in evidence on campus and around the world, they can tear people apart.

Despite their centrality to many people’s experiences, however, spirituality, faith, and religion remain relatively unexamined—especially from a personal perspective—across the University. This course provides an opportunity to address this gap by bringing together students and faculty from across the University to explore what we can learn in conversation with leaders around the world who are informed by these practices and commitments.

This course grows out of our highly successful experience in piloting this curriculum across three well-subscribed J-Term SIPs. Student interest in this course has grown each year we have offered it, and we are currently collaborating with 30 students and faculty from across the University to build out the syllabus and terrain of the course to match most closely student needs and interests. While we expect a strong student base from among our own MBAs, we are scheduling the course in a timeslot that will accommodate a group of committed cross-registrants.

Aspiring cross-registrants desiring more information about the course can reach out to our teammates in their respective schools and programs, including Practitioner in Residence John Brown and Assistant Dean Laura Tuach (HDS), Adjunct Lecturer Metta McGarvey (HGSE), Professor Scott Westfahl (HLS), Professor Howard Koh (HSPH), Senior Fellow Tina Fernandez (ALI) and HBS Executive Fellows Angie Thurston and Rich Phillips This course is a move toward reconnection, toward integration, not just for the purpose of making meaning for ourselves but also to reconnect with each other.

Course Goals

By the end of the course, students should understand how an awakened sense and understanding of spirituality and faith traditions can drive both individual and corporate purpose, as they have seen this modeled in invited leaders from the realms of business, public health, education, and public policy. They also should have a better sense of how this awakened sense can help them to guide their own personal and professional agency across careers of increasing responsibility. Most broadly, they will have a deeper appreciation and understanding for what has been a crucial aspect of existence for individuals and societies.

Our hope is that this course will have a profound influence on your self-understanding, on your formation as a leader, on your understanding of the communities in which you will operate, and on your sense of personal purpose.

Course Outline

To serve the objectives outlined above, we are planning to organize our term into three principal modules, focused on three stages of the development of a global leader. These stages, with examples of existing curriculum that students have encouraged us to continue to offer, are presented below. We will continue to build out our plans and guest list across the summer and fall and invite your active participation even before term begins.

I. The Inner Journey – Learning to Make Meaning

• The Dance of Dharma
• Leadership and Character
• Making Meaning in the Workplace
• Finding Meaning in Relationship with Nature

II. The Outer Journey – Focusing On Your Leadership Role

• Difficult Decisions: How Faith Shapes Boardroom Debate
• Faith as An Enabler and Disabler
• Linking Spirituality, Health and Leadership
• Poetic Justice: Islam and Business

III. Moving Beyond – Locating Purpose in the World

• Moral Growth as a Business Leader
• Spiritual Philanthropy in Emerging Markets
• Trans-Generational Change: The Lessons of Ashoka
• Spirituality in Technology
• Regenerative Capitalism

Readings and Teaching Formats

The assigned readings for the course will be drawn from a variety of sources, including a curated selection of readings from ancient wisdom traditions as well as contemporary readings, some composed by invited guests. While we have developed a number of case studies for use in the course, we will favor experiential learning over case-based pedagogy, as well as live interaction with our invited guests.

We are currently assembling the final reading list for the course and can offer recommendations to students wishing to dive in across the summer and fall.

Journey Groups

During an early Tuesday afternoon class session, each student will be assigned to a 5-person Journey Group. Groups will be designed to be cross-sectional in nature, with representatives drawn from across participating schools in the University. This group will meet six times across the semester, ideally at a consistent time, agreeable to all members of the group, every other week from early February through mid-April. While some sessions can take place over Zoom, we strongly encourage in-person meetings, and some in-person sessions will be required.

Journey Groups are intended as safe, confidential spaces for students to share their understanding of their guiding values and to keep track of their own spiritual exploration across term. A favorite exercise is called Rivers of Life, in which students draw (yes, with colored pencils and drawing paper) a map of the significant life experiences that have shaped the leaders they have been, and are becoming.

A student shared with us this past year that her Journey Group was different from any other small group she participated in at school because “this is the only meeting that is about me.” That’s not a bad statement of our ambition in creating this aspect of the curriculum.

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