A Year in the Life
By Paul Ward
Over the last twelve months my clients have been found in the States of Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia. But not in my home State of New York. As a result, much of the year has been spent in on airplanes and in airports.
Assignments for clients this year have focused on strategy implementation and people engagement, with continuing work in operational excellence. Facilitating the annual strategy deployment process for the fifth successive year with one client was contrasted with facilitating a leadership conference and high impact WorkSmart project for a client new to Quest Worldwide in 2006. I also had the opportunity to visit the chocolate city of Hershey, PA, to facilitate the mid-year meeting of the Power and Communication Contractors Association utilizing Quest’s high impact event processes.
Watching yet another sunset from the window seat of commercial airliner or waiting in the lounge for yet another delayed departure can be wearisome but also provides valuable time for reading and reflection. Having completed a doctoral dissertation early in the year, reading is now less focused on the research into leadership values and behaviors and increasingly focused on integrating the principles of business performance with the principles of people engagement. This led to participation in the International Spirit at Work Awards Conference held over an October weekend in Garrison, New York. Eileen Fisher, Inc., The Australia and New Zealand Bank Group Ltd, Clean Service Power, GmbH, and The Times of India, are among thirty five companies from ten countries honored over the past five years for demonstrating a long term commitment to spirit at work.
Membership of the Association for Spirit at Work (www.spiritatwork.com), The World Business Academy (www.worldbusiness.org), and The Values Collaborative (www.thevaluescollaborative.com) provide collaborative networks to extend client work focused on sustainable business strategies, values-based leadership, and the development of human potential at work. Although people engagement in the work place is considered to be declining, the focus on spirit at work is on the increase. If Particia Aburdene, author of Magatrends 2010, is right, spirituality in business, having quietly blossomed for decades, is an established trend that is about to morph into a mega trend, and I plan to be a part of that trend. Balancing the focus on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit is becoming increasingly important to us all.