St. Augustine said, when he was bishop of Hippo, “Change the heart and the work will be changed.” I have found out working with Catholic business leaders over the past nine years that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done first before a heart can be changed. I ran a three-month pilot to test the viability of the Attollo concept in 2014, which was to create a business leadership development organization based on the tenets of the Catholic faith. From that pilot, I discovered that business leaders needed to get themselves right before they could get their business right, and they needed to get their business right before they could get their relationship with Jesus Our Lord and Savior right.
Now, when I say get things “right,” I don’t mean perfected. I want to be clear that all Catholic business leaders will be working on these areas throughout their entire professional lives. After retirement, they will continue to work on their personal development and spiritual maturity for their remaining days. St. Francis de Sales said that the obligation to advance in the love of God and therefore in all the other virtues lasts even unto death. A good reminder.
Getting Yourself Right. The world would categorize this as personal development work. It’s important because it can significantly shape the culture of a business leader’s company. Many of them have unknowingly shaped the culture of their organization through the way they act at work.
The first step to getting yourself right is to be aware of the conversation you have in your head throughout the day. It will help you identify your predominant fault. A predominant fault, according to Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., “is the defect in us that tends to prevail over the others, and thereby over our manner of feeling, judging, sympathizing, willing, and acting. It is a defect that has in each of us an intimate relation to our individual temperament.”
So, knowing your temperament will provide clues to identify your predominant fault. For example, a person who is sanguine is prone to lust, gluttony or pusillanimity (lack of courage). Cholerics are prone to anger and envy. Melancholics are prone to fear, aversion, despondency and despair, while Phlegmatics are prone to sloth or acedia and a reluctance to suffer due to an attachment to pleasure.
Working on oneself and being aware of and working on correcting your predominant fault will impact the culture of your business and will give you more time to work on your business.
Getting Your Business Right. Attollo prepares business leaders and the businesses they run for growth and maturity by teaching them how to function as president or chief executive officer. I define a mature business as one that can run without the owner being there 24/7. Too often, businesses aren’t structured to handle the stress of growth, so that stress falls on the owner. Most small businesses, in my view, tend to reach sales of $1-2 million and plateau because the owner’s time and energy have reached their limits. The goal of business mastery is to get the owner out of firefighting mode by following a proven plan that allows their businesses to operate smoothly and independently. This work provides them with the gift of time, which was once a rare event in their life.
Getting Right with Christ and His Church. Speaking of time, many participants in the pilot said they lacked the time to foster a deep relationship with God. They admitted that while their body was in the pew at Mass on Sundays, their head was already thinking about the work to be done on Monday. Time spent on the conflicting demands of work, family and faith is usually spent in that order — work is prioritized first, then spouse and family, while God often comes in last. Passages such as Matthew 15:8-9 (“This people honors me with their lips but their heart is far from me in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men”) and the greatest commandment Mark 12:30 (“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength”) are overlooked due to those conflicting demands that are pulling them to pieces. I always suggest to Catholic business leaders that a simple first step in correcting this problem is to schedule time for God in their calendar, so their work and the secular world will not build him out of it. Taking a simple step by adding the Angelus to their calendar or as an alarm for 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. helps to refocus, even if only for a minute, and bring God back to the fore where he belongs.
The benefits of this work: personal development (getting yourself right), business mastery (getting your business right) and spiritual maturity (getting yourself right with God) are the result of an intentional investment in time and effort. It is time that many business leaders don’t think they have, but it is necessary for the development of the whole, integrated executive.