Keeping the faith | More executives in Maine are saying amen to religion in the workplace — and reaping the rewards of faith-based businesses

Some business leaders look for workplace inspiration from their peers. Others consult how-to books or look to management greats like J.P. Morgan and Warren Buffett. Bob Cooper goes straight to the top. Cooper, the owner of Bisson Transportation Inc., consults God.

He's not alone. From the Augusta crisis center manager who uses Buddhist meditation to get through stressful days to the Jewish international business consultant whose faith helps him attract Israeli clients, Maine businesspeople increasingly employ spirituality in ways that go beyond the corporate bottom line.

It's a growing trend, not only in Maine, but throughout the country. While decades ago religion and work occupied separate quarters in most Americans' lives, today the so-called "faith-at-work" movement has spawned thousands of websites and corporate prayer groups around the country. The faith-at-work issue has landed on the cover of Fortune and Business Week, and it's been analyzed by academics at places like Yale and Harvard. And if President George W. Bush can tell colleagues his presidency is driven by a mission from God, why can't a CEO in the corner office?

Some business ethicists believe the faith-at-work movement is the next major idea in corporate innovation. Local companies have their own takes on it; Bisson, based in West Bath, calls it a "faith-friendly" way of doing business, while Tom's of Maine in Kennebunk dubs it "values-centered leadership." A lot of small-business owners in Maine simply call it spirituality. Whatever the name, those who keep the faith from nine to five say it makes them better business people.

"It means that I'm more patient," says Peter Wohl, a Zen Buddhist who's director of Substance Abuse Services for the Crisis and Counseling Centers, based in Augusta. "For me, the ability to listen to others better and be present and attentive to what others' needs are is important, both for dealing with client work and for administration."

Still, in Maine, the topic of religion at work rarely comes up in business circles. In effect, workplace spirituality remains largely a private effort. Others who have carried their faith into the workplace have learned that there are certain pitfalls in consulting God about business matters. For example, Cooper knows he'll ruffle feathers quickly if he mentions Jesus in the office, or if he quotes the Bible, or if he proselytizes in any way for Christianity. Instead, he distills tenets of Christianity to keep Bisson's three offices, in West Bath, Westbrook, and Augusta, pleasant, productive workplaces. "What you have to avoid is preaching," says Cooper. "Preaching can be offensive. What you need to do is demonstrate your faith."

In 2003, Cooper founded Christian Leaders in Maine Business, or CLIMB, to bring Biblical leadership qualities, like honesty and service, to the workplace. CLIMB has a regular membership of roughly 40 Maine-based executives, including Mike Stoddard, senior vice president at Maine Bank and Trust in Portland, and George Baines, sales manager at WGME-13 in Portland

David Miller, a Presbyterian minister and former international investment banker, has studied the faith-at-work movement as executive director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture in New Haven, Conn. Miller, whose most recent book on the subject, God at Work, was published this year by Oxford University Press, says business leaders who incorporate spirituality into their management model tend to enjoy a more pronounced sense of composure. "It's lonely at the top, it's challenging at the top," he says. "Faith can be a real sense of calm, of wisdom — an anchor, a way to determine right from wrong. And there's also the business; you attract the best and brightest people who know they can come there and be their whole self. There's some research that shows that companies that are faith-friendly have employees who are more loyal."

Handle with care
Carl Pabst, owner of Portland-based cane manufacturer Lean On Me, says faith infuses everything he does, including every facet of his workday.

Pabst is a member of the Baha'i faith, a monotheistic religion stressing unity and peace that was founded in Iran in 1852. There are currently more than five million Baha'i around the world, according to Bahai.org, the international Baha'i community's official website.

Pabst says the Baha'i faith requires followers to better the world through meaningful work, and sees his business as part of his spiritual practice. "Religion to me encompasses an attitude toward divinity that's reflected in life, so I can't really separate my faith from my work," he explains. "My spiritual attitude sustains the business. There's a saying, 'If God is not everywhere, then God is not anywhere.'"

Some explicitly draw on their faith to deal with the stresses of the workplace, like Augusta's Wohl, who takes several minutes to meditate alone in the middle of stressful workdays. And still others have discovered faith helps them relate to other businesspeople. Perry Newman, a Reform Jew and founder of the international consulting company the Atlantica Group, a division of Portland law firm Pierce Atwood, says his faith helped create an "obvious and unspoken bond" with clients from Israel.

But some caution that working with God can cause more harm than good.

"A leader's job is to be of service to people in the company," says Richard Grover, an associate professor in the University of Southern Maine's business school, whose annual graduate course in business leadership includes a segment on spirituality in the workplace. "So if a leader comes in and imposes a faith on other people in the organization, there would certainly be problems associated with that. If I were Muslim and somebody came in and imposed Christ on me, it would be uncomfortable from an organizational aspect. The approach I advise is a respect for individual differences and respect for the basic humanity of the people in an organization."

There's no church-and-state separation in the workplace. In fact, religious expression at work is protected under the Civil Rights Act, which says that employers must "reasonably accommodate the religious practices of an employee" and cannot hire or fire an employee based on religious persuasion.

Beyond federal laws, it's up to individual companies to detail their own faith-at-work policies. (For more on how Tom's of Maine integrates faith into everyday business practices, see "Good intentions" on page 18.) Each year thousands of companies get tripped up on vague or nonexistent faith rules. In 2006, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission fielded 2,541 complaints of religious discrimination, more than double the total from a decade ago.

Such complaints are rare in Maine, but they do happen. A federal court in 2005 found that Abdul Azimi, a former employee of Jordan's Meats in Portland, was a victim of religious harassment in the workplace. According to court documents, Azimi's co-workers frequently harassed him because of his Muslim faith.

Increasingly, Americans are reluctant to check their religion at the workplace door. According to a 2006 Gallup Poll, 84% of Americans say religion is important in their lives. Meanwhile, a 2002 Gallup poll found that eight out of 10 employees think open expressions of religion at work should be tolerated, and nearly three out of 10 believe such expressions should be encouraged.

Integrating faith
David Miller says it's difficult for people to abandon their faith at work. "This movement of people wanting to integrate faith in work is people wanting to be who they are 24-7," says Miller. "Faith is a part of that."

Miller, however, draws a distinction between religion and spirituality, noting that most associate religion with dogma and proselytizing while spirituality is regarded as a more accommodating pursuit of deeper meaning. As a result, he says, many Americans are more comfortable with spirituality at work than with religion at work.

Miller traces the beginning of the current faith-at-work movement to the late 1980s, during massive shifts in the global political landscape that highlighted human rights abuses, including the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and apartheid in South Africa. Miller says cultural upheavals since then have bolstered the movement, including Americans' sense of vulnerability after September 11, an influx of religiously diverse immigrants entering the workforce and the professional maturation of baby-boomers, many of whom are interested in spiritual balance and personal fulfillment.

Bisson's Bob Cooper, whose CLIMB-sponsored Good Friday breakfast this year vibrated with gospel fervor, didn't always work so closely with God. He left behind a career as an investment banker in New York City to move to Maine in 1990 with his wife, a native New Englander. He bought Bisson that year as an investment, but was largely a hands-off, absentee owner. Meanwhile, he took an investment banking job with Fleet Public Financial Group in Boston, commuting from his home in Falmouth and, later, Alfred.

Cooper resented the move from New York, regarded the rural company as an annoyance, and saw the job in Boston as, while lucrative, containing no lasting value. Cooper says he was "always angry" during those years, and it manifested in what he calls bad behavior, including visiting Bisson only three or four times a year. "I always had this nagging sense that when all is said and done and I'm on my death bed I'd say, 'What did I do with my life?'" he says.

In 2001, Cooper passed a sign outside the New Life Church in Biddeford during his Boston commute. The church, Cooper says, advertised a sermon series on forgiveness. "It was as if Jesus had walked into the passenger seat and rode down on the commute from Boston," he says.

Cooper, a stocky man with white hair and striking blue eyes, attended church for the first time in decades that Sunday and has attended every week since. He quit his job in Boston to focus on Bisson, the company through which he came to believe he was destined to do God's work, and began attending the company's weekly staff meetings. He discovered the company he'd neglected for nearly a decade was, as he says, "in a cultural shambles," with managers hoarding resources, blaming each other for the company's failures and arguing in staff meetings.

"I told them, 'We're going to become a community grounded in trust,'" Cooper says of an early meeting he attended. When he informed his team of 10 managers that he was instituting an employee moral code called "CRISS" — compassion, respect, integrity, stewardship and service — and that each person in the company would be reviewed by Bisson peers on those principles, starting with Cooper and the management team, he says, "their eyes bugged out."

"I lost three of the top guys," he says. "They either left the company or became enraged and became dysfunctional" and Cooper removed them.

When the dust settled, Cooper says he had a cohesive management team committed to CRISS and Cooper's values. In 2004, the company created its slogan, "Service you can trust from people who care," and last year generated revenue of over $25 million, up from around $4.5 million five years before. "Trust is such a huge issue," Cooper says. "It takes time. It took a good year before we had some momentum going. But our profit has gone from a loss in 2001 to our biggest year yet in 2006. There's a huge expense item for a dysfunctional workplace that you don't see on your P&L."