Melding Quaker ethics and business

It would make for a distinctively American calling card: ''Have spirit, will consult."

As a people, we're known for both our religiosity and entrepreneurial spirit, and while the two may seem in conflict, that hypothetical business card would be a decent thumbnail job description for Margaret Benefiel. She promotes the coupling of Quaker tradition, known for its commitment to peace and social justice, with the hard-headed pursuit of business success.

Benefiel, whose Executive Soul firm advises business leaders to be better managers by being better people, points out that several successful companies, including the English bank Barclays and chocolatier Cadbury, were founded by Quakers.

''Quakers have been known for hundreds of years as ethical business people," she says. ''Quakers were the first to put price tags in shop windows to say there's only one price for something, so people knew they could count on that price and not have to haggle."

Ethics is one secret to that success, says Benefiel, 53, a Quaker who teaches spirituality and leadership at Andover Newton Theological School, in addition to her consulting work.

''What I do is help people step back and get in touch with their deepest values. If they talk about spirituality and religion, I help them get in touch with those values and use practices of spiritual discernment. If they don't use spirituality language or religious language but they want to talk in terms of ethics and values, then I help them get in touch with their moral compass."

If that sounds touchy-feely, a board member at one nonprofit says that Benefiel helped her organization resolve knotty business problems. Two years ago, the board of Citizen Schools in Boston became snagged on the issue of raising money to pay for its growing afterschool programs, board member Karyn Campbell recalls.

''I personally felt there were issues the organization was not facing up to," she says. In two months of working with Benefiel -- meetings, chat room discussions, and reading assignments from both business and religion books -- Campbell learned an empathy that helped her and the board move off square one.

''From this course, I was able to learn how to get a group of people working better together," she says. ''How do you, as a compassionate person, recognize why [colleagues] have blocks on this issue?"

She says the board came to realize that ''while they had approved the growth [in programs], they had not dealt with the underlying issue of how they were going to fund it." Among other steps spurred by Benefiel's work, says Campbell, was the hiring of fund-raising staff.

Benefiel stresses Quakerism's emphasis on people hearing each other's views respectfully. ''Quaker spirituality is a listening spirituality," she says. ''I work with [clients] and help them develop that listening, and also then we talk about listening to God if they use God language."

Religious belief is not essential, however. ''I define spirituality broadly, as the human spirit fully engaged, so, for some people, that is connected with a religious tradition, and for others it isn't," she says.

In her book, ''Soul at Work," Benefiel included Southwest Airlines, whose leaders ''talk about fun and joy and creativity and humor, and I think they're a great example of the human spirit fully engaged, even though they don't use any religious language."

A reader of the business news might stop at this point and ask if Benefiel's spirituality talk really makes sense. Wal-Mart, after all, may be the most successful business in America, and even its supporters don't use the word ''spiritual" to describe its strategy. Its business model might better be described -- critically or flatteringly, depending on your perspective -- as efficiently and even ruthlessly competitive.

Benefiel acknowledges that some botched business decisions are the result of simple managerial bungling, a deficit on the balance sheet rather than of spirit.

''But the literature on why decisions fail is surprisingly full of examples of people who weren't able to stay grounded in their values," she says. ''. . . All I can say to that is that I think it's a short-sighted approach to be so ruthless and treat your employees badly and burn people out. I think that in the long run, those companies that treat people well and that abide by their deeper spiritual values are the ones that are going to survive and thrive."

The business world offers some corroboration. After all, she points out, people once thought Enron was a successful business, until its leaders migrated from the business page to the crime news.

Questions, comments and story ideas can be sent to spiritual@globe.com.