The relevance of Spiritual Leadership to public health: values, meaning and purpose

Public health currently faces many enormous challenges that highlight the urgent need for more effective leadership models. This paper explores Spiritual Leadership in the Workplace as a potential approach to informing and animating the field of Public Health Leadership. Developed and applied over the past two decades, Spiritual Leadership is defined as the "values, attitudes, and behaviors necessary both to motivate and inspire workers and to enhance key individual and organizational goals through a vision of service and a culture based on altruism." While for some it can relate to, and build upon, religious practices, Spiritual Leadership more broadly relates to leadership based on personal values and actions emerging from a sense of mission, purpose, and connection to something bigger than oneself. This paper first describes the origin and evolution of Spiritual Leadership and its necessary and organizational development competencies. Then, we conduct a literature review about Public Health Leadership competencies and find that many of them map directly onto the Spiritual Leadership model, thereby opening an opportunity for integration. We also acknowledge both opportunities and challenges for Spiritual Leadership implementation in secular and culturally diverse settings while noting substantial anecdotal indications that many public health leaders already enact Spiritual Leadership-consistent practices. We conclude with a discussion on implications for Public Health Leadership education, workforce development, and research. Spiritual Leadership can serve as a unifying, practice-oriented leadership perspective that can help strengthen purpose, belonging, and resilience in public health organizations.