BY: ED GIGANTI
Ella Bell is a ringmaster.
An associate professor of business administration at the Tuck School of Business
at Dartmouth, Bell is also a busy consultant with clients such as Salomon Smith
Barney and PepsiCo. In her consultations, she frequently uses a group exercise
called "Circus Acts" to provoke professionals to think about their careers,
their workplaces, and their lives as a whole.
Bell asks participants to draw three rings, one each for work, personal life,
and community involvement. Next, she asks them to draw the performer — clown,
tightrope walker, lion tamer, etc. — that best represents their role in each of
the three rings. For each performer, participants list their biggest stresses
and coping mechanisms. Finally, they imagine how they would want their rings
to be and build action plans to move them toward those visions.
When I read about Bell's work in the December 2001 issue of Fast Company,
I wondered if the three rings of her metaphor might not exist within a "tent"
of personal spirituality. I called her to see if she would agree.
"I never thought about it as the 'big top,'" she said. "What I often find
in doing this work with people is that they put spirituality in a separate ring.
They are not thinking about spirituality in work or community life. I usually
have to call attention to it. It doesn't mean that they are not spiritual people,
but we compartmentalize. You don't bring the church into school or work or community.
"We compartmentalize everything. 'This is the time for family, this is the
time for work,' and so on. But life is not compartmentalized. God is with us
all the time, and we are spiritual creatures all the time."
Bell divides her time between the Dartmouth campus in Hanover, NH, and her
home in Charlotte, NC, where she is an active member of a local church. "Given
all the crises of this world, given the events of September 11, given all the
layoffs, we should be more aware of our spirituality. The churches in Charlotte
are full. But how much of that gets pushed into the other parts of our day?
"Now that I think about spirituality as the circus tent, I see it as a powerful
concept. In this exercise, people do start to think about their relationship
to something bigger than themselves. When work like this touches a certain place
in persons' souls, it becomes spiritual. People are looking, they're hungry,
because we don't take the time to fill our spiritual wells."
Bell experienced this yearning firsthand working with a group of women at
Salomon Smith Barney, although she was hesitant to be explicit about the spiritual
dimension at first. "Sometimes we put restrictions on ourselves. I wondered,
'Is that my role? I have to be careful.' But I ended the exercise with a prayer
that asks, 'Where do you want to go? Where do you want to be?' The response
was overwhelming. Weeks later I was still hearing from some of these women.
They were telling me, 'I found that prayer, and I've started praying again.'
"I've been amazed at the responses to this work. It shows that we need spirituality
more than ever. We need God in our lives more than ever. We need to know that
the best thing is happening, that we are where we're supposed to be, and that
we are loved. That knowing is so important. People are misaligned. They are
not in alignment with a higher spirit."
One of the first black women to be appointed to the faculty at Tuck and the
coauthor of the book Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle
for Professional Identity, Bell frequently consults with groups of black
men and women working in her client organizations. "This exercise [Circus Acts]
is a way to look at stress. I have used it as a way of surfacing the stress
of the bicultural reality black managers face, not being able to bring their
culture and ancestry into the workplace. We talk about being spiritually grounded
in both worlds. I ask, 'What spiritual anchor are you carrying with you?'
"My work is about bringing the spiritual back out. We try to bring back, to
'dust off' our ancestry, our history. For black people, we're so caught up trying
to show that we are super-competent in our work and champions in our communities
that we don't have the energy or time left to honor our spiritual sides. We
often get caught in places that don't deeply feed our souls. As you move up
higher in many corporations, you get sent around the country and the world.
You can find yourself away from your family, your church, your support community.
I tell people you have to develop a 'pocket spirituality.'"
Bell found the Internet a useful tool in her own spiritual life. Her Charlotte
church broadcasts services over the web, so she can sit at the computer in her
Dartmouth office any day of the week and listen to Sunday services complete
with preaching and Gospel choir. "One day, I was really having a bad day. I
called some people into my office, sat them down, and we had church right there."
Bell's goal of helping people bring more of themselves into
the workplace reminded me of poet David Whyte's diagnosis that
most people leave 30 percent of themselves in their cars in
the parking lot at work and another 10 percent at home in bed,
too afraid to face the world. In his work with Fortune 500 companies,
Whyte uses poetry to help managers find deeper, life-giving
meaning in their work. In his new book Crossing the Unknown
Sea, he turns to his own experiences — as a naturalist in
the Galapagos Islands, an executive directing a non-profit organization,
a poet, and a corporate consultant — to describe the journey of
discovery that is available to all of us through our work. In
good work, "done well for the right reasons and with an end
in mind," Whyte says our very identity is at stake. "Perhaps
it is because we know, in the end, we are our gift to others
and the world."1
NOTES
- David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, Riverhead Books, New York,
2001.
Copyright © 2002 by the Catholic Health Association of the United States
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