Faith As A Leadership Discipline: The Practice That Sustains Change

By Laurel Donnellan, Darryl Brown, and Sarah Feely (Originally published at Forbes.com) 

No, I am not referring to a leader’s religion. 

How do you become a more inspiring leader? Start with being inspired. Then find out what inspires your team and use that to create more creativity, confidence, and competence. 

Earlier in my career, discussing inspiration or faith was avoided in the workplace. However, as mindfulness, innovation, and cultural competence become part of the mainstream, respectful discussions about positivity, religion, and spirituality offer leaders opportunities to learn about their colleagues and their different paths, fostering more understanding and inclusion.

Anyone uncomfortable with the idea of inspiration or hope in the workplace can learn to have these conversations authentically and productively. It is a unique opportunity to strengthen your ability to lead more effectively. 

In leadership, faith is often misunderstood. It is not passive optimism, blind certainty, or denial of difficulty. Faith is the disciplined practice of staying connected to something larger than yourself when outcomes are unclear and pressure is high. Faith can help you find hope when things are uncertain or celebratory joy when things are going well. 

The Compassionate Leadership Journey

This is the second post in a series exploring the 12 principles and practices of the Donnellan Leadership Method, following my earlier piece on courage. If courage helps leaders step toward change, faith is what helps them sustain it.

For some leaders, faith is grounded in religion or spirituality. For others, it is rooted in nature, philosophy, service, creativity, family, or a deeply held belief in human potential. Whatever form it takes, faith begins with identifying a personal positive belief and strengthening it through intentional practice. 

The practice that develops the principle of Faith is Connect to Inspiration. On an individual level, that may look like reading a favorite book, going to church, getting into nature, or taking an overdue vacation.  For a team, it may be connecting to inspiration through team activities, social events, or retreats. For example, we often start our meetings with a short guided meditation to assess what we are bringing to the group, and we end with a short exercise that asks everyone to appreciate each other’s contributions. 

Faith Begins With Attention

That idea came into sharper focus during a recent conversation with my colleagues Darryl Brown and Sarah Feely. We were discussing this principle and practice, and one theme kept surfacing: faith is not something we simply claim. It is something we cultivate over time.

Brown described his daily practice of silence: 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night. In a culture that rewards constant productivity and reaction, silence can feel countercultural. Yet it may also be one of the most strategic leadership disciplines available.

Silence creates space to think clearly. It interrupts reactivity. It allows leaders to move beyond performance and reconnect with purpose. It can actually make you more productive by helping you make decisions more calmly and quickly, which benefits you and the team you lead. Helping leaders access a deeper source of strength than ego, speed, or external validation will benefit team members and their productivity. 

Brown spoke candidly about discipline. He acknowledged that structure and limits did not come naturally to him, yet he also recognized that discipline ultimately creates more freedom, not less. That tension is familiar to many leaders. We often associate freedom with the absence of structure, when in reality, sustainable growth usually depends on it.

In my own life, my daily practice has changed drastically over the years and has included meditation, yoga, support meetings, prayer calls, writing, walks on the beach, and, now, a regimen of simple care.  Thanks to chronic arthritis that I am overcoming through a series of surgeries, while making sweeping changes in my business, I have to keep it simple.  It is daily physical therapy, medical appointments, keeping a food journal, paying closer attention to health, and getting a full night’s sleep. None of it is glamorous, but all of it is meaningful. And the more consistent I am in connecting with inspiration through a daily practice, the better equipped I am to lead. 

Healing Requires Margin

Feely introduced another powerful idea during our discussion: margin. She described the margin as the space between the load and the limit. The concept explains why some people absorb pressure more effectively than others. The greater the margin, the more resilient the individual. The narrower the margin, the easier it becomes to fracture under stress.

That framework resonates deeply with me because faith and healing are not merely outcomes. They are processes strengthened by capacity. For individuals, practices such as solitude, reflection, journaling, movement, prayer, and time in nature are not only reactive tools for moments of crisis. They are preventative disciplines that expand our capacity before a crisis arrives. For teams, celebratory, social, creative, or volunteer outings can provide that same type of space or margin. 

Brown compared faith to muscle, which feels exactly right. Strength develops through repetition and use. Resilience is rarely accidental. It comes from a positive belief and a practice that supports it. 

Hope Is Built Through Connection

Inspired teams will create more connections among themselves and feel more hopeful. Hope is not abstract. It is relational. It develops through honest interaction, trust, and shared humanity. That matters profoundly in leadership because during periods of uncertainty, people are rarely looking for perfection. They are looking for grounded presence. They want to know someone is paying attention, remaining steady, and responding with care.

In that sense, hope is social. It strengthens teams, organizations, and communities one relationship at a time. Feely expanded on this beautifully by connecting faith to compassion and action. Compassion is not simply feeling empathy for someone else. It is choosing to act on that empathy.

If faith is the inner resource, compassion becomes its outward expression.

Faith Is A Leadership Advantage

It is hard to be a leader others look up to without understanding your sense of faith, your powerful and positive beliefs, and the practices that sustain them. Understanding how to help people get inspired and stay inspired can unleash potential. Once you know how to find and foster hope and faith, you can devote more attention and thoughtful effort to learning how your stakeholders find and develop their faith through connecting to inspiration. 

What continues to stand out to me through my experience coaching and supporting leaders is that faith belongs at the center of leadership, not on the sidelines. Anyone uncomfortable with the idea of inspiration or hope in the workplace can learn to have these conversations authentically and productively. This is a unique opportunity to strengthen your ability to be inspired and inspire others. 

Faith helps leaders remain grounded when circumstances shift, when pressure rises, and when the future feels uncertain. It does not eliminate ambiguity. It creates the steadiness needed to navigate ambiguity with clarity and resilience. Without faith, leaders often default to fear, over-control, or ego. With faith, they are more likely to lead with humility, stability, and perspective. 

In the end, faith may be less about certainty and more about connection: connection to purpose, connection to people, and connection to the practices that help us remain fully human while leading others through change.

Listen in on our conversation about faith and leadership here on the Compassionate Leaders Circle Podcast.