From Seminary To CEO: What Faith-Driven Leadership Really Looks Like

By Laurel Donnellan and Sarah Feely (originally published at Forbes.com) 

When Denis Ring sat down with us, I expected a good conversation. What I didn’t expect was to feel, by the end of it, that I had experienced something rare: a deeply authentic leader who had never separated his inner life from his professional one.

Ring is, on paper, an extraordinary business mind. He co-founded the Whole Foods 365 brand with John Mackey, launched Central Market for HEB, and built Ocho Chocolates from scratch before selling it. His resume is the kind that commands attention in any boardroom. But spend an hour listening to him talk, and you quickly realize: the resume is almost beside the point.

My colleague Sarah Feely first met Ring at the Greater Good Science Center’s Why Kind Leaders Win event in Berkeley, where he was a panelist. “I was struck by his authenticity, curiosity, openness, and generosity of spirit. I knew we needed to learn from his wisdom and then share it with the world!”

Choose What Is Most Life-Giving

Before Ring’s corporate leadership journey, he spent seven years in the Jesuit Order, teaching at Loyola High School in Los Angeles, working with homeless and undocumented communities in downtown LA, and serving at an orphanage in Mexico. He went to Yale for his MBA with the intention of exploring business ethics within the Order. And then, after a reflective period of deep discernment, he left.

His spiritual director gave him a guiding phrase he carries to this day: "Choose to do that which is most life-giving." It's deceptively simple, and yet, Ring has built an entire leadership philosophy around it.

"I hated leaving the Jesuits," he told us plainly. "But I sometimes think of myself as a lay Jesuit, because I am trying to carry out the faith and spiritual practices I picked up in my own Jesuit formation." He didn't abandon the Order so much as expand its borders.

Leadership as an Act of Love

What makes his leadership approach so compelling and urgently relevant right now is that it moves beyond theory and cognition into practical wisdom and compassion. When Ocho Chocolates set up operations in West Oakland, one of the most economically distressed neighborhoods in the Bay Area, He didn't simply manage his workforce–he knew them as people.

He repeatedly hired formerly incarcerated individuals from a nearby halfway house. When an employee told him she could feel heat through the walls of her apartment due to faulty wiring, he called around for housing. When the security deposit on a new apartment was raised out of reach at the last minute (a brazen form of price discrimination), he wrote a personal check. When a beloved employee disappeared after a relapse and ended up incarcerated, He didn't close the door. He wrote a letter to the judge. His opening line: as soon as he is released, he will have a job with our company, no questions asked.

"This is about a person who encounters a holy moment," Denis reflected, "and responds in a way that endeavors to promote the dignity of another person."

What the Data Say

In the social sciences, what we casually call “care” or “love” is anything but soft. It appears across decades of research on rigorous constructs such as Leader–Member Exchange, Transformational Leadership Theory, benevolence and trust, compassionate leadership studies, prosociality, and the building blocks of psychological safety.

As Compassionate Leaders Circle’s Chief Learning Officer, Sarah Feely puts it: “Across these frameworks, the data tells a consistent story. When leaders demonstrate interpersonal care, they lay the foundation for psychological safety, trust, engagement, and increased discretionary effort. What follows? Performance.”

The Leadership Lesson We Keep Forgetting

At the end of our conversation, I asked him for his single most important leadership lesson. He didn't talk about strategy or scale. He talked about humility — and luck.

"I was born a white male in America in the '50s. I'm well-educated. There were opportunities that I didn't even have to seek out," he said. "I have no dignity as a man unless I help create circumstances where people who didn't win the birth lottery at least get a chance to participate in the upside of life."

This is the conversation we don't have nearly enough in leadership circles. We celebrate hustle, vision, and disruption. We rarely pause to ask: Who helped me get here? Who did I bring with me? Who was I to the people around me today — not as a manager, but as a human being?

Ring’s life lesson was even simpler than his leadership one: "Allow love to operate."

In a world saturated with leadership frameworks and productivity hacks, Denis Ring is a reminder that the most powerful thing a leader can do is show up authentically, faithfully, and with genuine care for the people before them. You don't need a seminary degree to lead that way. You just need to pay attention.

Come celebrate compassionate changemakers like Denis Ring at the 6th Annual Compassionate Leaders Circle Awards on April 20th, 2026. Every year in April, we honor leaders across generations, continents, and sectors who wake up every day thinking about how they can make the world better. Register today to be inspired and join our community of compassionate changemakers. Meet past honorees and register to attend live or for the replay here.

Listen to the full conversation with Ring on the CLC Podcast.