Why Faith is Critical to Your Business Success: No, It’s Not About Religion

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If you are like many people, when you saw the title Why Faith is Critical to Your Business Success, you probably got uncomfortable. We’re not supposed to talk about faith and business together.

We’ve been taught to see life segregated into two different areas: your public/work life versus your personal/private life. Work and business go on public side. Faith goes on the private side.

You shouldn’t bring your faith to work, right?

Wrong.

You definitely need to be careful about how you bring your religion to work, but your work success is directly dependent on faith. In fact, all aspects of your life depend directly on faith.

Understanding Faith

Faith is another way of saying trust. Faith is another way of saying confidence.

In fact, the word confidence comes from pairing the prefix con which means with (remember your Spanish classes?) and fide which means faith. Confidence means with faith.

When you say that you have confidence in someone you are saying that you have faith in them

Fidelity means that you keep the faith with another. When a person cheats on their spouse, they commit an infidelity. The Marine Corps motto is Semper Fidelis. Always faithful.

The word trust comes Old Norse meaning strength. How much trust, how much strength, is there in your relationship with your spouse, friend or business partner?

You make thousands of acts of faith every day. You have faith that your alarm clock will wake you at the right time. You have faith that your money in your bank account is still there. You have faith that flipping the light switch won’t electrocute you, that the water you drink isn’t poisonous and that people you don’t know will stay in their lane on the highway.

Without those thousands of acts of faith each day, you couldn’t function. Our society would collapse.

Countries where people have strong faith in their justice, banking and political systems do well. When people doubt fundamental systems, bad things happen.

Faith should never be based in blindness or ignorance. The best faith is always be based in evidence—like previous experience. I have faith that I won’t get electrocuted flipping the light switch because I’ve done it hundreds of thousands of times and I’m still alive. I have faith in my auto mechanic because he’s always been honest with me in the past.

Faith and Work

Your business is based on faith. Do you have faith that your people do the things you ask them to do? Do you have faith your clients will pay you? Do you have faith that your team is fully committed to each other and the goals?

What happens to your personal and team performance when you lose faith in your managers, your team, or your clients, bank or suppliers?

When we lose faith, we hedge. We don’t fully commit. We spend time and energy on backup plans. Performance drops. Anxiety skyrockets.

Google’s research on high-performance teams shows that trust—faith—is the key factor in team performance. Faith is more important than talent.

Faith is critical for business success, family success, and success in your relationships with yourself and your friends.

Why Use the Word Faith?

Okay, so why talk about faith—which some people mistakenly take to mean blind religious faith—when we can use the word trust? Why use a word with potential negative baggage when we can use a word that doesn’t have that baggage?

Two big reasons.

First, the word trust has become so familiar that we use it without thinking much about what it means or how important it is in life. We take it for granted. It has lost its impact.

Using the word faith makes us think about trust in new, more powerful ways. It can remind us that faith in ourselves and each other is one of the 2 or 3 most important things in life. Faith is about the strength of relationship.

Remember, strong relationships don’t just give you high-performance teams, families and friends. As we’ve discussed in earlier blogs, high-quality, high-faith relationships are the key to Happiness in life.

So, using the word faith makes us more conscious of the fundamental importance of faith or trust in all aspects of our lives.

That leads us to the second reason using the word faith is powerful.

Faith Unifies and Strengthens our Lives

If we use trust for our public/work lives and only use faith for our personal lives, we reinforce the artificial and destructive idea that we live divided lives.

Trust is the stuff over here. Faith is the stuff over there. That’s a fragmented life.

That’s unfortunate. If you live a divided life in which you think one thing about life, but you are living life doing the opposite things, you will be less productive and less happy.

Less productive because your efforts are divided, not aligned and focused.

Less trustworthy and less happy because you are saying one thing but doing something different. (We used to call that hypocrisy).

We live our best and most productive lives when we unify and focus everything in our lives on our purpose in life—Happiness.

When we don’t feel like we have purpose in life or when we do things that go against our purpose, we become unhappy.

The idea that your life has purpose—Happiness—is basically an act of faith. In fact, any decision you make about meaning or purpose in life is an act of faith. Even if you decide that life has no meaning or purpose—you’re still making an act of faith.

If you don’t make any act of faith about the nature of life, your life will be an unfocused, chaotic, unproductive and deeply unhappy mess.

The word faith reminds us that we make an act of faith about the meaning of life. The word faith reminds us to live our lives faithful to that meaning of life. When people see the consistency between what we say about life and how we live life, they will put more faith in us.

And when we have high-faith relationships with others, we are at our most productive and happiest in life.

Using the word faith forces us to think about life in deep and fundamental ways that the word trust does not. Faith unifies and simplifies our lives, making us more trust-worthy, more productive and happier.

And that brings us back to your business success. Your success at work.

Faith is absolutely critical to your success. When you have high-trust, high-faith relationships with your customers, you will get more of their business.

When you have high-faith relationships with your team, you maximize your employee engagement, their performance and their productivity.

Combine high-faith relationships with customers and your team, and you have an almost unfair competitive advantage at work and in life.

Here are a few tips:

• Reflect on the meaning of life and what that means for how you live your life at work and elsewhere
• Write down 2-3 ways you can consistently show clients and teammates that you love them and they can put faith in you. Make it your signature.
• Think about 2-3 things you do that are not faithful to your purpose in life

Faith. Think about it.

I’d love to hear what you think:

• What is the meaning of life?
• What about this discussion on faith resonates the most with you?
• What about this discussion on faith and work makes you most uncomfortable?

I’m Pete Bowen.