Have Faith

AZRA KHALFAN WAS ON A PLANE from New York City to Dubai when a PepsiCo executive sat down in the next seat. Khalfan’s company, Plaques by Azra, had done some work for the food giant. They expressed mutual admiration of then-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, in part because of the Hindu principles she utilized in her leadership.

A Muslim wearing a headscarf, praying, and eating only halal food during the 13- hour flight, Khalfan also was reading between the lines of her seatmate’s reactions to her expressions of faith that day. “I felt in effect this man was telling me that what I was doing was right, and he put me in touch with his global supply-chain manager,” Khalfan recalls. “He liked that I took these things seriously.”

In an increasingly secular age—only 50 percent of Americans said they were a member of a church or synagogue last year, down from 62 percent in 2010, according to Gallup—the idea of CEOs publicly discussing or displaying their faith may seem anachronistic at best. At worst, it can lead to high-profile PR misfires, such as the blowback Chick-fil-A’s Dan Cathy got for his outspoken opposition to gay marriage before he retreated to more private views on the subject.

But as many corporate leaders struggle to reposition their companies and brands as standing for some sort of sublime purpose beyond mere dollars and cents, business leaders such as Khalfan and Cathy— whose company famously still keeps all its stores closed on Sunday, despite billions of dollars in lost potential revenue—have been talking about conviction all along. The result is a surprisingly resonant message for stakeholders, especially young employees longing for authenticity, empathy and integrity in their workplace.

“There’s a perception fed by the public sector more than anything else that faith doesn’t have a part to play in the workforce,” says Nathan Sheets, founder and CEO of Nature Nate’s Honey, a food company in McKinney, Texas. “But that seems disingenuous. Where the culture is today, especially millennials, they’re all about authenticity and transparency.”

Faithful CEOs include Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who regularly talks about his Christian beliefs in speeches, often proclaiming, “God is good.” Mark Hogan, the chief global advisor and a former board member of Toyota Motor, attends mass daily when he can—an easier commitment in Detroit and in Brazil, where he spent most of his career, than in heavily Shinto Japan.

“My faith is one and one with me, not separate,” says Shmuel Gniwisch, a Hassidic Jew whose Montreal-based family outfit, BNSG Capital, has owned and started many companies, including e-commerce giant Ice.com. “We’ve invested in more than 30 companies, and our responsibility is to pay forward into them. It’s not only about the money. We’re working for a greater purpose.”

Communicating his faith “isn’t standing on top of a milk crate and saying, ‘This is what you need to do,’” says Gniwisch. “It’s in the little things, the discussions around every business table, the details that you drop into a conversation.”

For instance, Gniwisch likes to note that God created the world in six separate days. “So I use that story to point out how we need to celebrate ‘little wins’ in whatever we are doing, meaning you don’t necessarily have to ‘go big’ all the time,” he explains.

Sheets tries to lead with six characteristics that he says are drawn from biblical passages such as 1 Corinthians 13. “Be loving, faithful, compassionate, creative,” he says. At its plant, Nature Nate’s encourages employees to drop cards into a box recommending fellow employees who are living out a “beatitude”—one of the prescriptions that Jesus Christ delivered in his Sermon on the Mount. Optional Bible studies are available during work hours.

And if he has to fire someone, Sheets says, “We’ll do it honorably and compassionately. Maybe that impacts us negatively from a bottom-line perspective, but that’s OK. We’ll make it up in other ways.”

Bryan Owens, CEO of Unclaimed Baggage Center, in Scottsboro, Alabama, says that honoring the company’s commitments is one expression of his Christian faith. “We’re fastidious about that,” he says. “We don’t pay things before they’re due but never after they’re due.”

Joel Manby developed his Christian “servant leadership” philosophy as CEO of privately held Herschend Family Entertainment and wrote a book about it, then brought those principles to his tenure as chief of publicly held Seaworld—where secular problems such as a tarnished brand and a shareholder activist ended his time at the helm in 2018.

He says that “leading with love” as an expression of a leader’s Christian faith “matches very well with what millennials need today. They want more empathy, more workplace and life balance, and a vision of an entity that goes beyond making money.”

Richard Merrill, president and CEO of Fellowship of Companies for Christ, an Atlanta-based organization with chapters in 30 states and nearly 40 countries, says such approaches come naturally to CEOs with genuine faith. “If you’re running a business by Biblical principles, you should be conducting business with integrity and caring for employees and customers,” he says. “If you do that, it doesn’t become exclusionary or judgmental. It becomes not only what millennials and Generation Z are looking for but also good business practice.”

Khalfan agrees. “My faith isn’t a barrier in any way—it’s just who I am.” She says she runs her company by Islamic values: doing business fairly, being honest, providing value and having good relationships.

This kind of leadership brings challenges, of course. Gniwisch’s company once voluntarily relinquished its legal right to a building it had just purchased in downtown Montreal because the Jewish owner of an adjacent building complained in rabbinical court—not a forum recognized by Canadian law—that he had first right of refusal to the structure.

Rabbi Danielle Eskow, who runs Online Jewish Learning, from Brookline, Massachusetts, and instructs hundreds of students around the world in the Torah, says that it’s difficult to “scale the company and make money while staying consistent with faith-driven values. The company can’t lose money on a student, but we don’t want to turn people away when the mission is to bring people closer to the Jewish experience.”

Not surprisingly, sometimes leading with faith creates opposition and even outright controversy for CEOs. Sheets fired someone for performance recently, but the ex-employee shot back with an accusation of gender and age discrimination—and of hypocrisy by a Christian organization.

“Generation Z might be the first post-Christian generation, certainly in the United States, so you’ve got all of these cultural forces and some legal forces against you,” Merrill says. “If you lead with your faith, you can be subject to various attacks.”

Steve Green, a dedicated conservative Christian and the billionaire founder and owner of Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft and home-goods stores, drew the ire of progressives in 2014 by getting the U.S. Supreme Court to exempt for-profit companies like his from the contraception coverage requirement in Obamacare.

Then Green announced that he was going to build a $500 million Museum of the Bible just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., which opened in 2017. Hobby Lobby had to pay a $3 million fine and return Middle Eastern artifacts after federal prosecutors said the company got caught up in an antiquities-smuggling scheme; Green blamed naiveté.

McMillon’s evangelical views might have caused him to oppose a proposed religious-liberty bill in Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered, in 2015. McMillon tweeted that the legislation “threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state.”

Nonetheless, persevering is an integral part of the experience for CEOs of faith, and so are the rewards. “One reason we’re so successful is that I run the company by my faith and my tradition,” says Eskow. “It makes work every day so much more meaningful and gives me motivation and drive.”

BY DALE BUSS