Daniluk, Vera (2000).
Managing a public organization: a projection of one's ethical and spiritual values,in T.C. Pauchant and Associates, Ethics and spirituality at work. Under revision in the U.S.
In this chapter, Mrs. Danyluk, re-elected for a second mandate as President of the Executive Committee of the Montreal Urban Community, which represents more than 1.8 million citizens, shares a personal account of the role her spiritual life takes in the execution of her public leadership functions.
She does not hide her discomfort at disclosing her intimate process and considers this sharing even more difficult than the carrying out of her political life. Taking a systemic point of view as well (see the previous chapter), Mrs. Danyluk describes her relations with the people's representatives, her employees and citizens. Although she refuses to impose her religious views and practices on others, she points to the fact that she draws numerous qualities essential to her leadership role from her spiritual life : the energy, detachment and serenity necessary to overcome difficult situations; the emphasis she puts on long term goals rather than immediate brilliant feats; the implementation of rigorous ethics for the sound management of "the common good"; an increase in congruence between words and action; her enthusiasm for serving her fellow citizens and her awareness of the nobility of this task; the possibility of going beyond the mediocrity inherent in any democratic system; and the inner strength she needs in order to publicly reveal the failures of her administration.
Stating that she encounters the divine mainly through people, Mrs. Danyluk also emphasizes the fact that she draws her refusal of hatred, rancor and resentment as well as her capacity to forgive from her spiritual life. In doing so, she meets the two conditions facing the complexity and irreversibility of human affairs proposed by the philosopher Anna Arendt: the power to promise, the promise binding what is uncertain in the future with contracts and laws and the power to forgive, which releases what was bound in the past . If Anna Arendt doubted that forgiveness could exist in politics, Vera Danyluk's leadership demonstrates the opposite.
