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

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,