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The gospel according to Adam Smith

Is doing good compatible with making money? It is if you practise spiritual capitalism.

“Our people dedicate their time now to more human goals,” Versteeg says. “The salespeople have their pride back and clients are happier than ever before.”

Which brings us back to the integrity of Art DeLorenzo’s commitment. Before he retired in 2005, DeLorenzo was a financial adviser with the retirement planning firm Ameriprise Financial. As group vice president, DeLorenzo was responsible for growing the revenues of the 50-plus advisers who worked under him in Ameriprise’s East Coast market groups. DeLorenzo’s team did a lot of cold-calling and as he says, “They get told ‘no’ a lot. Rejection is a significant part of their lives. If people are not good at managing that baggage, their failure rate is higher.”

Testing salespeople’s emotional competence was a longstanding practise, because, says DeLorenzo, “We knew those who scored the highest in emotional competence were the most successful.”

But he felt they should go further. So in 2000, after the dot-com stock market crash, when his teams were dealing with especially heavy negativity, DeLorenzo took it upon himself to introduce Rick Aberman, a developmental psychologist and founding partner of the Lennick Aberman Group, a consulting firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Fred Luskin, a psychologist who cofounded the Stanford University Forgiveness Project and authored Forgive for Good. The trio developed a program based on Luskin’s “forgiveness” training.

Why forgiveness? “Interpersonal kindness and goodwill that is almost unlimited—that is the spiritual basis of life,” explains Luskin, who says we develop it by practising what he calls “the three tenets”: compassion, forgiveness and gratitude.

Gratitude is powerful, Luskin says, because it makes it harder to hold onto anger. “It’s a lot harder to feel picked-upon when you’re focused on the experience of being grateful for what you have. When you forgive, your attention is much more placed on the present and the future, rather than locked in needless argument over the past. The less arguing you do, the less angry or depressed you’ll be and the more energy you’ll have to give—to be productive and do a good job.”

In the first pilot program, conducted from September 2001 through August 2002, participants did exercises to help them “identify and hold onto values that enhance productivity,” according to Luskin. For gratitude, he recalls, “we did an exercise where we had people take a drink of water, and do so mindfully and with thanks. You actually tasted the water and focused for a minute on how thankful you were. And you looked at the picture on your desk of your family and you were thankful for that too.” Participants reported feeling more refreshed, and were more productive back at their desks.

They also played a game called “The Freeze.” In the middle of a lecture, DeLorenzo would tell participants to freeze and would write down how they told him they were feeling. “It’s intended to help people realize that even when we’re having a conversation, our minds are not always 100 percent engaged,” he says. It’s during such unconscious moments that our feelings creep up and can negatively affect our behaviour.

If you’re irritated, but aren’t conscious of it, your actions may run contrary to your values—you might get angry with a customer and lose a sale. “If, on the other hand, you stay on top of your feelings, there is a good chance that you’ll keep your feelings in alignment with your values, and your actions will be in alignment with your goals,” says DeLorenzo.

The results were encouraging. Participants showed an average 18 percent increase in commissions on sales compared to 11 percent for those who didn’t go though the seminar. In a sales environment, generating 7 percent more revenue than your colleagues is huge.

To date, 74 advisers have completed the seminar in seven annual programs. Each year, participants have outstripped the average productivity of their peers. The 2002-’03 group showed a 24 percent increase in sales, compared to just 5 percent for non-participants; one of two classes in the 2003-’04 year increased commissions by a stunning 46 percent, compared to 13 percent for those who didn’t receive the training.

Since 2001, participants’ stress scores have dropped 23 percent; anger scores have dropped 13 percent; and “positive-state” scores—whether or not people think positively about the world—have risen 20 percent. Participants’ “physical vitality” scores even improved, by 9 percent. DeLorenzo, Luskin and Aberman now run the program as part of a combined consulting practise, and this year Ameriprise will roll out the training for its Mid-Atlantic Market Group, which includes 1,100 salespeople.

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