By: MIchael DeVenney
Do you bring hope to those around you? Is your message inspiring?
Hope has been proven to be one of the single greatest character traits of successful leaders. Hope is not wishful thinking – or a permanent smile on your face – or only talking about the nice things. Hope is about having an actionable belief in a bigger and better future.
The key to engaging employees and teams in your business is hope.
The great irony of intelligence is this – while we may listen to those who appeal to our intellect, we follow those who appeal to our beliefs. Hope is the language that articulates our beliefs.
As a leader, do you bring hope to your team?
In his book, Hope, author Andrew Rezeghi shows how crucial to success it is for leaders to provide hope in their organizations to inspire and motivate employees to become engaged and invested in the future of the business.
Leaders need to give people a reason to believe.
How important is providing hope? Think about this - statistics show that the new employee generation (those between 25 and 34 years of age) work an average of 2.9 years with an organization before moving on to the next job. Departing employees most often site lack of leadership as one of the primary reasons for a premature departure – hence the axiom - people don’t leave companies they leave people.
Sadly, in a recent research study, 89% of business leaders believed that retaining good people is about money, while 88% of employees give reasons other than pay for leaving.
From the National Employee Benchmarking Study, only 20% of all US employees want to be with their current employers in 2 years.
When leaders fail to communicate hope – either deliberately or inadvertently - their employees lose faith not only in them but in the future. The cost of turnover and loss of talent is debilitating to organizational productivity and profitability. Lack of hope hits the bottom line.
Since leaders are dealers in intangible things – an ambiguous future, a lofty mission, stretch goals, heartfelt aspirations, and the motivator of team desire – leaders must be the greatest believers.
Successful leaders give their employees hope in the future – belief combined with action to engage people to work towards a bigger and better future.
The real problem with hope is that we have an insatiable appetite for things negative. Negative information is perceived as more salient than positive information. When making decisions, many of us weigh the costs of losing – or the negative – much more than the rewards of winning – the positive.
Think about your team meetings and individual employee discussions – how often do they start with the negative or focus on the problems?
One of the reasons science has had such a difficult time coming to grips with hope is that doing so requires understanding how something merely imagined and yet to occur can cause something else to happen.
You must accept effects (your actions) precede cause (your hope) in order to use hope as a tool. Otherwise, you risk leading with false hope (hoping it works out).
The result of the deliberate action of the mind – a hopeful outlook – causes a physical reaction in the brain – a need to act. This is really the goal of leadership – to encourage others to act.
Hope – like fear – is a leadership choice and both can be used to influence human behavior. Fear ironically causes an immediate reaction but it doesn’t build lasting action. Hope does.
Hope is basically a positive expectation and desire for something to happen. A second definition is a person or thing that gives cause for hope. You can be hope. Leaders therefore personify hope.
There are several myths about hope and the difference is in how the leader uses hope.
- Hope is not the same as wishful thinking. Leaders put action to hope – it is to ignite action toward a desired objective with the positive belief in achievement. Hope is active not passive. Your job as leader is to help individuals put actions to their thoughts. Help them create a plan to make hope happen.
- Hopeful leaders are just happiness promoters. Followers fail when they don’t know what to do. A leader’s job is to make decisions positively not to promote happiness
A question for leadership: How do you bring hope to your people?
The answer is simply to keep a positive focus.
Start with yourself – focus on what you are working toward – write down what you believe are the success factors, the things that will help resolve the challenges or make the opportunities possible. Given those success factors, why should you do this? These are your beliefs.
Even though as a leader you may fly business class, you will forever remain in the middle seat – forced to manage the expectations and divergent demands of all who look to you for leadership.
How often do you find those around you looking down – caught in the moment – versus looking up – focused on the future? How often do they – even when looking at opportunity – stand still?
The job of the leader is to keep people’s heads up and looking to the future. Leaders need to focus on the positive and build on success.
Storytelling is the most effective means of human communication – especially to inspire hope and belief. Narrative storytelling especially from personal experience makes hope tangible. It is not the story alone that matters – who tells the story is just as important. When told by leaders, stories hold more meaning.
In lieu of flipcharts, use personal experience to frame your vision. Instead of AV equipment, use conversation.
Their hope involves believing deeply, seeing further and thinking conditionally while acting willfully to make things happen. As a leader, you cannot let this hope abide alone in your. The team needs to hold the dream.
To be human is to hope. To hope is to see with your heart. And to lead in the face of uncertainty is to have the courage to act on your seeing heart – to create the future rather than waiting for it to come to you.
Beliefs affect outcomes. Your beliefs may be the most important leadership tool you have. Get to know them and those of your team. Become a belief manager.
Create a culture of believers and you will create an organization more resilient, more courageous and more ably equipped to manage through ambiguity, around fear and into the future.
Help your people enjoy the journey – if you don’t, they will find another route. Bring hope to your teams.
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