DURING A RADIO interview about his book, Anatomy of Hope, Dr. Jerome Groopman, recalled a conversation he had with a patient dying of breast cancer. Groopman had been treating the woman for years and had grown very fond of her; sadly he had come to the end of medical therapies he could offer. He relayed the news to the woman late one afternoon as she lay in her hospital bed. She replied that the doctor was overlooking one worthwhile therapy: "Friendship." Their friendship had developed over time within the larger context of something that Groopman believes is essential to treating serious disease — hope.
A leadership essential While physicians should not willy-nilly build false hope in patients, especially those with terminal conditions, Groopman argues that hope can make treatment more effective, pain more tolerable and life more livable. Likewise leaders must instill hope in their people by communicating its importance in thought, word and deed.
Hope is essential to the net gain of leadership, that is, obtaining results. Without hope, no officer could send a soldier into battle, no coach could field a team, nor a manager expect to complete a project. Communication is essential to hope because communication is how hope is transmitted from leader to follower. We need to define hope. Let's start with what hope is not. Hope is not the feeling that everything will be okay no matter what happens. That of kind of thinking leads people to jump off cliffs with homemade wings in the hope they will fly.
Rather, genuine hope is a sense of optimism that, despite the odds, an individual's contributions matter and do make a positive difference. The medical analogy is this: A physician treating a patient with a terminal condition will not cure the patient, but if the patient believes in the therapy and the physician, the months and years remaining can be better than they would have been without hope.
By the same token, when leaders ask their people to do what seems impossible, it can often be achieved because the followers possess faith in the leader and hope in their own abilities. Entrepreneurs trade in hope; they have ideas for new products or services but need capital and people to move from ideation to production. That requires hope. Not simply hope, but a sense that "what I do makes a real difference if I have the right resources and the right people."
Communicating Hope Since hope is essential to effective leadership, here are some ideas that managers can use to communicate its necessity.
Instill optimism. Hope flourishes on the notion that things can be better. The net result of any work should be improvement, either a correction or a new way of doing things. Otherwise it is friction, a drag on the enterprise. You have probably had the unfortunate experience of working on projects that have gone sour; sticking with them is akin to playing out the clock in a basketball game when you are behind by 50 points. By contrast, imagine the sense of exhilaration that floods over a team when what you are working on — a process, a therapy and a piece of software code — will improve things for someone else. Leaders need to communicate that optimism to the entire team. It is uplifting and creates momentum that carries through the project.
Tell the truth. Unwarranted optimism, however, can be fatal. That is why leaders owe the truth to their people. When things turn bad, they must be honest and straightforward. No one likes to give or receive bad news, but withholding bad news is a luxury no leader can afford. And while it may seem that truth, especially if it is bad, is antithetical to hope, the opposite is true. Withholding bad news will instill false hope but when the truth is revealed, the bond between leader and follower is ruptured, sometimes forever. If you are upfront and truthful, you create a basis upon which you can build a strategy and develop tactics to achieve a goal. That action instills hope.
Demonstrate resilience. Few things in leadership, as in life, go as planned. Setbacks are inevitable in every endeavor, be it academics, sports or business. Engineers are often the most resilient of folks. As ones who diagnose causes of failure, discover possible remedies and implement solutions, they are accustomed to trying option after option in the quest for a viable solution. Setbacks do not deter them. In fact, they often must be pulled off projects, or at least persuaded to implement less than optimum solutions, just to keep things moving. In short, they have resiliency, honed by their knowledge and skills, but nurtured by their hope of improvement.
More Than Just Hope Hope is not the "be all end all." Gordon Sullivan, former Army chief of staff, co-authored an insightful book, Hope Is Not a Method, about how the U.S. Army transformed itself from an organization of draftees into an all-volunteer force, in part by adopting and implementing principles of organizational learning. Leaders, according to Sullivan, do not hope for change. They make change by focusing on needs and developing strategies that will improve organizational effectiveness. In other words, you must not simply hope, you must do.
Action, of course, is integral to effective leadership. And when you couple action with a sense of optimism tempered by reality, you create conditions for people to hope. Whether you are developing a new system or reorganizing a department, hope is essential to results. People doing the work must have the sense that what they do matters and will make things better for individuals and the organization.
Without hope we are lost. With hope, we can achieve. Hope may not be a "method," but it certainly is the spirit that keeps us going
John Baldoni is a leadership communications consultant who works with Fortune 500 companies as well as non-profits including the University of Michigan. He is a frequent keynote and workshop speaker as well as the author of six books on leadership; the latest is How Great Leaders Get Great Results (McGraw-Hill). Readers are welcome to visit his leadership resource website at
www.johnbaldoni.com.