For our next four-part series, we’ll examine two essential but frequently overlooked elements in the workplace: hope and joy. Far from touchy-feely “extras,” both are essential ingredients in any highly functioning company where workers feel happy and supported. Finding hope is integral to how you do business.
In a world where managers and employees alike are all too willing to retreat into cynicism, creating an organization where hope and joy can thrive is a bold act—and a true competitive advantage.
All too often, it can seem as if we’re living in a golden age of pessimism. Whether you spend a few minutes reading the news, browsing social media, watching TV, or just having a conversation with a friend, a central theme is all but guaranteed to emerge: everything sucks.
Pick your pet bugaboo of the moment: Tipflation. Greedflation. “Quiet quitting.” Mass airline cancellation events. ChatGPT hype. And on and on.
Not unsurprisingly, this feeling of cynicism and negativity has seeped into the workplace. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report, less than a third of U.S. employees (31 percent) are “engaged” in their work and workplace.
The results are predictable: across industries, millions of American workers are demoralized and exhausted, automatically conditioned to expect the worst after the announcement of some new change or challenge.
In other words, they are feeling hopeless.
Hope is a lot more than something that’s simply “nice to have.” It’s a necessity in workplaces that aren’t merely functional, but thriving. In challenging times it can help buffer employee morale, and in better times it can foster the kind of organizational unity you need to operate at your highest level.
Finding hope in difficult times isn’t easy, but it’s well worth it. If you’re struggling to find it, these four ideas can help.
Hope Starts at the Top and Leading Effectively is the First Step
1. Adjust Your Default Settings
In fairness, our strong tendency to catastrophize isn’t entirely our fault. Study after study shows that humans are far more likely to recall negative experiences than positive ones, a phenomenon known as the “negativity bias.” You probably recognize this from your own experience.
Be that as it may, “my genes made me do it” isn’t exactly a winning mantra if you want to be an effective leader. Given the stakes of your role, you should expect (demand?) more of yourself. The good news is that getting beyond the negativity trap is a skill, much like learning a new language or how to sail. Anyone can do it—but there will be resistance.
One of the most effective ways to counteract automatic negative thinking is through “reframing”: recognizing negative thought patterns for what they are—simply thoughts, not reality—and using this knowledge to view events through a more detached, rational perspective.
(Perhaps unsurprisingly, reframing is a central component of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and mindfulness.) Use it to keep a proper perspective when challenges inevitably come up inside or outside your organization.
An important point, though: reframing isn’t the same as putting a positive spin on something. Far from it. Putting a “spin” on something implies being naive at best or dishonest at worst.
When you reframe something, you accept it. But you also gain the crucial ability to put it into perspective. Had two slow quarters in a row? Not fun. But it’s also probably not an existential crisis, despite what that pit in your stomach insists.
Instead of fretting about the worst-case outcome, wouldn’t you be better served devoting your limited mental energy to coming up with solutions?
By doing the latter, you’re exercising your agency. And nothing makes finding hope more likely than agency, the belief that your actions matter—because they do, even if you can’t immediately tell.
Tip
“Helplessly Hoping” might be a great 60s folk-rock tune, but it shouldn’t be a description of your leadership. Hope needn’t be squishy or ineffable; it’s the result of behaviors and actions you can choose to take (or not). So choose wisely!
2. Hope = Action
For many leaders, the solution to combating entrenched workplace negativity is to try to, well, be less negative. If negativity is undesirable, then less of it is surely better, right? Not exactly.
Just keeping negativity to a minimum isn’t enough to produce hope. Hope is net positive, meaning it needs to be actively present for it to register. Additionally, “less negativity around the office” is a state of being, not a plan of action. If your goal is to create an organization where hope can grow and people thrive, you need to get moving.
The psychologist and hope researcher Shane Lopez, author of the 2014 book Making Hope Happen, has summarized hope as “the belief that the future will be better than the present, along with the belief that you have the power to make it so.”
It’s more than words. It’s also more than just optimism (like negativity, another state of being). In an article profiling Lopez and his research, Live Happy, a blog focused on the mechanics of happiness, explained that “optimism is merely an attitude” and “looking at life through rose-colored glasses is itself a passive activity.”
Being hopeful, critically, implies doing something.
“Hope is a waking dream.”
– Aristotle
3. Create a Hopeful (Work)Place
Finding hope in hard times is a journey, not a single stop; leaders can’t just “give hope” like a pill or “click here for hope” icon. But they can create the conditions in which people can discover it for themselves.
Here are three high-impact actions you can take to help employees do just that.
- Name the monster. In safe settings, I’ve found that asking people to name their worst nightmares, looking right into the eyes of the monster, helps disarm their power.
“What’s the worst-case scenario playing out in your head? Tell me about the horror reel looping in your mind at night when you can’t sleep.” What I often hear are scenes far more tragic than are likely to ever play out in reality.
When I ask, “And how likely do you feel that scenario is?”, they often pause and say things like, “I guess not very likely.” Naming the monster in the presence of a trusted friend or leader helps reduce their outsized power over our perspective, restoring a sense of agency.
- Help them slay the monster (aka reframe). What paralyzes many people during uncertain or cynical times isn’t the catastrophes they concoct in their head, it’s the fear of succumbing to those catastrophes.
When we panic, our brains can shift into what neuroscientists call “amygdala hijack,” our brain’s protection mechanism that leads to our fight, flight, or freeze response.
Our rational brain in our prefrontal cortex disconnects from the part of our brain that processes danger, and our decision-making and judgment apparatus become impaired.
If this is happening to someone in your organization, it may be time to help them reframe.
Doing so will help create some distance, showing them that maybe their “monster” isn’t so scary after all, and that, though they may have forgotten it, they have overcome challenges in the past. That there are concrete things they can do to slay it—or at least keep it in its cave for now. - Show (the right kind of) empathy. Having listened to someone’s worst nightmares and helped them tap into their forgotten reserves of resilience, you have now earned your right to offer empathy.
Acknowledge their anxiety and grief as legitimate and without comparison or judgment; pass on statements that begin with “Well, at least it’s not [horrible thing].”
Empathy simply lets people know you genuinely understand and care without having to “fix things.”
Talk candidly about why you have hope despite your own worries, and what steps you’re taking to feel hopeful. Because you made an effort to truly listen to them first, your thoughts should be far more welcome than if they’d been offered immediately.
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4. Model What Hope Looks Like
For all your interest in creating an organization where people are finding hope on their own, nothing is as powerful as walking the walk. If employees see you modeling authentic hopeful behavior, it will be harder for them to dismiss hope as something silly or unrealistic.
The hope you’re selling doesn’t involve replacing the wallpaper with inspirational art or minimizing bad news. It’s grounded in reality—and the expectation that better things can happen.
One result of being hopeful is that gratitude inevitably follows. After all, if you believe that better things can come—not that they will, but they can—you will be more open to appreciating the good in your life or organization right now, not lamenting its potential loss.
The importance of this truly can’t be understated. In “The Science of Gratitude,” a landmark 2018 study conducted by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, researchers linked grateful dispositions to a wide range of mental and physical health benefits, from quicker emotional recovery after heart surgery to decreased rates of burnout among athletes.
This tells us that gratitude produces a sense of well-being and purpose, when we use it to regain lost perspective—which in turn reinforces hope. So tell people about what you are grateful for. Most importantly, tell them you are grateful for the courage they are showing amidst their fears, and for being honest with you about those fears.
The Hope that Goes Around Comes Around
In an interview with Faith & Leadership, a publication produced by Duke University Divinity School’s Leadership Education initiative, Lopez says that creating hopeful environments can spark a virtuous cycle. The converse is also true: environments of cynicism or negativity can create a doom loop.
“The revelation for me over all these years of doing this research is that hope is contagious,” he said. “The intriguing part of that ‘hope is shared’ message is that if you’re around hopeful people, you become more hopeful in time. If you’re around hopeless people, you become hopeless over time.”
To that end, says Lopez, “You can give [hope] away, but you can also be an agent of despair.”
Which path will you choose?
Choose the Path of Hope—Start Leading Effectively
Discover the power of hope in the workplace and its untapped potential in driving organizational success. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to foster an environment where hope and joy thrive, setting the stage for a brighter, more engaged future.
Dive deep into the essence of effective leadership with Navalent and learn how to cultivate hope as a competitive advantage in your organization.
We know what it takes to lead effectively because we’ve:
- Performed more than 220 organization diagnostics
- Performed more than 1,800 transformation projects
- Coached over 600 C-suite executives