Thrive: Cultivate Hope
Hope.
As you read that word, notice what you think and feel, perhaps what you sense in your body.
You may feel positive and optimistic. It may bring a smile to your face and cause warmth to rise in your chest. You may feel uplifted.
Or you may feel negative and cynical. You may flinch or even grimace at that word. It may cause you to pull back.
Or you may feel ambivalent. You may smirk or shake your head. You may think of hope as a weakness or an immaterial quality.
Hope, like love, can trigger a strong reaction. If your response is related to your current workplace, what experiences come to mind? And what energy is linked to those stories?
These reactions to hope and their related narratives and energy are important to notice because it turns out that hope and what has been termed “hope culture”, which we will learn more about below, can be a strong determinant of not only persistence toward difficult goals but also thriving.
In this series on Thriving, I’ve explored five other qualities of individual, team, and organizational experience we’ve discovered in our work that people need to thrive: Clarity, Courage, Wholeness, Spaciousness, and Simplicity. The final quality is hope. Hope is the activator of all the others. And, taking meaningful action on these others makes hope possible.
Even talking about hope may be triggering for you. I encourage you to read on and see what I’ve discovered in researching hope about what it is, why it is important, how it cycles in cultures, and how to cultivate hope to not miss out on its benefits. These benefits can be experienced by even the most unlikely of teams struggling with the most difficult problems.
Hope is…
Hope is both a noun and a verb. Hope is “the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best.” And hope is also “to believe, feel, or trust that something desired will happen.” Hope has also been defined by Akshay Malik as “a state of optimism where individuals feel willing and able to achieve their goals.” He points out that one with hope has both the “will power (agency) and the “way power (pathways)” to meet goals. Hope can be learned and enhanced; it is not a fixed characteristic.
Hope plays a role in attaining success, maintaining emotional well-being, and effectively handling challenges such as illness or adversity. Hope has been shown to be correlated to higher profitability, higher retention, greater satisfaction, more commitment, better performance, more solutions, and better quality problem-solving.
Hoping Against Hope
But you might say, you haven’t worked in my organization. You haven’t taken on our challenge. If you only knew how difficult our goals are, or how tough our environment is.
And it’s true. So many people are engaged in working on really hard problems, that are often life and death, that matter to the welfare of individuals, or that have long-term consequences. When organizations and teams are trying to address urgent truly difficult issues, how can they muster hope? How does one hope when working on the climate crisis, brokering peace in the face of intractable war, trying to resolve a refugee crisis, housing the unhoused, healing those addicted to opioids, overcoming injustices and bigotry, bridging the chasm between political ideologies, feeding the hungry, curing illnesses and so much more? With such seemingly unresolvable problems, fraught with frustration and challenges, how can a team find hope?
And you may ask, even if my work isn’t so high stakes, what I do is important to me, and how can my team possibly hope in the face of our own seemingly insurmountable challenges that are exhausting?
Hope Culture
Researchers Katina B. Sawyer and Judith A Claire offer ground-breaking insights on the benefits of a hopeful culture, particularly when an organization is tackling “a Grand Challenge” that is, pursuing a lofty, difficult aspiration without guarantee of success. They observe that such organizations are more active and resolute in taking on that Grand Challenge if there is a “hope culture.” They define hope culture as “assumptions, beliefs, norms, and practices that propagate hopeful thoughts and behaviors in pursuit of an organization’s goals.” And in such a hope culture, team members thrived and the organization was more likely to sustain its earnest efforts with determination. But when hope declined, so did these outcomes. It is notable that the organization they studied was a residential, trauma-based rehabilitation program for survivors of commercial sex exploitation, certainly an example of an organization that was taking on a “Grand Challenge.”
Sawyer and Claire describe three key principles of hope cultures: “1) collective agency, or a feeling that the organization could be successful if members banded together, 2) a belief that the organization was leveraging effective methods and practices for achieving their goals, and 3) a collective, shared vision for a more desirable future.”
They observed the organization move through four phases from a time of “high hope”, with strong positive narratives that spread positive emotions and strengthened hope, followed by “harsh realities” when stories of despair became more dominant and negative emotions weakened the hope culture. Next, a tragedy led to an “emotional rock bottom” and the dominance of hopelessness and negative emotions. But then “hope rebounded” with new residents bringing new life, more positive narratives and emotions, and along with this a restoration of hope culture. Energy and goals, they found, ebb and flow in tandem with hope culture.
The award-winning authors concluded that “to persist toward goals that can enhance society and our collective capacity for human flourishing, organizations that are tackling grand challenges must draw upon hope. In doing so, they might make greater progress toward a brighter future, even when times are tough.”
They call out the importance of paying special attention to unfolding events and thoughtfully and actively managing the stories that are told and the collective emotions that arise to help organizations persist in their important work and thrive.
“Hope is needed most when it’s hardest.” – Rick Gage, A Human Workplace COO
Many teams we work with come to us lacking in hope and struggling to thrive. They may be at the nadir of the hope cycle. Some find themselves there due to post-pandemic challenges. Others have been there for a long time. The model offered by Sawyer and Claire in their study of an organization taking on a grand challenge gives the rest of us inspiration for actions we can take to try to shift our culture from despair to hope.
Work to cultivate a sense of shared effort. Focus on ways that you can join together and that you are all contributing to a common goal.
Make sure you are using respected methods to do your work, and that people know the value of the approaches you take. If you are using ineffective tools or outdated ways of working, do all you can to change to engender the confidence of your workforce and to bring positive results.
Form a truly shared vision of the future you are working toward. Leaders set direction, to be sure, AND team members can all contribute to describing how to bring that vision to life day to day, why it matters to each of you, and what it will look like when it is achieved. Engage everyone in this descriptive process.
Monitor events that both surround and occur within your organization to proactively manage the narratives that when repeated become the truth and foster emotional contagion. Remember that “words create worlds” and how we speak matters. This doesn’t mean we should deny difficult truths or wash over trauma or loss. On the contrary, we need to acknowledge the setbacks and traumas and be with each other in these human moments with candor and honesty. This is crucial. Develop the emotional capacity for this as a leader or team member. And, be able to speak about and point to the fullness of your story. This may include reminding your team of the truth of your commitment, unity, and care for each other. Your skill, resilience, and creativity to face the challenges can also be part of the narrative. Speak to the fullness of your reality.
Work diligently to cultivate the other Thrive qualities in this series that are part of our approach to Thriving. Hope rises naturally when we see progress in these other areas. When we gain more clarity about our purpose or on how to work together as a team, we have hope. When we work in an environment that supports courage and truth-telling, we have hope. When we are welcome to bring our whole authentic selves and don’t have to hide parts of ourselves to do our jobs, we have hope. When we work effectively as a whole instead of in siloes, we have hope. When we have the spaciousness to do our work in a reasonable and humane way, we have hope. When our processes are characterized by simplicity, we have hope. Likewise, when we solve simple problems with the right approach, not making things more complex or complicated than they need to be, we have hope.
If we do these things, we can help to cultivate the hope that is an essential part of thriving.
I share more about leading teams that thrive on To Work: With Love a NEW series airing on the Gut + Science leadership podcast. Find episodes HERE.
If you’d like to take a Thrive Self-Assessment, email me at Renee@MakeWorkMoreHuman.com
And if you want to talk about real strategies for wholeness, contact us here.
Our Thrive Strategy Lead is Faith Addicott and our Thrive Program Lead is Lili Boyanova Hugh. To learn more about bringing Thrive to your team, reach out here.
