When Hope is Slipping: The Path to Rebuilding it in Your Business

These past few weeks got me thinking about hope.

For example, there’s the hurricane seasons, election season, and other turmoil. While I’ve never been to Ashville, NC, where some still are suffering without basic needs met, I have been to Sanibel, which was all but wiped out a couple of seasons ago..

Sanibel represented hope to me.  It’s where I went for many vacations.  It’s where I, as an adult, first saw and recognized that my parents were people, not just parents, watching them act like teenagers goofing around with their friends in a grocery store.  Sanibel is where I walked the beaches and cleared my mind about the boy I was about to be engaged to and the boy that I married.

With the hurricane, there was no road to get there.  The people there were awash with fear, struggling to find hope.

We see it in our workplaces too.  This time of year, many people assess how things have gone for the year and start planning for the next.  One of my clients is doing that right now.  They believe they are behind.  They invested a lot of time and resources in developing the plan.  Holding themselves and others accountable to the plan fell flat due to unforeseen turnover and other business matters.   A clear sense of frustration and disappointment came through in their voices.  They were experiencing an undercurrent of defeat.  The opposite of hope.

Yet – the business is having a good year.  They are meeting many of their goals, despite the lack of coordination around strategic plan implementation.

Nonetheless, they and their colleagues are restless and tired.  The thought of pulling the team together to talk about accountability is unnerving.  Will that be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and creates turnover?  Fear and fatigue are wearing them thin.

And they are not alone.  The last several years in particular:  COVID, supply chain, political poison blares in the news, inflation, Ukraine, gas prices being spiked because they can be, climate change and its impact on our businesses, never ending labor shortages…. which are now threatened to get worse with the threats of deportation nationwide.

Resolves are challenged and frayed.  Hope is illusive.

My husband just got done reading a novel by Ursula K Le Guin – Three Hainish Novels, the prequel to her biggest book The Left Hand of Darkness.  He shared a couple of sentences from the book that have really stuck with me:

“Hope is a slighter, tougher thing than trust.

In a good season, one trusts life; in a bad season, one only hopes.

Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies.” 

The book is a work of fiction but, my goodness, never has a more factual statement been true.

We need to bring hope back into our businesses and our workplaces, if not back into our lives.  Awhile back, there was a political campaign that was built around the theme of hope.  Some people bought into it where others made fun of it.  I’ve even heard someone say, without trying to be political, “How’s that hope thing going for ya?” in some business meetings to challenge another’s perspective on something. 

We’re told that "hope is not a strategy."

Don’t believe it. 

Without hope, there is no strategy.

Hope fuels strategy.  It’s what helps us have faith and develop confidence in what we are building. 

There have been studies on the role of hope in business. Nir Halevy, a professor at the Stanford School of Business researched this.  He found that a lack of hope leads to defensive aggression.

What does that mean?

Defensive aggression is when we do something to protect ourselves that is likely harmful to not just someone else but to ourselves as well because we’re afraid something bad is going to happen. 

He cites the example of a duel or a homeowner encountering a robber in their home.  Neither party wants to kill the other person.  They just want to get out alive.  And in fact, the ideal outcome would be for both to get out alive.  But the conversation and problem solving needed to get to that ideal outcome is complicated and messy.  It takes time to call a time out.  In the heat of the stress, we don’t perceive there is time, so someone skips right to defensive aggression and pulls the trigger first.

In our businesses, unwanted turnover is the best example I can think of for this type of behavior.  I quit my job because I fear being fired, or I fear the company is going under, or I fear the environment and stress is never going to get better.

It’s steeped in uncertainty.

It’s surrounded by fear.

But these pre-emptive strikes aren’t actually triggered by fear.  They are caused by a lack of hope.

Interestingly enough, according to Professor Helevy, it’s easier to increase hope than it is to reduce fear.  That’s because hope does not demand eliminating a threat.  In fact, hope and fear live side by side when managed well and appropriately. 

Hope is made up of three key parts:

• First, we have to have goals. Something we wish for or want to accomplish.

• Second, we have to feel that we have the agency to achieve the goal. That is: We. CAN. Do it.  It’s within our power and control to somehow make it happen.

• And lastly, we can see a pathway for it to come about. We can identify the course of action and routes to accomplishing the goal and anticipate what obstacles might be present along the way.  This gives us the chance to think about them, prepare for them, and get around them. 

We need all three of these components for hope to take root and flourish even alongside our fears.  Take for example the implementation of a new important system in your company. 

System implementations are a pain the tail.  Speaking from experience, they are a ton of work and highly risky.  They cost a lot of money and can drag on for forever.  When we’re in the thick of it, it’s easy to become dispirited, fatigued, and frustrated  Moments come when the uncertainty and fears of reputational and business risk cause us to  want to chuck it.  Forget it.  It’s not worth it.

This is the exact time we need to stop, take a beat, and remind ourselves of  what our goal was in the first place.  We need to remember and recognize our agency and ability to get this done and revisit the pathways/project plan for finishing it and reaping the new system’s benefits.

The same is true with our team.

This is the time of year when I encourage my clients to engage their teams in planning for the new year and build their plans into the fabric of their day-to-day work.  But sometimes, like with the client I referred to earlier, we need to first bolster hope within leadership.   Leadership itself needs to count blessings.  Take time to acknowledge (despite all the challenges) what has gone well this year.  Talk about hopes, fears, and goals.

I’ve developed a tool to help walk you through what this might look like.

You can do this for yourself or ask your team to do it together.  Each person completes it for themselves, as it relates to the business.  Then share, compare notes, and build understanding.  This will, in turn, build hope and lead into the strategic planning process. 

Working through the exercise as a team fosters a shared hope.  With renewed hope, strategies emerge for action.  With renewed hope also comes renewed commitment to make things happen, whether building a new road to paradise or transforming your company into its best self.

Hope springs eternal.  In our business and in our lives.

Bring it back to your workplace.  Watch it transform your life.