The name of this blog comes from our mission at INFLUENCE: “To empower people with clarity and confidence.”
Our objective is to provide brief but meaningful topics (under 500 words) that inspire, educate and empower leaders through resources both inside and outside of INFLUENCE. This week’s edition is provided by David Salmons.
Hope provides fuel for effort. Without it, energy, creativity, and resilience suffer, and that’s just as true in the workplace as anywhere else. For that matter, increased hope in the workplace has been linked to higher levels of engagement and lower levels of absenteeism.
While a healthy workplace culture has many components, it’s probably intuitive that hope is a prerequisite for accomplishment. What we might forget however, is that hope requires leadership input.
This isn’t about sugarcoating bad news. Instead, it’s about creating problem-solving energy; an energy that is for the most part produced when leaders share vision and offer feedback.
Here’s what that looks like. Heather Huhman, career and workplace expert and writer for Entrepreneur magazine, offers these 4 steps for creating cultures of hope:
- Share the vision. Write it out. Talk it out. Without vision, employees struggle to self-direct. With vision, they transform from confused clock-punchers into teams vested in a plan. And make it personal too. Help employees recognize their own opportunities to grow in the organization.
- Lead by example. As a leader, demonstrate your hope in words and deeds. Be sincere in creating energy around where the company is going. In contrast, venting about organizational pains may feel satisfying in the moment, but it also lowers morale – especially when others are doing the same. Don’t indulge the urge.
- Celebrate the positive. Be careful not to create cultures focused only on problems. Over-focusing on fails reduces hope. Focus also on successes to produce the energy needed for more success.
- Provide perspective. Communicate why each employee’s work matters for the client and for the team. Few things create hopelessness like the perception that “what I do doesn’t matter.” A little feedback to the contrary can make a big difference.
One additional point Heather makes is that we can invest in a culture of hope from the earliest moments of onboarding. She points out one example where new hires at a consulting firm were all asked to create a shortlist of career goals. Their goals were then shared with the organization and posted in a common area, creating communal energy and hope.
Incidentally, not only does this create energy, but it also supports peer coaching, where peers check-in on one other to supply encouragement, enhance motivation, and elicit strategies for accomplishment.
In conclusion, cultures of hope require genuine, engaged leaders who communicate vision and offer meaningful feedback. It’s worth the effort because hope adds energy, creativity, and resilience to the workplace. And as Huhman says, it’s contagious. People are much more likely to get behind a vision – and be hopeful – when they see their leaders are all in.