New Book:  Putting Hope to Work: Five Principles to Activate Your Organization’s Most Powerful Resource  by Harry Hutson and Barbara Perry

"Hope is a word we have known from the beginning.  Even before the word, hope has been with us as an instinct, a feeling, an impulse, a thought.  We know it so well, yet we forget what an important role it plays in every aspect of our being."  -- Alice Rose George and Lee Marks

A dozen years ago we were sitting in a hotel ballroom, at a conference on Total Quality Management, in a session on how to drive fear out of the workplace.  W. Edwards Deming, the sage of TQM, had wisely identified fear as a major culprit in organizational dysfunction.  Well and good, but somewhere in the middle of the talk it struck us that everyone in the room looked depressed.  What if, we whispered to each other, Deming had said, "Drive in hope so that everyone may work effectively for the company?"  How would people appear then?  That flash of insight gave us our start.

Here’s our working definition of hope:  "Hope is an orientation to a positive future that engages our heads, hearts and hands."  In our research, we identified five principles that make hope what it is:

1.  Possibility -- choosing goals that stretch us yet remain possible.
2.  Agency -- having a stake in the outcome, a voice in decisions, and the resources to make a difference.
3.  Worth -- believing our work is vital, meaningful and consequential.
4.  Openness -- trusting in the unknown and welcoming learning and truth.
5.  Connection -- connecting with empathy to other people, and with clarity to reality.

When we observed high levels of hope in work groups, we found people whose worth to the organization was affirmed, who perceived openness and transparency on the part of management, and who enjoyed an authentic sense of connection both with the organization’s mission and their colleagues.  Even so briefly expressed, these principles suggest how hope can be an energetic force for positive change in a way that, say, optimism could never be.

We have only just begun to understand hope in terms of organizational culture and leadership behavior.  Long ignored, perhaps because, as our respondents told us, it sounds too "spiritual" or too "wishy-washy," it nonetheless appears to be the vital, animating force of the human spirit at work.  After all, what is innovation but hope for the future put into action?

There is a rapidly growing body of research into positive psychology and emotional intelligence that is giving empirical credence to hope as a powerful force in life.  We were greatly encouraged that Harvard Business Review chose our work on hopeful leadership as one of their twenty breakthrough ideas for 2007.  For us, these are signals that the time has come to make hope a topic for meaningful
conversations within our organizations.

Our study of effective executives has uncovered many ways in which their decisions, words, and actions make the people they lead more hopeful. Collectively, these practices are the basis for a leadership toolkit for building and sustaining hope. But the most important change comes when leaders simply become more mindful of this vital part of their mission. Much can be accomplished in a reflective pause to ask: is what I am about to do or say likely to be destructive or accretive to hope?

Excerpt from:  Hutson and Perry, "The Leader from Hope." Harvard Business Review, Feb. 2007.