"Leaders are dealers in hope..."

I wanted to build upon my recent post "Hope is not a strategy...or is it?" and talk a little more about hope.  One of history's greatest military leaders, Napoleon Bonaparte, reportedly once said, "Leaders are dealers in hope."  Former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (under President Lyndon Johnson) John W. Gardner wrote in his book On Leadership, "The first and last task of a leader is to keep hope alive - the hope that we can finally find our way through to a better world - despite the day's action, despite our own inertness, shallowness, and wavering resolve."  What does it say when two very different leaders from two very different times and two very different worlds basically say the same thing?  My take is that leadership is about creating and fostering hope.

The Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks writes a weekly column for The Atlantic magazine (online), "How to Build a Life".  In his piece from September 23, 2021 ("How to be more hopeful"), Brooks mentions Medal of Honor recipient and Vietnam Prisoner of War Vice Admiral James Stockdale and what business author Jim Collins (perhaps best known for his superb book Good to Great) has described as the Stockdale Paradox.  Collins asked Stockdale how he made it through more than seven years of captivity during which time he was beaten, tortured, starved, and denied medical care.  Stockdale replied, "I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade."  Stockdale showed incredible resilience, which prompted Collins to ask him about the POW's who didn't survive the ordeal.  Stockdale quickly answered that they were the ones who were most optimistic, "They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart … This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be" (emphasis mine).  

Hope is a very powerful thing.  While many people tend to use hope and optimism interchangeably, they are two distinct emotions.  Two psychologists reported in a 2004 study in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology that "hope focuses more directly on the personal attainment of specific goals, whereas optimism focuses more broadly on the expected quality of future outcomes in general."  Optimism is a belief (which may, in fact, be a false one) that "everything is going to be okay."  Hope does not make that assumption and instead is a conviction to take the necessary steps to make things better.  Hope, according to a study published in 2013 in the journal Psychological Reports, is "having the will and finding the way."  That same study found that high-hope employees are 28% more likely to be successful at work and 44% more likely to enjoy good health and well-being.  Hope is our super power!

Annie McKee, who at the time was a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (and author of How to Be Happy at Work) shared in her 2008 Harvard Business Review article "Doing the Hard Work of Hope" an important point made by her close friend, Father Vladimir Felzmann: Hope = Faith + Hard Work.  She writes, "Hope is an experience that allows us to:

• Tap into optimism (we will get through this)
• Find a feasible vision for the future (No delusions! Be reasonable)
• Discover efficacy (I, or we, can make this happen!)."

Note that optimism is "Faith" in Father Felzmann's equation above.  McKee goes on to say that "Hope is nothing without courageous action."  Dane Jensen, writing for the Harvard Business Review ("Sustaining Hope in Uncertain Times") adds an important caveat.  Jensen writes, "The final component of hope - and the one that makes it resilient - is an ability to make peace with the fact that we cannot control or predict the future despite our vivid imagination and best laid plans. When things don't go according to plan, cultivate the ability to see adversity as an inflection point rather than a reason to abandon hope."

During these uncertain and turbulent times, it is our job as leaders to cultivate and foster hope.  It's important to remember, though, that hope is both an emotion and an action.  Without action, it's just optimism, and that's not enough.