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The business case for instilling hope

A Gallup Management Journal Q&A with Shane Lopez, author of Positive Psychology: The Scientific and Practical Explorations of Human Strengths (Sage Publications)

Hope, in U.S. culture, is a wishy-washy thing. It's a good thing -- but it's not a business thing. Business is work, numbers, performance, results -- things that can be done, counted, improved, then done again. If a business relies on hope, according to conventional wisdom, then things have gone wrong, because hope, like luck, is thought to be the opposite of action.

Shane Lopez, Ph.D., would say that's a gross mischaracterization of hope. To Lopez, hope is an attribute that can be measured, increased and deployed. And, he contends that hope plays a central role in business as it drives persistence, motivation, goal setting and innovation.

Dr. Lopez knows what he's talking about. He devotes much of his life to studying the effects of hope and other motivational forces. He's an author as well as an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Kansas, specializing in positive psychology, psychological assessment and educational leadership.

In this interview, Lopez discusses his research findings, including how the best managers create and encourage hope, why hopeful workers find solutions when others see only obstacles, how to balance both hope and fear to motivate, and why hopeful is as good as smart and better than happy -- at least in business.

Q: What's the first thing managers need to know about hope?

A: Managers have great potential for positive psychological capital in every person they work with and every idea they generate. They're not necessarily given the budget or the staffing or the time they need, but they do have an infinite resource -- hopeful thinking -- in every one of their employees and fellow managers.

Hope is part of authentic leadership; it's an element of psychological capital and part and parcel of everything we do.

Q: Explain the hope theory.

A: Humans are the only creatures on the planet that are truly future oriented. For humans, A is linked to B, and if I want C to happen, I'll mess with A and B a little bit so I can make C happen. Even folks in cultures that are more present oriented and interdependent think about how they can be in the present and be interdependent so that in the future they'll arrive at nirvana, or wherever they want to be.

Q: Okay, what's future orientation then?

A: Future orientation relies on three kinds of thinking -- goals thinking, pathways thinking and agency thinking -- and hope theory capitalizes on these. Goals thinking is ubiquitous, and we all do it fairly well, but everyone could do a little bit better in refining goals to make them more attainable, to make them approachable. Pathways thinking is the perceived ability to create pathways or strategies to get from point A, where you are now, to point B, which is goal attainment.

Agency thinking is the self-efficacy and the mental energy to work and pursue your identified goals along your selected pathways. Pathways and agency thinking work in tandem; they reverberate in such a way that the more you have of both, the easier it is to pursue and attain your goals.

Q: How do goals thinking, pathways thinking and agency thinking affect work?

A: Normal daily life presents tons of obstacles. I started working as a kid in oil field construction, and for me, it was horrible. It didn't take much of that before I was ready to move on.

That's the thing about hopefulness at work: We encounter obstacles all day long, but when hopeful people bump into an obstacle, they just generate more pathways. When low-hope people bump into an obstacle, they become stuck and frustrated; they may have a downward spiral in performance or attendance or mood.

So hopeful people deal with everyday obstacles with ease and may even become energized when they hit a sticky patch and then get unstuck. People with low hope stay stuck.

Q: How do hopeful workers benefit a business?

A: High-hope employees are conscientious about their jobs, and they have helping attitudes toward other workers and their community. They're courteous to fellow workers and customers. They're good sports when it comes to other folks succeeding, because they see others' success as a good thing. They don't participate in the blame game. They always have pathways to desired goals. They're able to motivate themselves under normal circumstances and then really get energized when the pressure's on, so they can balance "hope/fear" thinking in their heads and move forward.

Great managers are high-hope employees too. They don't breed fear for fear's sake; they like a level playing field where everyone has an equal chance to succeed. Advancements and benefits are truly linked to effort and success. The lowest person in the organization is treated with the same respect as every other employee. The first priority of management in high-hope organizations, according to our studies, is to help employees do the best job possible.

Q: You said that hope helps people persist. How does a manager instill a feeling of hope?

A: Rick Snyder, my mentor [and fellow University of Kansas professor], did a study in 2001. He looked at a bunch of companies and had someone at each level of the company complete a hope scale. In the high-hope companies, he found that managers included employees in the goal-setting process. Employees felt like they'd taken on a responsibility for finding solutions to problems; they weren't just going to work and doing what they were told. This is important because the goals have to be valuable to the person pursuing them.

Great managers can tell the story of the goal pursuit in a way that makes it a shared story, so everyone feels as though they're moving toward something that's meaningful. Those managers enlist people in a shared pursuit for the common good. This is hard. But some people have this special ability to do it, and some people don't.

Q: How can managers teach hope -- instill hope -- in a way that doesn't seem contrived?

A: If you want to instill motivation, you should have people view other people who are motivated and successful. Have them associate themselves with a model so that they can see how hope is linked to success. And as that becomes explicit, you have vicarious learning creating ways for people to experience success. The direct experience of success is also very powerful.

Copyright © 2006 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. Visit the Gallup Management Journal at http://gmj.gallup.com.