Recently I have begun to wonder how my enormous experience with hope in conversation might be useful to managers. When I posed the question to my husband, he responded that my experience in hope has been incredibly useful in his management role. He said he has learned to think about the need to be positive before he speaks, and to govern his language according to that need.
The credit for making these linkages goes entirely to him. He has gained his knowledge through a process of seepage over the years—sitting in on my Saturday morning hope presentations to foster parents and cancer patients; manning the book table during my hope workshops at conferences on elder care and clinical hypnosis. He’s taken the inspiration from my stories about impossible things becoming possible, and things turning out better than expected. He has noticed how language changes perspective. But the day is rapidly approaching when managers will not have to learn these things through seepage. Hope will be a popular topic in management training.
There’s a new trend in hope studies these days. People are beginning to ask how hope strategies could help managers do their work more effectively.
Though much attention continues to focus on strategies for sustaining hope when people are ill or otherwise challenged, and hope continues to be a topic of great interest to doctors nurses and social workers, hope is finding its way into management theory. Books and articles that take hope seriously are beginning to appear.
If there’s one excellent reason why managers ought to be interested in hope it is this: Hope and hopelessness are silent factors in most work environments, active yet unacknowledged. Research in the counselling world has shown that new opportunities for growth are created when the influence of hope and hopelessness is brought out into the open. Many of the strategies we use for making hope explicit in counselling can be applied in other types of conversations as well. They can be used in one-on-one encounters and also in group settings. Hope and hopelessness shape individual and group behavior. So it is not surprising that management theorists are beginning to pay attention to hope.
Hope is a motivator that keeps people moving forward. It is the underlying emotion that makes us want to pursue goals. Not only do we hope to achieve goals, but goals often make up part of a large picture with hope at its centre. Our underlying hopes give goals their importance and personal meaning. Hope is a complex, yet simple concept. It is a feeling that changes the nature of thoughts, actions and relationships. High levels of hope, according to the research, can be linked with success at just about everything. People with high hope scores do better at athletics and academics. They cope better with illness and pain. Hopeful people direct attention toward a future that seems important to them.
Hopelessness, in contrast, is a de-motivator. It is the absence of purpose that keeps people plodding forward without inspiration, confines them in the old ruts, limits them to sticking with what is familiar. Without stepping out to take either credit or blame, hopelessness gets in the way of many things that could be happening.
People in general are interested in talking about hope, reducing hopelessness and rallying around hope symbols. This interest can create opportunities. Managers could now be using knowledge about hope and hopelessness to make things better in the workplace. Ultimately there will be management training in the area of hope. You can see it coming.
Hope theory and management theory have begun reaching out to one another. Patricia Bruininks and Bertram Malle have conducted conversational research to identify perceived differences between hopes and goals.
Longtime hope scholar Kay Herth has emerged from a nursing context to write about the role of a hope leader. Management consultants Harry Hudson and Barbara Perry have built a management book around five principles for promoting and sustaining hope in organizations.
As hope theory and management theory converge, managers will find themselves learning how to talk about hope. Like other management training, the hope training will start with big ideas and move toward practical strategies that make sense to the trainees. The gap between the big ideas and the small contextual strategies is still relatively unexplored. Most of the knowledge about how to inspire hope through guided conversation still rests in the counselling and nursing literature. It hovers expectantly at the brink of the gap, searching for bridges, waiting for invitations, preparing to cross over.
References
Bruininks, P. & Malle, B., (2005). Distinguishing hope from optimism and related affective states. Motivation And Behavior 29(4)
Herth, K. A. (2007). Hope-centered leadership in practice. Academic Leader, 23(8), 4-5.
Hudson H. & Perry, B., (2006). Putting hope to work: Five principles to activate your organization’s most powerful resource. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
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