Unleashing The Power of Hope

Earlier this year The Gallup Business Journal featured one of the key elements of successful change in it's article Making Hope a Business Strategy  

Hope -- the belief that things could be better and that you can make them better -- can help companies prosper, says Shane J. Lopez, Ph.D., professor of the practice at the University of Kansas School of Business, Gallup senior scientist, and a leading researcher on hope. But first, leaders must understand what hope is and how to unleash its power in the workplace.

Hope is an active stance, says Lopez, author of the forthcoming book Making Hope Happen. It helps people launch new businesses that thrive and dream up new products that sell. Hope also pushes people to be ambitious and become successful. And it accounts for 14% of productivity in the workplace. To take advantage of hope in the business world, leaders must make goals meaningful, strategise hope and plan for "what ifs," and help employees understand that they can use hope to make the workplace better.

The more you do it, the better it works and the more you can do it. "It's hard to be successful without being hopeful," Lopez says. "When you think the future will be better than the present, you start working harder today."

A large part of FranklinCovey's work in change projects also involves leveraging Hope, and the approach we take involves 2 stages. Firstly, we help people understand that while the new and different results being asked of them may seem challenging, this is typically because they are being looked at through the lens of their current experiences, mindsets and behaviours. Then, having identified which new ways of thinking and new ways of working may best enable the new results they are targetting, we are able to codify these and make them accessible in scalable learning formats so that these characteristics can become part of the business's culture, thus unleashing the power that a collective sense of hope can create.