a time for hope
When facing fear and uncertainty, hope is a powerful antidote.
What a year.
For perhaps the first time since World War II, we’ve experienced global upheaval. The pandemic changed the way billions of people live and work, as well as providing the spark for simmering social unrest and political tension.
The result is unsustainable levels of fear and uncertainty that will likely have considerable long term repercussions.
Whether it’s the fear of catching the virus, the fear of its impact on our job, or simply the fear of not knowing what the future holds, this has been compounded by physical distancing and the proliferation of negative news and messaging. Habits like doom scrolling are eroding our mental health. And with emotions running high, the slightest provocations are promoting disproportionate reactions.
At work, leaders have borne the brunt of this situation.
Any form of disruption or transformation is difficult, but more so when the changes occur on a massive scale, under tight deadlines, and while people are in an emotional state that hijacks attention, and shuts down reasoning and rational thinking.
Not only does fear shut people down to learning and change, it insidiously permeates the employee experience, damaging morale, performance and wellbeing.
This has manifested three significant challenges:
How to change people’s behaviours to adopt new work arrangements and COVID-safe practices.
How to ensure the employee experience remains positive, without people’s memories of work and the organisation being encoded with negative emotions.
How to alleviate fear and uncertainty to ensure people remain safe, healthy, and performing at their best
From necessity, the first challenge has consumed the majority of time and focus. However, the other two are just as important, especially as we move beyond reactive measures and direct our gaze back towards the mid-to-long term.
The power of emotion
Traditionally, emotions in the workplace have been treated as taboo. Which is crazy, given they comprise a fundamental part of our experiences, memories, narratives and identity. And the stronger the emotion, the more powerful the associated experiences, memories and narratives, and more resistant people are to change.
In an emotionally charged environment like we’re experiencing at present, the best response isn’t to ignore emotion and carry on as if it’s business as usual.
Instead, we need to apply empathy — identifying, understanding, acknowledging and validating emotions, then helping people to address them.
We do this through positive emotion. Not in a flippant, ‘buck up, everything will be ok’ way. But by understanding the effect on our physiology and cognitive function.
Because not only have positive emotions been proven to improve learning, critical thinking, decision-making, performance, health and wellbeing, resilience, relationships, and transformation — certain positive emotional states are highly effective at countering those at the negative end of the spectrum.
Hope as an antidote to fear
Hope isn’t a primary emotion like fear or anger, it’s an emotional state — a desire for the future to be better than the present.
While this sounds much like optimism, there are a couple of key differences.
The first is agency. Hope is more than just a goal or wish, there must be the means and the motivation to achieve it. In this way, it’s quite contextual — related to a specific scenario, and contingent on people’s abilities and belief the aspiration is possible to achieve.
Second is belief. In a recent study, psychologists Bury, Wenzel and Woodyatt found “hope is distinct from optimism and positive expectation; hope is tapped into when odds are low yet individuals are highly invested in the outcome”.
Hope isn’t purely rational. It isn’t the result of analysing facts and weighing the pros and cons. Indeed, doing so in some situations could lead to losing hope entirely. This means you can be hopeful without being optimistic, and vice versa.
While hope and optimism both have benefits, hope is more relevant to our present circumstances as numerous studies have proven it highly effective at inspiring change in people experiencing fear.
Hope inspires a sense of possibility. It builds anticipation, which is an important aspect of any experience. And it keeps people moving through adversity, even when there’s uncertainty around the outcome.
In a study exploring the impact of hope on motivation, psychologist Charles Snyder asked college students the question: “Although you set your goal of getting a B in a class, after your first exam, which accounts for 30 per cent of your grade, you find you only scored a D. It is now one week later. What do you do?”
Students who exhibited high levels of hope said they would work harder, and considered more ways to improve their final grade. Students with moderate levels of hope thought of several ways to improve their grade, but had far less determination to pursue them. And students with low levels of hope didn’t even attempt to improve their grade.
Research also shows that hope is a deciding factor in the speed a patient recovers from injury or illness. Conversely, a sense of hopelessness can delay recovery and increase the likelihood of depression and anxiety. One particular study found that exhibiting hope before and during cognitive therapy decreased PTSD-related depression symptoms in war veterans.
So with all these benefits, how exactly do we inspire hope?
Postmodernist philosopher Richard Rorty describes hope as a metanarrative; a story that serves as a promise or reason for expecting a better future.
Given that narratives already play an essential role in providing purpose and facilitating transformation, weaving hope into our narratives and messaging is a relatively simple way to begin alleviating fear.
Ideally, we can strengthen belief and increase agency by providing a clear course of action and the necessary skills to achieve our objective.
No matter how great the aspiration or challenging the situation, a compelling narrative supported by the means to achieve it is powerful enough to overwhelm fear and rally people towards our shared vision.
Use compassion to inspire unity in adversity
Compassion, like hope, isn’t exactly an emotion, per se — it’s an emotional response to people’s suffering that compels us to assist.
From an evolutionary perspective, compassion may have played a role in humanity’s survival by rewarding us with physical and mental health benefits. Simply: we’re biologically wired to want to help each other.
For leaders, compassion can be used to create an environment where people look out for each other. Now more than ever, we need this sense of togetherness to counteract fear, loneliness and other side-effects of physical distancing.
So how do we foster compassion?
Despite being a positive emotion, it tends to be triggered by negative imagery, such as fear, pain or suffering. Sadly, there’s sadly no shortage of these at present. However, we can use these examples (sensitively) to inspire people’s inherent desire to help.
Compassion tends to be most effective when it’s directed towards small numbers or depicts specific individuals. In these cases, it is far more effective than logic-based appeals. Larger numbers, however, are often seen as abstract concepts, and more likely to trigger feelings of hopelessness and overwhelm, rather than inspiring action.
Finally, compassion is particularly effective at influencing people’s attitudes during decision-making. This makes it a powerful emotion to consider when behaviour change is required.
Provide relief — but with caution
While alleviating fear by providing hope should be a desirable outcome, why would anything involving humans be simple?
Research shows that relief following a period of anxiety causes temporary disorientation that hijacks information processing. In this state, people are less likely to make good choices and highly susceptible to suggestion — a dangerous combination.
For leaders, this means that instilling hope is only half the work. The final phase of moving people from fear to hope involves supporting them with clear and decisive communication — ensuring good decision-making while they’re in a fragile state of relief.
But if we get this right, we play a massive part in improving people’s health and well-being, performance, and the employee experience.
Worthy work indeed.
