Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (24 page)

Inspired by Gallup’s leadership findings, I tried to learn more about hopeful leaders by talking to their followers. Here is what JerLene, a workplace consultant for the same company for twenty-five years, had to say about the leader of her consulting group.

JerLene and other followers of strong leaders talk about their shared vision for the future (focusing more on “we” goals than “me” goals), the chance to use their talents to make change happen, and an energy that sustains them and gets them through down times. They feel a day-to-day excitement and hope. There’s no fear in their interactions.

Shortly after an F5 tornado with 200-mile-per-hour winds decimated 95 percent of the city of Greensburg, Kansas, at 9:45
P.M.
on May 4, 2007, a group of community leaders realized that they had to create
a bold new vision of the future for their city, one that would get the nation’s attention.
Within twelve hours of the storm, then-mayor Lonnie McCollum told the media that the people of the city had decided to rebuild.
Upon her visit to Greensburg, then-governor Kathleen Sebelius met with city leaders. When she left the closed-door meeting she announced to the world that “[w]e talked about having Greensburg be the greenest rural community in America.”

Just days after the south-central Kansas city was turned into rubble, city council members and state officials signed a resolution announcing that Greensburg would rebuild as America’s greenest city, making it environmentally and economically sustainable. Steve Hewitt was
city administrator, and so it became his job to rally the community and turn big ideas into LEED-certified public buildings, businesses, and homes—a sort of living science museum that would bring more people to town than its other big attraction, the world’s deepest hand-dug well. I asked Steve how the city’s plan, collaborations, and hard work had restored morale to a group of people who had lost everything. He told me, “Everybody needed a story of recovery,” and explained that the Greensburg recovery story came together as the community contributed to it, as real planning began, and as the long-term picture started to look better than the past.

Mayor Bob Dixson, who took office in the wake of the storm, helped Hewitt follow through on the plan, declaring, “We live in exciting times here in Greensburg, and we need to be moving boldly into the future.” Dixson continues to lead Greensburg toward its status as America’s greenest city, with the goal of providing some inspiration to the rest of America. (For more information see Greensburggreentown.org.) And when the city of Joplin, Missouri, got hit with an F5 in May 2011, Greensburg city officials passed on all they had learned to those city leaders and townspeople in Joplin.

If we aspire to lead with hope, like the city leaders in Greensburg, we need to support our story in every message we share with our followers, from strategic plans to the details of everyday communications.
All exchanges—including texts, emails, tweets, reports, speeches, interviews—must, individually and in total, communicate trust and stability to create and/or maintain excitement about the future. Followers see fear as the enemy, and when fear infects the words of their leaders, it can make them doubt their commitment to a project or even to a company. Auditing or vetting messages for hope and fear can help keep employees engaged.

This doesn’t mean memos filled with exclamation marks, smiley faces, and goofy emoticons. The goal is a straightforward and engaging message that the future will be better than the present, that every recipient has a role in making it so, and that the paths to the future will require the group’s commitment and effort. That is what I saw in
a recent communication from Steve Rasmussen, CEO of Nationwide Insurance, who rose through the ranks in the insurance business and led his company through the Great Recession, to his thirty-six thousand associates. In his letter, he explained that they had many opportunities to expand their business and he wanted their help in promoting that growth. He closed by writing:

Thanks for all you’re doing to help build our momentum. Associates are why Nationwide has been so successful in serving members and building the communities where we work, and why I’m sure we’ll continue to be so in the future.

My request is to help us take full advantage of the opportunities before us. Also, please learn how your role or team provides value to the entire organization. Understand how all the pieces fit together to activate our New Mutual strategy. And know that you’re working for a winning organization that is on the move—one whose noble purpose is fulfilled through our actions and commitment to our members, communities and associates every day. I’m proud of how far we’ve already come, and for what I know you’ll do to help us leverage our competitive advantage in the future.

Rasmussen’s closing statement creates a sense of energy and forward motion. He includes all of Nationwide’s associates in the mission and then makes a request of each of them. He reminds them of their purpose and their responsibilities—all in 150 words.

Leaders like Rasmussen know that their personal hope is a public resource.
If you can’t make followers excited, you are no longer a leader.

The hope or fear created by our daily communications doesn’t change just the overall climate of our homes, schools, or workplaces. It affects the emotional and cognitive psychology of each person, making them either more open or more closed. Excitement about the future, whether it’s experienced as calm encouragement or something bordering on exuberance, expands what a person feels like doing right now and can do in the future. According to psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, these positive emotions can create an upward spiral where pathways and energy fuel one another.

Leaders who are burned-out, fearful, or demoralized tend to shut down their own thinking. They struggle to solve old problems or deal with the crisis of the moment, leaving little energy for coming up with fresh ideas and flexible plans. With blinders on, they are more concerned with surviving the now than with preparing for the then. Through their anxiety-laced communication (or worse, no communication at all), they infect their followers with negative emotion, narrow vision, and their own disengagement.

At their core, great leaders are great storytellers. Some are quiet, some are flamboyant. But they all create a picture of a meaningful goal, and they describe a path—filled with both struggles and exciting challenges—to get there. It’s the story of a journey we want to share, one that demands our best skills and efforts and expands our own sense of what we can accomplish.

Leaders lose influence when they make our lives harder. Whether it is a small-town high school principal adding extra obstacles to graduation, or a politician creating more red tape in the way of getting what you need, we don’t respond well to hope killers.

Hopeful leaders make our lives better and easier.
With instrumental support (a helpful hand in a time of need), influential leaders knock down obstacles to goals, giving followers their best shot at doing what they do best. Fairness and balance also come in here, because getting rid of some obstacles can create new bumps in the road for someone else.

For leaders who are willing and able to put themselves in the shoes of their followers, knocking down obstacles is one of the quickest ways to build hope. Unfortunately, too many leaders distance themselves—their followers tell you they “don’t have a clue.” How many high school counselors, bankers, and college financial aid counselors have recently completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid that paves the way for many students to attend college? How many college presidents have logged into a mock student account and tried to enroll in a class? How many CEOs have struggled to duct-tape together child care for their kids during holidays and summers? How many senators have waited all day in a free clinic to get a referral to another clinic to get basic health care?

John Fetterman has a clue. At six feet, eight inches and more than three hundred pounds, a bald and heavily tattooed Fetterman could easily use his street cred and a little fear to get his way. But as mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Fetterman hardly uses his brawn in his attempts to turn his adopted hometown around. He uses hope as a hammer.

Like many industrial towns, Braddock, an old steel town outside Pittsburgh, had its glory days. The first A&P grocery store in America opened there. It was home to the Carnegie Foundation’s first public
library in the United States. But when Fetterman moved there in 2001, it was nearly dead, having lost 90 percent of its population and 90 percent of its buildings.

Mayor Fetterman has a knack for eliminating obstacles. With no community center or playground, Fetterman struck a publicity deal with Levi’s jeans. The company set a national ad campaign in Braddock, used local talent, and, most important, donated a $1 million community center that was named in honor of a slain child.

With no grocery stores or restaurants, Braddock was a food desert. Fetterman helped locals develop a two-acre urban garden that provides produce for families and extra vegetables for sale in nearby towns.

Fetterman works daily to make the townspeople and outside investors enthusiastic about the future of small-town America.
He believes that a leader should give people more options. “Creating as many different opportunities and allowing people to define their success is crucial.” Supporters refer to the Fetterman Effect, which led to Braddock getting more attention and resources than other struggling towns in the Rust Belt. Despite his appeal, his progress is slow and he is not without critics. But lifelong resident Jeremy Cannon sums up Fetterman’s efforts: “He’s one of the few people that gave us hope for the future. He gave us opportunities with jobs. He just gave us a reason to wake up every day and a place to go.”

A leader’s greatest challenge is regoaling, which reclaims willpower from the pursuit of unattainable goals. Regoaling requires you to change course after days, months, or years of convincing others that you were on the right path and then realizing that you weren’t.

Regoaling is where hope meets courage. Leading with hope is easy when the odds are in our favor or when we can recruit a team and develop a plan that can help us beat the odds. It is a different matter when the odds are truly insurmountable. In the face of such odds,
some leaders engage in conspiracy and silence, deluding themselves and others about what might happen, while they cling to goals that are no longer viable or realistic. Other leaders—the ones we want in our lives—guide us toward choices that balance our rational and emotional interests. They are at their best in the worst of times.

I learned how great leaders face the toughest of circumstances from an unlikely source: a pediatrician. Chris Feudtner, who works at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is not your typical kid doc. He is one of a few dozen palliative pediatric care physicians in the world. That means he spends every day helping families who are losing their fight for the lives of children.

Years ago, Dr. Feudtner realized that hope is what sustains families who are working toward one vital goal: keeping their child alive. Then, when all forms of treatment have been tried and all tests point to failing health and imminent death, Feudtner teaches families to reinvest their hopes in a new goal: helping their child die peacefully. In one of our discussions, he convinced me that there is one right we should all have when we are out of treatment options. “You have to pick your modus exodus, the way that you die,” Dr. Feudtner said.

When Feudtner’s families regoal, they take the support and energy they have devoted to keeping their child alive and redirect it to letting the child go peacefully. Every day, Feudtner helps parents face the hardest decision they will ever make, framing the options in real terms, preparing families for what is probable and what is possible. “I ask them, ‘What is the best way to love your child now?’ ” This opens up one of the hardest conversations imaginable. Dr. Feudtner has been shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of families who have grappled with that question. How they answer it can make the difference between a grief that rips the remaining family apart, or allows them to heal slowly together.

My conversations with Chris Feudtner about his patients taught me a hope lesson that I will not soon forget. That is: regoaling requires us to let go of some of our dreams to make our best possible future. If parents facing an unimaginable loss learn to regoal, I can learn to do it as well.

In daily life, regoaling requires us to let go of hopes that no longer serve our future. And sometimes we have to revisit old goals that we thought were in our rearview mirror.
That was the case for Sandy Lewis, who shelved her own plans to get a beloved community senior center back on track.

With multigenerational programming, fund-raising, and new facilities and partnerships, Sandy had helped turn the Champlain Senior Center in Burlington, Vermont, into a community resource and a national model for promoting the independence and well-being of older citizens. Just a few years after Sandy resigned as the president of the board, the phone started ringing. Sandy’s friends and colleagues had bad news. The center was falling into disrepair and not meeting the needs of the seniors. Sandy felt compelled to visit and see for herself what was happening.