Leading to overcome hopelessness

Leaders can overcome hopelessness

Gene Mage

“There are no hopeless situations, only people who have grown hopeless about them.” Clare Booth Luce, US Congresswoman

As leaders we are faced with too many challenges to list. Dynamic market conditions, irritating people, and aggressive competitors all work tirelessly to make our job more difficult. But as tough as these problems are, there is an even more dangerous enemy.

Our worst enemy does not get a paycheck, make phone calls, or hang out by the water cooler. This enemy transcends traditional organizational roles and structures. This enemy is the insidious mindset of hopelessness.

From the highest levels of the executive suite down to the guy who mops the floors, people feel powerless. CEOs confide in me how hard it is to really change things from where they sit, “Everything I want to get done has to work its way through layers of management,” they complain.

In middle management, you might hear something like, “I get pressured from the top and the bottom. Top management rolls out their strategy and expects me to explain it to the rank and file. Then my first-line supervisors get frustrated because I cannot solve all their problems.” Supervisors and workers often bemoan their lack of authority to change things. Powerlessness reaches every corner of some organizations as sure as cherry Koolade turns a pitcher of water red.

Why do people feel so powerless? Some organizations have been conditioned by repeated change initiatives over a period of years. Soon they believe that nothing really makes a difference. All the leadership words begin to bounce off of jaded workers, particularly true in organizations with a long history of difficulty.

Companies that continually dance on the edge of financial disaster breed a strange fatalism. Each time a new leader comes along and says, “Listen to me. We’re heading for the cliff, and if we don’t change things, we’ll fall off the other side,” cynical workers reply, “Yeah, yeah. Every new boss says that. And we always manage to pull ourselves out of the fire. We’ll just stay cool until you and your big ideas move on.”

So how do you change things when people no longer believe that success is possible? Here are some ideas:

Lead from the front. When Hal Moore led the 1^st Cavalry Air Mobile into Vietnam in 1965 he told his troops, “My boots will be the first to touch the battlefield and the last to leave.” Show skeptical people by your actions that you mean business and are willing to do what has not been done in the past.
Expose people to the outside world. Nothing frees up calcified neurons like a good dose of best practices. Take people to visit successful companies and competitors. Seeing is believing; when you see others doing something it’s hard to say, “It can’t be done.”
Show people you believe in them. Trust develops slowly, over time, as people learn responsibility. When people make and keep promises to one another, trust abounds. So give people responsibility and trust them for results. Demonstrate through your actions that you believe your people are competent, capable, and full of potential. Set people up for success and small wins, and then progressively expand their responsibility.
Create accountability. Expect people to succeed, and demand accountability for results. Nothing changes behavior faster than experiencing of the consequences of behavior. Let people “stand and deliver” in front of their peers when they report quality, production, or financial results. Become intolerant of broken promises. Expect people to do what they say they will do.

If you do these four things, people will begin to change their beliefs about what’s possible as they experience the actual results of their efforts. Then confidence will begin to grow exponentially. It takes time, patience, and consistency to get those small wins. But after awhile the momentum will build, and success will be unstoppable.