Culture-Based Leadership Tips for Instilling Hope

Leaders can drive employee resilience, productivity, and engagement by actualizing one thing: hope.

Instilling hope in your employees isn’t a one-and-done event. It’s not a mid-week seminar. It’s something you do every day to uplift your organization’s climate.

In today’s post, we’ll cover simple ways to deeply embed hope in the workplace.

6 Culture-Based Leadership Tips For Instilling Hope

1. Make a Positive Statement About Their Future

Futurecasting:

The Great Game™ framework changes the way you do business. It allows leaders to
integrate human needs, business strategy, and action to reach organizational goals
and cultivate hopeful feelings among employees.

2. Share a Tip on How They Can Create that Future

Clue them in. Paint a picture of the positive, successful future that you and the company are moving toward. Employees will have a clear understanding of where they fit in this process and what they can expect.

3. Appreciate and Give Praise

Praise is a really effective tool in getting employees on board, hopeful, and engaged
with your organization’s goals.

4. Recognize Any Impactful Meaningful Actions They Make Towards Others

Keep an eye out for any meaningful actions made by one employee to another.

5. Compliments Go a Long Way

Building a culture of recognition and establishing a company culture that gives compliments and praise for good work deeply affects productivity, engagement, and
retention.

6 Ways To Reward & Recognize Your Employees

6. Connect and Make Bridges

Fostering meaningful connections with your staff is a huge step in the right
direction.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid If You Want to Instill Hope

Whether intentional or not, it’s common for us to do things that negatively affect
hopefulness, lending to negative externalities:

● Decreased morale
● Impaired productivity
● Poor sales
● Lower customer service quality

A meaningful investment in effective self-management to eliminate the following
actions can give huge benefits:

● Don’t ignore anyone or give a cold shoulder
● Don’t dismiss people’s ideas out of hand. Be tactful, respectful, and attentive.
● Don’t dump your anxieties and negative emotions onto other people.
● Don’t overemphasize what’s going wrong or what’s bad.
● Don’t go to extremes, whether being over-the-top with your elation or
chronically panicked. Stay level-headed, realistic, and hopeful.

Exercise: The Adult Trait Hope Scale

This exercise was developed by Rick Snyder and his positive psychology colleagues. It’s a simple, effective way to measure hope levels in your organization. You can use it with staff members, partners, job applicants, and more.

This version is taken from the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center.

The Adult Trait Hope Scale


Directions: Read each statement carefully. Using the scale shown below,
please put the number that best describes you in the blank provided by each
statement.

Statements:

____ A. I can think of many ways to get out of a jam.

____ B. I energetically pursue my goals.

____ C. There are lots of ways around any problem.

____ D. I can think of many ways to get the things in life that are most important to me.

____ E. Even when others get discouraged, I know I can find a way to solve the problem.

____ F. My past experiences have prepared me well for my future.

____ G. I've been pretty successful in life.

____ H. I meet the goals that I set for myself.


To Score:

The “pathways” subscale score is the sum of items A, C, D & E - it measures people’s
confidence in their ability to move forward toward a better future.

The “agency” subscale score is the sum of items B, F, G & H - it shows people’s willpower in relation to the better future they desire and dream of.

“Hope” is the sum of the four pathways and four agency items. Scores can range from a low of 8 to a high of 64.