Hope is a strategy
“Hope is not a strategy. We work hard and we don’t rely on hope to get the outcome we want.”
Have you ever heard anything like this before?
This idea, that “hope is NOT a strategy,” was popularized in 2001 with a book published by this name. The idea, however, had existed for years in business circles before Rick Page wrote it down.
The idea is that instead of leaning on “hope,” the prerogative of workers is to work their asses off to make sure they get a win, both personally and for their organization.
The idea of working hard to reduce the chances of a bad outcome isn’t a bad one. Good things come from hard work.
But the idea that the only way to win is to eliminate “hope” has its consequences.
As we all know, there is no such thing as certainty in our world. No matter how much we strive for it, we can never be certain of what an outcome will be. Hope, however, is much easier to get rid of (especially at work).
And that leads to a central question: is there even a place for “hope” at work anyway?
We had a conversation with Jennifer Moss on The UNBLOCK Yourself podcast and dug into that question in part of it. Jen is an author, speaker, and expert in burnout and in how to build healthy cultures in the workplace. She’s also a complete gem of a human being.
Her research has found that the absence of hope plays a central role in driving disengagement and ultimately burnout for tens of millions of workers in North America.
To her, hope is “a sense that everything is going to be all right,” but it’s more than blind optimism. Hope includes feeling encouraged by the future, seeing yourself as part of it, having meaning and legacy, and experiencing psychological safety.
So many of us have had “good jobs” we should feel grateful for. After all, these jobs allow us to use our skills, pay us well, and offer flexibility to balance work and the needs of our lives. But instead, many of these “good jobs” leave us disengaged and burnt out.
The root of these feelings is the loss of hope, which is formally defined as “a feeling of expectation and desire for something to happen.”
In her book Why Are We Here, Moss looks at work done in positive psychology (called Snyder’s Hope Theory). It’s cool (trust us) and makes a TON of sense.
In it, psychologists identified three components that make up hope:
A clearly defined goal or objective
A pathway (or multiple pathways) to achieve that goal
A sense of agency (and personal belief) in the ability to achieve that goal
When you remove any one of these components, you remove hope. You remove the desire of the people in a workplace to care about the outcomes they’re working toward.
When that desire fades, you get disengagement. You get burnout.
For over 15 years, we both worked in the fast-paced, high-growth tech industry. This industry is famous for setting outsized targets, rolling out hacky “minimum viable products,” and pushing people and teams as hard as possible to move fast and achieve impossible goals.
These outsized targets, often called “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals” (or BHAGs), sometimes work out. Teams feel motivated to do it, or there is just so much momentum for an idea that big dreams become a reality.
But more often, the opposite happens. A big goal is set without clarity on how it can be achieved, or in the absence of resources (people or tools) to make that “thing” happen. Instead of feeling engaged and excited, the people left to do the work tune out, disengage, and in their desperate efforts to achieve the outsized goal, burn out.
Whether you work in tech or any other sector, these same principles apply. If there is an absence of any one of these three components (let alone all three), the people who are needed to achieve a goal lose hope. They lose the belief in, or the desire for, that outcome to be achieved. And if that happens at any point in the journey, results AND the people involved suffer.
Whether you’re an hourly worker, individual contributor, leader, or entrepreneur, hope is essential to any strategy in order to achieve anything. Whether it’s preparing for a big meeting, aspiring toward a sales target, or cleaning up the shop for a sale, these tasks can either “just get done,” or they can “get done well.”
We all know the difference between just getting the job done and getting a job done well. There’s something special about the quality of the work when it’s done by someone who has a desire to do it.
We can see when a job has been done with a desire to do it well — that is, when the work is done by someone with HOPE.
And when work is done this way, whether it’s us or someone else, that is truly GREAT work.
If you’re a leader, you may inspire hope in the teams you lead already, and do it intuitively. Maybe you’ve read Jen’s books, and hope is already a part of your strategy (WOOOO!).
But perhaps (like Greg for YEARS!) you’re still maintaining a “work hard because hope is not a strategy” narrative (yikes!).
If this is you, here’s how you can inspire hope for the teams you lead:
Be CLEAR in the goals you set for your team. Break bigger goals down into steps, making those goals easier to achieve.
Offer multiple pathways to success. Plans with only one path to success are simple, but when circumstances change, they fall apart. Build flexible plans, and include team members to build those plans, with contingencies, so there is belief in achieving an outcome.
Equip teams with support. Belief in the ability to achieve a goal comes from being equipped with tools and support to get the job done.
If you’re an individual in a broader team, or an individual who does a lot of work independently, having a leader or workplace culture that doesn’t inspire hope is not something you can change quickly. Simply leaving that environment may not be the best option for you, or may not even be feasible.
But the good news is you can do things to create HOPE for yourself:
Set “micro goals” for yourself in your work. Get clear on what the ULTIMATE outcome is, and then work backward, setting goals that mark steps on the pathway to get there.
Build short-sprint plans of action. Outline 3 to 5 steps you can take in the next few hours or days to move toward achieving that goal.
Equip yourself with tools or support. With clear steps to achieve, identify where help could be needed. Sometimes it is leaning on skills from a friend or colleague, or buying a new tool. Other times, it is just having the accountability to ensure it gets done.
While well-intentioned, the idea that “hope is not a strategy” is WRONG.
We’re converts to this idea that “hope is, in fact, the ONLY strategy.”
Blind hope without hard work? No.
Having a desire to achieve an ambitious goal, tied to a clear path to achieve it, and equipped with the resources and belief that we CAN do it?
Oh, HELL YES. We’re all in on hope as our strategy.
And you should be too.