Rotten Habit #3: failing to harness the power of optimism

Welcome to the third edition of the Rotten Season, our weekly insights into the hidden factors destroying your culture – and how to fix them.

Optimism is an underrated value in business. It is important generally, and it’s particularly vital when trying to drive inventiveness, momentum and growth.

There’s a simple human truth at the heart of this: mustering the energy to change something requires a fundamental belief that things can and will get better. But it’s astonishing how often that this is overlooked or held to be the preserve of snowflakes. This results in a management behaviour best summarised by that old joke ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves’. Why not try that for a week and see how you get on? Or maybe your culture is built on this behaviour already (in which case, we need to talk)…

To be clear, optimism doesn’t mean being chirpy, phoney or superficial. In fact, wooden spoon platitudes are usually embarrassing for all concerned. Nor, on the other hand, is optimism a narcissistic, cultish belief that only your team has the superhuman abilities necessary to move society forward (take a bow, Facebook). It is much more grounded than that: a belief that keeping going through adversity will, in time, lead to meaningful gains.

So how can you induce optimism in others? It has become fashionable to talk about happiness at work and ‘employee engagement’. But engagement is a bit of a loose term and covers a multitude of sins. HR departments can be guilty of using such language without substance (what exactly is it that you are trying to engage people with?). The brutal truth is that ‘employee engagement’ has ended up being associated far more with dog-eared posters, poor training, and failed intranet sites than with business transformation. A term that doesn’t sound as if management is exempt from responsibility might also be preferable.

The cultivation of optimism is not something that can be delegated to HR.Woolly notions of ‘helping ourselves to feel great’ are a waste of time and often lead to nothing more creative than a false smile.

Instead, the leaders of the business must ask themselves difficult questions, derive the truth and ensure that optimism is a real business goal. Good leaders think about this all the time. In fact, when Corporate Punk works with high-performing CEOs, they often list it as one of the top requirements of the job.

Psychological studies have found that happiness derives from two things: purpose and pleasure. Purpose without pleasure is brutal hard yards. Pleasure without purpose is too transient to be meaningful. This seems like as good a place as any to start when thinking about optimism. So, leaders need to pay attention to two questions. One, do we have a credible, relevant and distinctive sense of purpose? And two, are we doing everything we can to instil a sense of reward as we try and fulfil it?

The advice, then: find ways to balance purpose and pleasure in your culture.

Oh yeah: and please avoid grounding your purpose solely in financial targets. No-one ever got out of bed to create shareholder value.

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