“Few people are powerful enough, persuasive, persistent, and charismatic enough to change the world all at once,” she argues. She urges these leaders to tend first to their “ three feet of influence” - the clients, patients, people and teams closest to them.
Sharon Salzberg, a central figure in the field of meditation, works with caregivers, educators, and social-change activists - well-meaning people with aspirations to make a big difference. All too often, though, leaders who champion futuristic ideas overlook the human and emotional connections that keep colleagues upbeat today. In times of unprecedented turmoil, there is an understandable temptation for leaders to bet the future on game-changing ideas: digital disruption, product reinvention, organizational transformation. Don’t just champion new ideas strengthen personal relationships. It is something you can do within the constraints and possibilities of your normal life.”īy encouraging their colleagues to do, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are,” leaders create a spirit of agency that leads to optimism. She calls this approach the “bird-in-the-hand principle.” Guided by this principle, she argues, starting a new venture or making things better “is no longer an incredibly risky act of heroism.
Balancing caution optimism professional#
In reality, most change agents start with “who they are” (their “traits, tastes, and abilities”) use “what they know” (their “training, expertise, and experience”) and add “whom they know” (their “social and professional networks”). The mythology, she argued, is that successful innovators predict a future others can’t see, develop a finely tuned plan to turn that future into reality, and attract the financial and human resources to back their efforts. Sarasvathy published an influential study of how innovators and entrepreneurs actually get stuff done. Invite everyone to become a problem-solver, then give them room to fix things. It’s hard for people to be positive if they don’t get a chance to play. March calls “organizational foolishness.” In his seminal paper, “Footnotes to Organizational Change,” March describes how the best leaders balance “explicitly sensible processes of change,” such as careful planning and sound project management, with slack time, experiments, blue-sky thinking - “certain elements of foolishness” that can be “difficult to justify” but are “important to the broader system” of innovation.Īchieving that balance has never been more important, not just for the healthy performance of the organization, but for the mental health of your colleagues. In times as demanding as these, it’s impossible to succeed without embracing the grind - the day-to-day struggle to meet the needs of anxious customers, collaborate with stressed-out colleagues, balance work and family.īut this organizational attention to detail can’t come at the expense of imagination and brainstorming - what celebrated Stanford Business School professor James G. Insist on crisp execution, but make room for “organizational foolishness.” But whether you’re running a company or managing a team, how do you keep your colleagues upbeat when the whole world is feeling down? How do you keep hope alive when things seem pretty hopeless? Here are four pieces of advice, drawn from renowned thinkers on organizational life, innovation, even meditation, that I’m optimistic will help you shape a more positive future. In other words, leaders help their colleagues be realists - and optimists. “We need to believe in ourselves and our future but not to believe that life is easy.” “The first and last task of a leader is to keep hope alive,” he wrote in 1968, another period of turmoil and struggle. John Gardner, the fabled scholar of leadership whose insights have influenced generations of executives, argued that positive change rarely starts from blind faith or naïveté, but it also doesn’t start from despair or defeatism. It’s important for all of us to get our optimistic groove back. “When you hit rock bottom, the only direction you can go is up,” said one chapter head, who declared she was “getting my optimistic groove back.” Membership is now at 60,000, down from a high of 190,000, although club leaders remain true to their guiding spirit. So many of our colleagues and kids are feeling stressed, exhausted, angry - “ hitting the pandemic wall.” No wonder a recent front-page article in the Wall Street Journal, which has chronicled the Covid-driven struggles of companies and universities, highlighted a crisis at a different kind of organization - Optimist International, a 110-year-old club with chapters around the world.
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