Strengths Based Leadership: Hope
Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie offers four basic needs followers’ have in order to get behind a leader: trust, compassion, stability, hope. We’re sharing our stories with these basic needs as leaders of millennial individuals and teams over 18 years management experience.
"It was not a disgruntled employee. Everyone here is extremely...gruntled." --Michael Scott, The Office
Turns out, gruntled is a real word (who knew?). And it's what you want in your work place, people who are incredibly satisfied with their work and their place in the world. The problem is, a large percentage of individuals in most work places are on the verge of being disgruntled with their circumstances, if they aren't already there.
A recent Gallup study of nearly 7,500 full-time employees found that 23% of employees reported feeling burned out at work very often or always, while an additional 44% reported feeling burned out sometimes. That means, about two-thirds of full-time workers experience burnout on the job. And younger employees experience burnout at a much faster rate--seven in ten Millennials report feeling some level of burn out on the job.
According to Gallup's research, the main factors that cause employee burnout have less to do with expectations for hard work and high performance and more to do with how someone is managed, i.e., the leadership they find in the work place. And, Gallup has also found, a key element to effective leadership is providing a bright outlook for the future, to offer hope. Providing team members with hope means giving them something to look forward to, and can help them navigate through chaos, complexity and the anxiety of the unknown. When an individual has a positive expectation for the future, they are much more engaged and invested in the present.
I was recently in a position that involved spending most of my working hours staring at a computer screen replying to email queries—reacting to the needs of the day and trying to live up to expectations that I will solve problems immediately. While I consider myself someone who enjoys finding fast solutions and have determined ways to use my Strengths to do so, I was inundated with problems and had little relief. I was on the fast track toward job burnout. As a result, I started to resent the time I spent at a computer, and the people who were sending me emails as well. It came to a point where I was getting headaches from the sheer number of times I rolled my eyes after receiving an email with--what I considered to be--an easily solvable problem that did not actually require my intercession. All of this was contributing to a deep dissatisfaction at work.
And then, something switched. One of my managers asked me how things were going and I described this experience of burnout. He gave me permission to boundary the time I was spending on email, responding only to the "the building is on fire!" types of needs, but to not feel obligated to respond to absolutely everything ASAP. He also invited me to be part of a team, participating in a project in the very beginning stages, mainly the sharing of ideas about a program being developed way off in the future. As part of this project, I attended meetings centered around brainstorming—all dreaming with no problems in sight! I was excited to not only be a part of this team, but was feeling optimistic about the future in a way I hadn't experienced at work in a very long time.
Now, I have to say, my main job responsibility of meeting the needs of everything in my email inbox didn't go away, but I at least had something to put my hope in, and, as a result, I was inspired to do my best work. My manager gave me an incredible example that offering hope in leadership requires paying attention not only to what a team member is doing, but also to what they could be doing. People need the reassurance that we are judging them not on what they did last but on what they can do next. That's the promise of hope in the work place and it requires good leadership in order to offer vision for the future
Janie Stuart is a coach with 18 years experience managing young employees and volunteers in the non-profit sector.
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