Leader’s Hope Deferred

Are you losing hope? Behind all the positive platitudes, all your strategies, all your plans, and all your presentations… are you losing hope?

Not just hope in your organization. Not just hope in achieving your targets. Not just hope in your leadership. I mean your personal hope. Are you losing hope in yourself?

And before you push away that feeling in your heart or suppress that tension in your stomach, just pause for a moment. Don’t run. Keep reading…

Let’s start with something easy. Google Trends shows over 92% correlation between searches about occupational burnout and hope in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom (shown below). This pattern repeats in other English-speaking countries.

In fact, a whole lot of recent events can be explained through and are related to hope:

Quiet Quitting (Ellen Scott 2022 Metro UK) = Losing hope in your job/employer
The Great Resignation (Ian Cook 2021 HBR) = Looking for hope somewhere else
Languishing (Adam Grant 2021 New York Times) = Deferring Hope
Workplace Burnout (many sources) = Running out of hope
Workplace Suicide (Bryan Robinson, Ph.D. 2020 Forbes Mag) = All hope is lost

And now that you’re feeling a bit more comfortable with this topic, can we get back to the main question: Are YOU losing hope?

If you’re a senior leader, this conversation may be especially difficult. Your role is meant to give your team hope even in the absence of one. You are meant to show courage not fear. You are meant to show passion not exhaustion. You are meant to lead the charge to bold unknow territory, to lead amazing transformations, to be a industry trailblazer. Except that truth be told, most organizations are running on a deficit of hope. At best they are running on DEFERRED HOPE: some great thing we hope will happen… we expect will happen but we don’t really know. And somehow we hope & expect this despite our financials, despite what our staff tell us, and despite clear shifts in the market… but for how long? How long are we going to defer our hope? How long before we give up on it? How long before we grieve it?

Except truth be told, most organizations right now are running on a deficit of hope. At best they are running on DEFERRED HOPE…

And for some of us, this question goes even deeper to a personal level. Because for some of us, behind our professional leadership fasad, there is a very lonely person loosing hope. It’s deeper then admitting you are emotionally exhausted, mentally drained, and uterly burned-out. It’s about admitting some kind of professional defeat or personal failure. We fight it. We repres it. We reject it. We… here it is again… DEFER it.

Yet we are here to offer you hope… perhaps even to restore it.

No we’re not offering some great new insights or consulting platitudes. You already get them from the large consulting companies selling their services. No we’re not offering some turnkey approaches that heal your company in seconds flat. Those don’t exist because this healing will take time. No we’re not offering lunch-time mindfulness classes, self-healing books, or lies we tell ourselves to make us feel better.

What we ARE offering is a meaningful candid heartfelt conversation… reconciling and healing both the professional and the personal parts of you. That’s where the real you can be found, in case you forgotten it or you don’t like who you’ve become. More importantly, that’s the only place where true lasting HOPE can be found.