Cenek Report

Hope can be a very strong coping mechanism during times of challenge, adversity or despair. After all, many survivors of Nazi concentration camps spoke of how hope assisted them in staying alive and coping with the horrific conditions they experienced.

Hope also has a role, in fact, a much-needed role in many of today’s organizations, according to Harry Hutson and Barbara Perry, authors of “Putting Hope to Work.” Published last year, the book covers a topic that some would view as too “amorphous” in today’s quarterly driven, bottom-line oriented organization. To the contrary, the authors, armed with research findings and years of practical consulting advice, weave together a very compelling argument for the use of hope in today’s chaotic organizations.

Their message: leaders need to further instill hope in organizations with five guiding principles that are:

Possibility - the principle of possibility states that you hope best when you hope for something in the range of what you see as being possible.

Agency – the state whereby leaders have engaged people in a way in which they have the will and drive to succeed – and are furnished with adequate resources.

Worth – leaders engage interests that followers consider vital, meaningful and motivating.

Openess – trusting in the unknown as a source of welcome surprises, and dealing with ambiguity in the road to self-knowledge.

Connection – connecting to people with empathy but facing reality with clarity

The book includes a number of great quotes, including this famous statement from Karl Menninger, MD, founder and dean of the Menninger School of Psychiatry and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom:

“Our shelves hold many books now on the place of faith in science and psychiatry, and on the vicissitudes of man’s efforts to love and be loved. But when it comes to hope, our shelves are bare. The journals are silent. The Encyclopaedia Britannica devotes many columns to the topic of love, and many more to faith. But hope, poor little hope! She is not even listed.”

Please note: This is not a paid review.