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I have just been watching a filmed interview with a missionary. The set-up was the classic in-situ shot with the missionary executive from the UK interviewing the missionary from the far east and as I watched it something began to bother me. I turned to my wife and asked “Look at those two men – who is the more passionate?” It was clear from the body language alone that the Indian missionary, in contrast to his British boss, was enthusiastic, visionary and above all optimistic about the future of his work. I found my heart saying “I want to be there with this man!”
Optimism is contagious.
As I look at leaders and seek to identify common attributes among them I find this one emerging repeatedly. Leaders we respect and admire are often people whose outlook on life is positive and enthusiastic. Their vision is for a better church, a better company, a better team or a better world. Effective leaders need to be people who exude hopefulness.
“Leaders are dealers in hope”
said Napoleon.
An underestimated quality
The place that optimism plays in leadership is vastly underestimated. In order to follow someone we want to know that the future they see is an improvement on what we are experiencing now. If that isn’t the case then the person who claims the right to lead me isn’t followable, even is he or she has the title.
Optimistic leaders use their imaginations to re-play success scenarios. When we look to the future we reflexively create a mental video clip of what will happen. Creating such visual images of the future is a natural human faculty and we all do it, whether it is what today will look like or when I will find a wife. Optimistic leaders, however, have trained themselves to see their own success in the future and play that tape to themselves over and over again. They will repeatedly rehearse it at a cognitive level and by doing this they actually inspire themselves.
Handling adversity
Martin E Seligman has spent much of his academic career analysing optimists and the make-up of their emotional landscape. Among many traits shown by optimistic leaders he observes that they view adversity differently from other people. They see setbacks as temporary and will reassure themselves that this problem is real but it won’t last for long. They also see problems as specific to a circumstance and not general, affecting every other are of life. Furthermore they treat setbacks as externally produced. The problems they face can be attributed to forces outside rather than being endemic in their own system. They don’t regard them as entirely their own fault. In sharp contrast the pessimists view adversity as inevitable, pervasive, and more personal. When challenges arise or difficult jobs come their way the pessimist is more likely to do worse than predicted and even give up, while optimists will persevere.
One way of understanding optimism and its importance for leadership is to consider its opposite. Pessimistic people, especially in positions of leadership or influence, tend to have a debilitating effect in an organisation. This effect can ripple through the relational networks leaving many others feeling heavy in spirit as a result. A dose of negativity in a conversation might be countered by an up-beat response but when that dose of heaviness is repeated time after time in random conversations the feelings of inspiration about the future can easily be diluted by this drip-feed of gloom. Winnie-the-Pooh’s Eeyore is a wonderful fictional example. On one day when Eeyore seems particularly depressed, Pooh follows him to his gloomy spot to find out what the trouble is. Eeyore says that he is unhappy because it is his birthday, and nobody has taken any notice to celebrate it. Two characteristics of the gloom merchant are clear from this
Firstly, the very existence of his ‘gloomy spot’ tells us Eeyore enjoys his own negativity. He has even designated a place to practice the art! Ask yourself: are there places where I tend to sip into negativity, or are there conversations that bring out the dour side of me? If there are it will be a worthwhile discipline to avoid or change them. Great leaders know where the gloomy spots are and either avoid them or change them.
Secondly he expects other people to be his own source of joy. This is a more subtle attitude that I have seen many leaders slip into. When we take ourselves too seriously and assume that our role as leaders comes with an inbuilt right to be made happy by other people then we are in trouble. Had Eeyore had said “Hey guys, it’s my birthday, lets go and do something together!” he would both have deflected his own negativity and inspired other people to follow him.
But before we write off the pessimist too easily lets not forget that the pessimist is often the realist or the pragmatist whom the optimist needs to take very seriously when strategising the future!
As a leader who can sometimes find optimism hard to come by here are some principles to consider
Avoid the gloomy spots.
Negative environments take a variety of disguises and may be places where your spirits are sapped (is your office depressing you?). Maybe a particular person or group of people make you feel down in which case managing that relationship should be one of your leadership priorities. By expecting people around you to succeed your optimism can change the atmosphere in even the most Eeyore prone places. By doing this you can nurture a culture of optimism.
Spend more effort on building your strengths that fixing your weaknesses.
Most of us have a shrewd idea of what we are good at and which skills we possess that outshine those around us. Optimistic leaders consciously build on areas of strength so they become more able and this leads to a constructive attitude about their personal worth. Of course we need to be sensitive to our weaknesses and work on them, but only to the extent that they don’t undermine our effectiveness. The rest of the time we need to manage around them.
Adapt your language
Effective Leaders often spend significant time on choosing the right language to express their vision and cast it in the right places. Almost every word we use (including the words in this article) carry emotional overtones in the minds of hearers and developing the art of understanding how something is heard is the sixth sense of the optimistic leader.
Be aware of your spiritual and emotional state
By reading inspirational material we can reframe our thinking if it has gone into pessimism. For me certain passages of the Bile are always inspirational and so are stories of other leaders who have succeeded, especially through adversity. Intentionally feeding your mind with this kind of material is capable of transforming your outlook to a more optimistic frame and so lead more effectively.
Be aware of the way you come over in meetings
It may well take an honest conversation with a friend whom you can trust to be neither judgemental or patronising to find out how you come over. Modifying this appearance is a leadership task that will always be behind the scenes and constitutes some of the personal heavy lifting work.
Be spontaneous occasionally
Just do something for the fun of it or because you’ve never done it before. Getting out of your zone of convention by being spontaneous helps to develop your muscles of optimism. This is happens because spontaneity essentially involves an expectation of having a pleasurable experience. Bertrand Russell once said that the quickest way to make ourselves miserable is to continually focus on ourselves. To my surprise it was his love of mathematics that kept him going.
To my surpriseI discovered Dr. Billy Graham was a pessimist. The nickname his family gave him in his early life was ‘puddleglum’ after a C S Lewis character who spread doom wherever he went. Apparently Graham consistently fought this tendency in his own soul frequently so that his public effectiveness would not be undermined by his private tendency to pessimism.
Dwight Eisenhower was a life-long student of leadership and noticed the same tendency within him. At one of the darkest points of the second word war he wrote in his diary
… I firmly determined that my mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory – that any pessimism and discouragement I might ever feel would be reserved for my pillow. I adopted a policy of circulating through the whole force … I did my best to meet everyone from general to private with a smile, a pat on the back, and a definie interest in his problems.
Just imagine what could happen if we church leaders did the same.
