265. Are We in a Hope Crisis at Work? With Matt Poepsel, PhD

22:28As you're describing that, I was thinking about Elon Musk and whatever you think of him and his management style or whatever. I think he's always said, we want to go to Mars or something. Well, he has a track record, like you said, regardless of what we might think about his leadership style. He has a track record. If I put together a team and I said, we're going to go to Mars, people would rightly be skeptical, right? But I'll tell you that when you've accomplished those things, and sometimes you see this in sports, you see it in the military, you see it in business world, you see it in nonprofit.

22:58Somebody comes in and says, I'm going to turn this thing around. And if they have the track record or if they have the leadership character and capacity, they can do it, right? They can do it with and through other people. So I think that, you know, a lot of times when we look at these big, hairy, audacious goals, whether it was our first exploration to the moon in the 60s, right, or whether it's now it's Mars. Someday it'll be something more than Mars, I'm sure. It's just a matter of saying that hope is warranted if the leader is prepared to offer the agency, right, that all the team members kind of see their contribution toward it and the pathways, the outcome, the ability to pull it off.

23:37And I think it's also fine if we set up, you know, multi-year missions that say it's going to take us, you know, a long time to figure this out. But at that scale, you're talking about the grandest scale of Mars, you know, and there are other many examples of that. Product launches that take years or, you know, who knows what kind of AI race we're in now. There's all kinds of examples where we can set these big, hairy, audacious goals and ask for the level of hope and command the level of hope. But that can only happen through the proper leadership style. I think some leaders might be going, OK, OK, Matt, I am 100 percent on board with this.

24:12I don't have the track record, but I do want to introduce into my team a BHAG, a big, hairy, audacious goal. But they don't have the track record. What do they need to introduce this so they're not going to get laughed at the next meeting? I think the first is intentionality. Are you choosing that goal because your executives handed it to you and now you just feel compelled for their, you know, for your own sort of glory and purpose to pull that off? That's not a great intention to ask your team to follow you. If it's genuine, though, if it's authentic, if you truly believe that it's possible and you're willing to do all the hard work and all the effective leadership technique to be able to help them pursue that goal with you, then I would say ask for that hope and issue that BHAG, but also be transparent about it.

25:00Be honest and say, you know, I don't know. I'll be honest with you. I don't know exactly how we're going to do it, but here's how we're going to figure it out. And we're going to be prepared to pivot or here are the guiding principles that are going to help us be successful. And then start with some of the smaller wins. If you don't chunk down a project to go to the moon, like you're going to need to have some proof points along the way. Right. Right. So if you come in and you have a big, hairy, audacious goal, I would suggest that if you don't have the track record, you just need to over index on the small wins and the proof points so that you can develop that track record.

25:32If you come in, you've already done it 100 times before, and this is just your latest, you'll get a lot more leeway from people. Right. There'll be a lot more insulated for whatever vision you're painting for them because they trust you. They've done it before. You've got that track record. So maybe you can say we're part of a three year turnaround and I don't need to provide as many milestones up front. I still think you should. But let's say that you just wouldn't have to obsess over that quite as much as you do if you're an unproven leader. So I'd say the two things in there. Number one is make sure it's coming from an authentic place, that you truly feel it for the right reasons, not for the wrong reasons.

26:03And second is just recognize and be honest that you don't have that track record necessarily. You're going to be transparent about it, but then just make sure there's a lot of proof points early so that people can see that it's happening. Right. We all want to have that feeling. It's happening. Right. You're going to have to do that as opposed to just based on your reputation or your charisma alone. So if somebody's listening and they're like, gosh, you know, I've got a big goal in my gut and I just want to give it to the team. I'm a little nervous about it. You're like, OK, great. So are we experiencing agency and pathways?

26:32Are we experiencing the hope of saying I'm the one who can do this? I can put this in front of our team. And the pathway is, well, how am I going to go about doing it? Well, maybe that little expose there gives you a little bit of confidence to say, OK, I can still ask for it. I just need to be transparent about it. and I just need to make sure that we're going to set up for a bunch of quick wins. So great. There you go. Now you've got a pathway. So yeah, I hope people do feel hope about that. If again, we're challenging the team. And the thing that I hate to see is leaders who are hesitant to ask a lot of their people.

27:03The thing is, is that we can challenge people. We don't have to worry about that. If it's coming from a mutually intentional place, if we want them to succeed and do well and to grow and we want to stretch them, we're going to give them gobs of support and safety. you can make big asks of people, whether they're your kids, whether it's a coworker, whether it's a direct report, whether it's a spouse, it doesn't matter. But if you're going to be a jackass, that's not going to work. You can't do that to people. That's not fair. So I think that a lot of times I see, especially early career leaders who tend to be hesitant because they don't want to stretch people because they don't want to burn a relationship.

27:38Unfortunately, it does a disservice. And so I think that hope can provide that insulator, right? To be able to say, if I'm tracking hope, if I'm making sure I'm constantly stoking the flames of hope, then it's OK for me to ask for stretch because I'm creating the conditions for someone to succeed in a way bigger than they probably saw for themselves. And those are the leaders we remember. How do we measure hope? I think number one is you can even talk about it all. When it comes to measuring it, it could be as informal as, hey, everybody, I just want you to go in the chat, you know, how hopeful are you feeling right now, scale of one to 10, if you have that type of team safety, if you've earned that right.

28:15If you haven't, you can put it into your engagement surveys. You can put it into your pulse surveys. If you have an HR team that's installed those kinds of tools, you know, add an item like whenever we encounter obstacles, we always tend to figure it out. Okay. That's pathways. Or I see my contributions as essential to our collective success. Okay. That's agency, right? Let's find out and let's take a look across the organization of who's rating those items highly and who's not. Maybe those leaders are in need of some education when it comes to how to foster hope. It's like these things are so fast and free, Al.

28:53How many things in life are fast and free? Not many. But when it comes to proper leadership, when it comes to engaging our team and helping them feel a sense of hope and see themselves as being essential and what I say, paint the picture with everybody in it, Like, it doesn't take long and it's not expensive at all. It's totally free. You just have to be willing to do it and you have to think to do it and you have to prioritize it. So I feel like hope, the return on hope, therefore, is quite high. I've written down two words here, agency and pathways. Is this part of like the system to install hope?

29:29Yeah, it's a psychological construct, which is what nerds like myself like to do, is come up and test these things and come up with organizing frameworks. Those are two from Snyder specifically that came up with two of these critical elements. And I love agency, which is basically my autonomy, my capability as an actor to take action. I have to see myself in it. Obviously, from a hopefulness perspective, that's huge. And the second pathway is, can I see a way to get to that, steps I can take to make this beneficial, positive outcome in the future? So, again, back to the silly example of me, for example, running a marathon.

30:06knowing that I could do the work, I can put in the miles, you know, I have the self-discipline. Okay, great. And then the pathways of I had to go get a training plan, just download it off the internet. Fine. But any plan is a better plan than no plan. And then being like, I can see where if I do these things that are written on this spreadsheet, then I'm probably going to be able to run that marathon. Sure. Done. You know, that's a tidy example, but it's, it's essential really for, for hope. So I like those two vectors, those two components of hope for sure. Agency and pathways. I've got a note down here, enlightened leadership.

30:36Is that your term? Yeah, that's my term, all right. I tell you how that's a doozy. It's a doozy. So I mentioned a couple of years ago, I think many of us experienced the global pandemic, and it helped us in a way because it kind of juggled our priorities, our values. And I'm no different than anyone else. I might be a little different than I scheduled my midlife crisis to take place right during the middle of the global pandemic, which was not too wise, but that's how it happened. And so I found myself in this free fall, right? Where I'm kind of like, oh my gosh, is the work I'm doing the way I'm doing it?

31:09Like this isn't resonating with me anymore. And I've just landed square on a Buddhist meditation cushion, as it turns out. So I started to practice meditation and think about these Eastern philosophical concepts alongside my Western psychology of leadership, because I stink at meditation. I can only think about work. and they all kind of got commingled in there. And I came to realize that when I use the term enlightened leadership, it's not Eastern, it's not Western. It's just the reality that the age of enlightenment was all about taking on new ideas and throwing off old ones. And so I feel like an enlightened form of leadership is one where we throw off these outdated attitudes and beliefs.

31:49It is very surprising for people who don't study leadership for a living that many of the frameworks and what we characterize as leadership today was developed in the 60s and 70s. It's been a full 60 plus years since some of these things that we teach were really relevant or developed. And so the modern, especially in the West, the modern sort of role of leadership is very me-centric. It's a lot of times has to do with the charismatic leader, the authoritative leader. And guess what? In today's environment, everything has changed. Everything has changed. Generations have changed. Technology has changed.

32:30The nature of our collaborative, connected economy. Everything has changed. Leadership hasn't. So for me, when I talk about enlightened leadership today, I say, how are we going to move past the outdated attitudes and beliefs that are holding us back? They're preventing success in three key areas, what I call performance, people, and purpose. All three of those systems are buckling under the pressure of outside forces right now. And I think that this is really a reckoning as we enter this new year. And we're thinking about in the era of AI adoption, in the era of increasing complexity, speed, pressure, the generational value shift, people just having experienced so much emotional intensity and burnout.

33:15The old ways of leadership are leading us in the wrong direction. So an enlightened form of leadership is much more selfless. It's much more collective in nature. It balances the increasing technology that we have access to with the humanity that continues to differentiate us. And if I could put a really fine point on it now, well, I'll tell you, leaders are healers of separation. And an enlightened form of leadership is what draws people together and creates alignment that creates the sort of multiplier effect that we need to drive performance and to care for people and also to serve purpose.

33:52so to me these this the dark ages of leadership uh couldn't end quickly enough and unfortunately they won't end quickly enough to be honest but i feel like an enlightened form of leadership is ours for the taking if the old style of leadership like courageous leadership or the the person who stands at the front of the boat and goes yeah come on we can do this you've got that and then the enlightened leadership is much more selfless where is the driver if you i i wouldn't know as a manager listening to you, how I'm going to be enlightened as a leader, but also still, you know, taking, taking charge, so to speak.

34:31Yeah. That's the paradox, right? So leadership isn't about you. It's about the mission. It's about the people around you, but at the same time, it's only about you because you can only control yourself. And it is a paradox, I will admit, but I feel like the, the term I like to use is we through me, like, how can you serve the, the needs and the capabilities of your team to pursue that goal under this banner of hope like we've been talking about. And you're the essential actor. You're the team leader. And if you're not the team leader, you're just a thoughtful team member. Guess what? You're still a leader.

35:00You can show up every day. You can manage your work. You can lift up your coworkers. I don't care what role you're in or what your title is or what your office or your home office looks like. You're a leader in my book. So then the question becomes, what does we through me look like? How do I make sure that my strengths, my gifts. Maybe if I have this, maybe I'm good-natured and I'm humorous and people enjoy working with me. Use that. How do you use that? How do you bring that in, right? To help people really recharge as they're pursuing difficult goals. So I do acknowledge that it sounds scary in a way, and it sounds like, well, what's my role in all this?

35:38But that's exactly what's happening. And you have to think that in the old days, the leader had the information, they made the decisions and they routed information up and down the organization. And we had layers and layers and layers of middle managers. Well, what's happening now? Well, computers do all that stuff better, at least a lot of it. And so now we're seeing organizations get flat, real flat. So now all of a sudden it's like, why do I need you to prepare a dashboard and send it to me? I can just have real-time access to information directly from your people. So goodbye, manager. And you're like, whoa, what happened?

36:05Well, you weren't doing the human parts. You were doing the mechanical parts. And AI is going to be a hell of a lot better at that than you. So instead, what I like to look at is think about the separation that takes place when we fall into misalignment, when people fall prone to their competing goals, when they fall into their own self-interest and they're not working as a collective. That's when we dissipate the energy of the organization. And that's when we hurt our ability to achieve our goals. So instead, that's why I say leaders are healers of separation. And our conversation today about hope is one great example of what a leader can do.

36:36How do you pull the team together by fostering hope, by making sure everyone can see themselves in the picture, that they see the role that they contribute toward the collective success? That's leadership. That's what it looks like. But if you stand there and you say, well, I'm in charge and we're going to do what I say and I'll make all the decisions. Thank you. It's like you're not even qualified. Everyone's a specialist now on your team. Everyone's got access to AI tools. So I don't care what you know. That's not what differentiates you anymore. How can you move us and keep us together while we're moving?

37:06That's what leadership is now. So I feel like for anybody listening that's saying, how do I move to an enlightened leadership perspective or what happens if I don't? We see what happens if you don't. Like, you know, you're redundant and you're gone. Instead, though, remember that we're going to see escalating technology. And that's a good thing. But we also need to see escalating humanity. And that's a leadership thing. So to me, it's focus your energies on those things that will always be necessary and are more essential than ever. So AI can do probably a lot of managers work, but what we're saying there is we focus on the stuff that AI could never do, which is human.

37:46The human bits, the transformation, the connection, the feeling. I don't think that I've ever felt hopeful just because of an interaction with AI. That's just a distinctly human sort of emotive and operational experience. So I feel like that's the example of what leadership will preserve to be. We have to remember that we're going to have this phase that we're in in 2026 where adopting technology and just adding technology is going to produce a short-term gain. But eventually, all those gains will dissipate. Everyone will have access to the same relative technical capabilities and investment. It's going to level the playing field.

38:22So what's the long-term competitive differentiator? It's the human parts. It's the creativity, the innovation, the agility, all the things that we've talked about. That requires psychological safety. That requires commitment. That requires hope. That requires leadership. If you expect to be in business for the next five to 10 to 20 years, you better get good at the leadership of the human parts because that's the part that's going to separate the winners from the losers, not who's got which algorithms. Everyone's going to have the same algorithms. Like, that's like trying to compete on electricity.

38:53Like, no, it's just like everything is going to essentially be broadly accessible to the entire marketplace. But leadership doesn't work that way. You know, when you have the best leaders, you can get the most energy out of your people. You can have an unfair competitive advantage when it comes to attracting talent and retaining talent and deploying talent, right? Not algorithms, not computer code. But we have to adopt those things, too. You know, we need those efficiencies. I'm not a Luddite by any stretch. But I just know enough and have been around long enough to know that the human bit, the leadership bit, is what will separate sort of those who have a competitive advantage versus those who are sort of continuously at risk.

39:37If you think back to somebody who had the, quote, leaders are dealers of hope. Leaders are dealers of hope. That was Napoleon Bonaparte. He understood. He understood that you need to paint this picture of the future if you're going to ask an army to fight for you. And that's a pretty extreme context, obviously. So unless you're a leader who's kind of taken over half the free world, then maybe you have the cred to argue with Napoleon. I wouldn't. But I think that military leaders, sports leaders, anybody in high stakes environments, when you think about big turnaround situations, when you think about emergency medicine, right?

40:12These people who are in high stakes leadership environments understand the role of hope. They understand the human spirit and will as making the difference in those very public sort of environments. And so I think that for a leader who says, you know, all this talk about hope is soft, maybe your stakes aren't high enough. Or maybe you don't recognize how high stakes you are actually in an environment, right? And it's easy to feel squishy about it because it's unfamiliar. But if that's the case, that's not leadership. That's something else. That's reductionism. That's mechanical approach. That's going to land you sort of in yesterday's news, right?

40:50Versus the companies that are able to attract top talent and feed a sense of purpose and do it in a way that feeds performance. Absolutely. You know, profitable businesses are non-negotiable. We can't run non-profitable businesses. But I think that at the same time, that's not the sum total of what we're capable of. So I feel like it's limiting. It's self-limiting, actually, to feel that hope is soft. Take a look instead. rip a page from people like Napoleon, who understood at the grandest scale and the highest stakes, why the human will is essential to large-scale success. I think we've heard that the phrase fear is contagious.

41:26Do you believe hope can also be contagious? Yeah, I do. I think both are contagious. And again, when I ask my students for their reflections, and I talk about things like optimism and hope, that's exactly the term they use. even without being prompted, they'll say the word contagious. It's contagious. I feel it when my manager, my supervisor, my leader is hopeful, positive, is confident, is sure that we're going to be successful. It's contagious. They feed off of it. And I think my counsel to leaders is always, everyone is always watching all the time. And it's not because it's literally true, but it's more true than not true.

42:03And it's true enough that we should just think that way. all eyes are always on you. And they're looking at your body language, even on Zoom. They're looking at your word choices. They're looking at how you frame problems as learning opportunities and obstacles that are actually going to make us stronger once we figure them out. They're looking at all of that. And that's why I feel that hope is contagious, because it's hard to be around somebody who you have to be a pretty hardcore skeptic and really be focused on the devil's advocate role, which is a valuable role, by the way. Like if somebody comes in with hope, it's not that they should be bristle at how dare you challenge me.

42:38I'm hopeful. It's like, no, they need to challenge you. That's that's a good thing. Right. When you have team members who are skeptics, let's not let's not throw them out and say, oh, they're just negative. No, no, no. As long as it's operationally helping us, as long as it's done in the right way. And it's not just it's not toxic per se. Arguing a counterpoint is actually quite good when you're on a debate team. You've always got the counterpoint team trying to help you make your argument stronger. But I do think that it is contagious, long-winded way of saying that if we lead by example, and if we're authentic in our hope, we're not just giving it lip service, then it absolutely affects and changes.

43:17And it's kind of like yawns and smiles. Those are contagious too, because those are kind of core human things. So I think there's a lot of examples of what's contagious in our organizations. We need to feed the right things, knowing how contagious these things are. Let's just be a little realistic about the beginning of 2026. that you've already said and alluded to that there's an awful lot of layoffs, there's an awful lot of like bad things going on and stuff that still feels like it's coming down the pipe. If you just can't get there to feeling hopeful, is there a stage before it or is there a pathway so that I can get hopeful?

43:52I think a lot of our beliefs take their formation in stories that we tell ourselves. Psychologists refer to it as explanatory style. Some of us have a naturally pessimistic explanatory style, and we tend to see something that's minorly negative, and then we pull on that until we can catastrophize it and say, it's going to take over our whole lives. Others have an optimistic story style, explanatory style, and they might find the positive in everything, maybe even to their fault, right? They may have rose-colored glasses, so to speak. So we need to understand that and have that self-awareness. We have to remember that headlines, for example, are designed to get us to click.

44:27And a lot of times we celebrate the negative. If you watch the evening news, if you look at the headlines, a lot of times we are getting a view of the world. Now, people are absolutely losing jobs. People are losing their jobs to AI or having them refactored at least, all kinds of stuff in there. And economic headwinds are a real thing. And jackass management is winning out over humanistic enlightened management in some cases. But I think that those things are also temporary. A lot of times, you know, these things are cyclic in nature. There will be a boom time again. These things always happen.

44:56If you're old like me, you've seen several of these. And when it does happen, then people are going to find the freedom to move around a little bit and make choices about their employment and things. And I think that in the short term, if you find yourself that you've lost a job or if you find yourself that you're anxious about what AI is going to mean for you in 2026, I understand completely. I totally get it. I've certainly felt it myself, too. But I think when we explore the facts, the reality of the truth behind it, and you fall back into, well, what am I capable of doing? You probably will show yourself that you're stronger than you think.

45:34And there are specific short-term things you can do to improve that situation. And I think being realistic about the situation that, yeah, this sucks. I think you have to admit that this sucks. But at the same time, not to lose that hope that in the long term, you know, you can take actions and you can make things work to your advantage and you can accomplish your goals. Sometimes we have to refactor those goals. That's true too. But I think that that would be my advice as we enter yet another year of uncertainty. Things always change. There's no going backwards. We can only move forward. And I think that when we try to keep things as fixed and like, oh, I just had my job perfect the way I wanted it.

46:17I didn't ask for all this AI stuff. Yeah, that's not how the world works, right? So, but being hopeful that what if something better, what if I could redesign my job in a way that I actually like it more, but that confronts us to face our fears and our comfort that we've historically had. Yeah, that comes with the territory, but that's leadership. That's self-leadership in that case. I'd like to finish up by asking you whether you've got a particular leader who you remember from either working with them, working for them, someone who stands out perhaps that has the qualities that you think are just, that's what brings hope to a team.

46:52Yeah. I mean, I've been blessed in a way to work for so many effective leaders from my military service, my work in the business world, even in academia. I go back to my mom. You know, we didn't have it great growing up. We were Midwestern family, you know, middle income at best on a good day. But the hope that she had for me and what she saw as my potential, it was there. It was there. And so I felt that. And I felt an opportunity, an obligation, a responsibility to kind of test my own limits, so to speak. So I don't think sometimes we could, I could give you a pithy response like, oh, Churchill, Churchill was so great.

47:31Yeah. And he was. And he offered hope to a nation and the world. And those are grand scale things. Every time you see a natural disaster, a turnaround, these big situations, you're going to see those examples. But I think a lot of times I like to look for more relational examples in our own community, sometimes even in our own homes, where there was all the reason in the world to be frustrated and sort of disheartened about what might happen or the future or the economic situation we were in or anything like that. But she wouldn't allow it. And that gave me hope. I think we all have that opportunity to be that person to those around us, to lead by expressing hope, embracing it, by using it, by cultivating it, right?

48:11By not running away from it because it sounds, oh, people aren't going to take me seriously or they're going to think I'm a fool. No, that's foolish, right? Understanding and embracing the fact that we're human, like, and that deepest humanity of ours, that is the future of leadership. It's what we need more than ever, especially because of what we're going through, not in spite of it. That was Dr. Matt pepsil and i really hope pon very much intended that you're feeling a bit more hopeful than you

48:36Leanne:were 45 minutes ago what i really enjoyed about matt's approach is that he's not selling toxic positivity he is acknowledging that things are really difficult right now layoffs and ai anxiety the constant uncertainty and he's basically saying that hope isn't about pretending that that's not happening it's about believing you can do something about your situation and see a path forward. If you want to find Matt, he's very active on LinkedIn. We'll pop a link in the show notes. Do check because his surname is not spelt the way that I thought it was. His book is called Expand the Circle. It's a five-step framework for what he calls enlightened leadership.

49:11One reviewer compared it to Stephen Covey's seven habits. Very high praise indeed. And in fact, go back to episode around, but episode 201, I think we had someone from Covey's organization on. So this book is definitely for you if you are a leader and you want to balance performance people and purpose and not just have to feel like they're picking one you

49:29Leanne:don't have to pick one you really don't you should also check out matt's podcast it's called lead the people which he describes as being for middle managers on a mission so if you've been promoted a few times but you don't yet run the place and you're feeling a bit stuck in the middle this is the perfect show for you yeah i'm a bit disappointed you didn't go for pepsil's people because i think that'll be a greater a great name we'll leave all the links in the show notes as always we will and if this episode resonated with you we would really appreciate it if you'd share it with someone who might need a bit of hope right now january can be a tough time and sometimes just knowing that what you're feeling is normal and that there is a way through it is enough that can make all the difference this is truth lies and work we'll see you next week