Infectious optimism

If you buy just one book, it has to be this one

During my business life I’ve been fortunate enough to benefit from lots of training and development and lots of leadership courses.   A few weeks ago as I was moving offices I had to go in and rescue a box of my desk stuff from before the pandemic.

It was a veritable treasure trove and time capsule of photos from social events, a few trophies for various achievements and training manuals from lots of those courses that I attended.  And a book.

Just one book.  

Right now my bookshelf is filled with some fantastic texts but at the time I wasn’t one that instinctively on getting to the airport went off to the self-improvement section to pick up the latest sage on who moved my cheese etc.   So, one book must have resonated with me and it was Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism.

This is not an easy read, you either need good eyesight, good glasses or both and a lot of stamina to get through relatively dense text.  These days publishers have figured out we have shorter attention spans and are adept at breaking content into smaller consumable chunks.  Seligman is now regarded as something akin to the grandfather of optimism.  

Nurture or nature

You may think that some people are just born or raised optimistic, and some are pessimistic.  Studies tend not to bear that out.  Children buck the trend of parents and identical twins can lean either way so it’s far from clear that optimism is something in our genes that can’t be changed and that’s the thrust of Seligman, Carol Dweck and a host of others who help us believe that the brain’s wiring however it is for us now can be changed.

So what’s optimism and its role in catalytic leadership?   Seligman says the defining nature of the pessimist is that they believe bad events will last a long time, that bad events will undermine their entire work and they are at fault for this.

Optimists by contrast aren’t happy go lucky people who believe a sprinkle of magic dust will solve everything.  They do recognise things go wrong but their innate belief is things will go more right than wrong given the odds.   And that when they hit a hurdle they see this as a temporary setback and confined to this instance, not a defining moment that impacts them forever.

So when confronted by challenge and difficulty the pessimist either retreats internally or looks to the world for the cause of their misfortune.  The optimist is likely to see it as a challenge, an experience to learn from and to try harder.

Optimists win always or eventually

In studies, optimistic sales people tend to sell more products – you might think that one is obvious.  But optimists as clinicians and doctors make better diagnoses.  Huh?   And when it comes to leadership how we manage our own emotions matters to the rest of the team.  Every day the 24 hour news cycle brings us reasons to be uncheerful, how events are set against us – it sets up our mindset to believe no matter how hard we try, something will get us in the end – events, dear chaps, events.

Victor Perton, author of Optimism, The How and Why explains that leaders who are innately optimistic bring with them a better workplace culture than leads to lower staff turnover, higher productivity and higher profit levels.   Optimistic leaders make for great catalytic leaders because they seek to expand thinking, are more creative and have a greater enthusiasm for the role of creativity in work, they infuse people with a mission and greater possibilities, and they inject energy into a debate and into others.

What if you weren’t raised as an optimist?

You may not have been raised as an optimist but as Seligman points out, it is a reframing of how you think that transitions you from a pessimist towards more optimistic thinking.  To be a pessimist you will always be proven right, there will always be things going wrong that you can guard against, put up shields, hunker down and your teams will follow that defensive behaviour. 

To be an optimist, you need to craft a different narrative for dealing with the risks and downsides of what you do – whether that is to see the unexpected as just unexpected, to see things that go wrong as an experience not to repeat, to see regret or analysis of mistakes as introspection and to be swapped for a forward-looking strategy.

And for many of us, the pessimist within is truthfully a defence mechanism, something we can blame if things turn out to be different.  

In the workplace do we value optimism enough?

But catalytic leaders can’t do this alone.  And it’s a tough call trying to convert an entire company towards being more optimistic.  Yet very few leaders when hiring search explicitly and significantly for optimism.  

When I wrote this article I did a search on indeed.com looking at all jobs advertised in the United Kingdom.   Of the 670,000 jobs advertised on the platform, just 891 specified optimism as a desired quality.  891!   That’s almost one tenth of one per cent of jobs calling for this quality.

When was the last time when recruiting you asked someone what makes them optimistic?  Or how do they infect others with their optimism?  If this stuff is important as all the research suggests it to be how come we’re not signalling it’s a quality we desire, treasure and value?

Optimism isn’t a blind faith that something good will come along soon or a lazy shortcut that decries doing the actual work and just coasting towards an outcome.  It is a courageous mental attitude that creates a strong driving force in a positive direction.   It’s OK by the way to encourage optimists to use data, just don’t be surprised if they surprise you with the findings within that data or see new and interesting trends within it.

Optimism and leadership

Final words for this article.  Imagine you the leader as a pessimist – someone who lacks faith in themselves and their team, someone prone to believe in the worst because that way they can’t possibly have any unpleasant surprises.   Guess you’d not want to work for you either.   Ah but you say – I’m a pragmatist – that’s OK but what does that really mean to a team you want to inspire.   I believe in you, I believe in your ability, I believe that even when you hit a setback or a hurdle you will find a way to overcome this.  That’s the stuff of optimism and boy is it powerful.

James Strock, Serve to Lead

"Vision is the ultimate source of all leadership. Optimism is vision girded for battle. Optimism can be a shape-shifting and protean force, moving like water past all obstacles, breaking a path of love, expressed in courage."