You don't need hope you need power

This blog will consider this paradox, inspired by the recent Gallup Global Leadership Report (subtitle: What Followers Want). It puts me in mind of the well-known Henry Ford quote:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

This quote is often misunderstood, and we will revisit it later.

What do we want from leaders?

Gallup’s previous research identified four follower needs: Hope, Trust, Compassion, and Stability.

The Gallup report states, “Leadership is fundamental to modern life, influencing everything from political power to family dynamics.” Many of these contexts lack formal hierarchies, making leadership and followership more dynamic for most of us outside of work.

This distinction may seem minor, but it’s critical. If leadership and followership are not fixed traits, the qualities that fulfil the four needs might not need to reside in specific roles or appointed leaders.

Why leadership isn’t about leaders

I may need a compassionate leader, but isn’t there a broader need for compassion in our lives?

Most people would recognise that having compassionate colleagues is desirable and diminishes the need for compassion from a specific person in a leadership role. Trust in leadership is essential as it underpins decision-making and action. However, when I also trust my colleagues, work becomes more efficient. I can delegate tasks, knowing they will be completed, or trust them to communicate any issues constructively.

Widespread trust enhances organisational effectiveness.  If we distribute leadership traits and derive our needs from colleagues, the world of work gets a little easier. Conversely, relying on a select few individuals for these qualities feels risky.

At Tuff, we advocate for ‘adult-adult’ leadership, where no one is permanently elevated above others. In this culture, we look to each other for support, insight, and decisiveness while holding ourselves accountable for bringing these to the table as well. 

The Gallup report’s emphasis on the need for Hope stands out in the context of distributed leadership. Hope is often perceived as external — given to us rather than self-generated. Perhaps it is an English language thing, but it seems like hope is a less collegial quality and so requires a bit of unpicking to take that need into the adult-adult world. 

Our sense of being at the whim of global force is magnified in today’s globalised world, primarily through social media. So, wanting faith in a positive future is both universal and under threat, but are leaders the best source?

Why ‘hope’?

The need for hope arises from helplessness. In my experience, I’ve often turned to hope when I felt powerless to act. While recently organising my house move, once I had fulfilled all my obligations, I hoped everything would fall into place for this crucial next step in my life. I look at the state of global politics and find, at least in part, solace in my faith in humanity. Hope amplifies our sense of a positive outcome when we feel powerless.

This inherent passivity in hope can be problematic. Employees who feel they have more control over their work experiences are generally happier and more engaged. In a workplace where people feel they have little or no influence, ‘hope’ in others can act as a painkiller at best or a sedative at worst.

An alternative to ‘giving hope’ is to focus on creating agency. Successful organisations empower everyone by providing choices in how and when to do their work. Many also foster open discussions about otherwise ‘taboo’ work topics: motivations to leave, refusal to do work and broken relationships. Transparency increases individuals’ feelings of influence over their experiences and the choices of others. More transparency means more agency, and less hope is needed because thoughts, feelings and agendas are all ‘on the table’.

What can we do? 

It isn’t that I don’t want hope or that I think hope is unnecessary. It’s more that reliance on hope is a symptom of dependence on something outside ourselves. Having it as a ‘top 4 followership need’ worries me because followers don’t feel they fully influence their lives for a positive outcome. 

Even if hope was what was needed now, should we be looking to leaders for that? Given that looking to leaders for solutions might be the very reason we have lost our agency and our ability to generate optimism for ourselves in the first place. We will never be free of the merry-go-round of ‘leader-as-saviour’ if we don’t start to embrace the idea that we are the key to finding purpose, answers and reassurance.

Returning to our Henry Ford quote, it is often suggested that customers would have been foolish to ask for a faster horse when the automobile was the next innovation. What is often missed is that Ford gave them a ‘faster horse’, but not in the exact way they asked for it. 

Leaders reading this Gallup report or acting on their instincts might be tempted to give cheerleading or pep talks to their teams to ‘give hope.’ But this would perpetuate the problem. We can give teams hope, but perhaps not in the way they expect. 

Teams are more than capable of completely freeing themselves from external hope. If hope fills in the gaps when something is missing, leaders and teams can instead focus on building a culture where everyone has influence, clarity and trust in the team. The starting point might be with leaders wanting to create an empowered team, but the end point is mostly writing leaders out of the equation.

What little hope is needed can be a product of sound knowledge, psychological safety and feelings of agency rather than a leader's charisma. We can all take a role in building a culture of clarity, openness, competence and distributed power that will diminish the role of a ‘hopeful future’ to the ‘cherry on the cake’ rather than a necessary need of followers on a global scale. 

In my mind, a successful company is not one where the leaders completely fulfill followers’ needs as measured by a tool. It is one where followers' needs momentarily emerge to the point of measurement only to disappear swiftly as they, or those they work with, can take action to address them.