How to Offer Hope

The oth­er day a friend told me about an orga­ni­za­tion in which those who are con­sid­ered star per­form­ers are explic­it­ly nur­tured, those who are con­sid­ered aver­age are rec­og­nized as doing good work, and those who are not doing so well receive no feed­back at all. This is a planned, offi­cial strat­e­gy, thought-out and based on lists of employ­ees that man­agers are asked to secret­ly pre­pare. The poor per­form­ers are just sup­posed to notice that they are not receiv­ing feed­back — as a kind of neg­a­tive feed­back, of course — and then choose to improve or to leave. It’s a real­ly inter­est­ing sys­tem, isn’t it? It cer­tain­ly makes feed­back an eas­i­er propo­si­tion for man­agers and avoids all those clum­sy, tense ses­sions in which every­body gets defensive. 

Rackhouses, Kentucky Distillery

The main thing is that it kills the spir­it via no con­tact, via ambi­gu­i­ty, via shun­ning, essen­tial­ly throw­ing peo­ple back on them­selves through an offi­cial kind of iso­la­tion. It’s hard to imag­ine a more destruc­tive, hurt­ful process or an eas­i­er out based on neg­a­tive beliefs about human beings. And, frankly, I real­ly won­der if it accom­plish­es the goal of fos­ter­ing improve­ment or sep­a­ra­tion. The goal seems to spur human change through demor­al­iza­tion, as if an enter­prise’s best inter­ests are served by dis­card­ing peo­ple con­sid­ered to be a form of trash. 

And this is pre­cise­ly the oppo­site of help­ing peo­ple by telling them the truth, includ­ing set­ting real bound­aries and goals for con­duct or per­for­mance, in a firm but respect­ful envi­ron­ment of lis­ten­ing and encour­age­ment. No one ever said that was easy work. Some­times it is painful­ly frus­trat­ing and time con­sum­ing. Some­times HR func­tions are of lit­tle real help, and the rules seem over­whelm­ing and unfair. And some­times what­ev­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion and coach­ing process is used, it just does­n’t work, in which case the man­ag­er or the asso­ciate, or the two togeth­er, must decide that time’s up on the employ­ment con­tract. And I am speak­ing here not just about first line super­vi­sors or man­agers, but also senior exec­u­tives who are just as like­ly to not know what to do when high lev­el con­duct or per­for­mance issues show up.

I will not in this post try to out­line an entire process for inter­ven­ing, but I will say this, that peo­ple are not like­ly to improve with­out some sense of hope for the future, a hope that any leader can pro­vide by help­ing anoth­er see how the present moment, how­ev­er dif­fi­cult, rep­re­sents an oppor­tu­ni­ty, not just a point of failure.

A personal example

Many years ago, when I still worked in a Per­son­nel Depart­ment (yup, the name sig­ni­fies just how long ago that was), I made a mis­take in my com­mu­ni­ca­tions with a senior leader — I’ll call him Bill. I had advised him that some of his employ­ees, five lev­els down in the hier­ar­chy, were won­der­ing if they had to hire a neigh­bor of Bil­l’s who he had encour­aged to apply for a sum­mer job in his depart­ment. I was a bit ner­vous about the mes­sage, but I felt it bet­ter he know about the con­cern on the street so he could reas­sure peo­ple that they should hire who­ev­er they felt to be best qualified. 

Some­how, how­ev­er, when we met, Bill heard me say he actu­al­ly was influ­enc­ing (or might try to influ­ence) the process and he imme­di­ate­ly felt his integri­ty had been attacked. Although he did not say any­thing about that dur­ing the meet­ing with me, with­in a few min­utes he was stand­ing out­side the open-con­cept Per­son­nel Depart­ment hav­ing a shout­ing melt­down about my “alle­ga­tions,” (I was not there at the time) and by the next day he’d gone to every unit in his depart­ment to tell them what a cad I was, how I could­n’t be trust­ed, and how I had maligned him. He was a big enough fish that my rep­u­ta­tion was in great dan­ger, so much so that I thought I might have to quit or that I might be fired for this mis­take — even though I’d had no inten­tion what­so­ev­er of ques­tion­ing his integri­ty. I cer­tain­ly did not think he would inten­tion­al­ly have manip­u­lat­ed the process. To make mat­ters worse, the Assis­tant Direc­tor of the Per­son­nel Depart­ment was a big fan of Bil­l’s and she imme­di­ate­ly sided with him — I must have attacked him!

What a mess! I went home angry as hell. And I want­ed my boss, the Per­son­nel Direc­tor, Howard, to fix the sit­u­a­tion. After all, he was more Bil­l’s peer, and I had done noth­ing wrong — except try to pro­tect Bil­l’s rep­u­ta­tion from gos­sip. The truth was, I did­n’t know what to do and the sit­u­a­tion scared the heck out of me. In part, the fear came from Bill, him­self. He was a short, stocky, poten­tial­ly intim­i­dat­ing mil­i­tary guy, hold­ing a high rank in the reserves — exud­ing com­mand and con­trol all the way. 

Howard called me to his office to dis­cuss the situation.

“What are you going to do to fix this, Dan?” he asked.

“What am I going to do?” I asked. “Howard, I have no idea what to do. I don’t think I can do any­thing, and I did­n’t do any­thing wrong! I was just try­ing to help, Bill! Can’t you do some­thing, talk to him?” I ram­bled on for sev­er­al min­utes, frus­trat­ed, dis­ap­point­ed, victimized.

Howard was qui­et, lis­ten­ing. Final­ly, when I got done vent­ing, he said, “Well, if you think an apol­o­gy would help, you might start there.”

Then I real­ly blew up. How could I apol­o­gize if I’d nev­er done any­thing wrong?! This was so colos­sal­ly unfair. After brood­ing myself into dark obliv­ion the pre­vi­ous night, putting up with the Assis­tant Direc­tor’s assump­tions, and now being placed in the humil­i­at­ing sit­u­a­tion of apol­o­giz­ing for doing some­thing that sup­posed to have been help­ful, I could­n’t take it any­more. I don’t remem­ber exact­ly what I said shout­ing or for how long, but it took awhile for me to cool down. Howard was still there, still lis­ten­ing. After a pause he calm­ly reached out to me.

“Dan, you know there are a lot of Bills in the world. This might be an oppor­tu­ni­ty for you to fig­ure out how to work with them just a lit­tle better.” 

His words were chal­leng­ing — and firm — but his tone was actu­al­ly reas­sur­ing. He was trust­ing me to fig­ure it out while not let­ting me off the hook. He was express­ing con­fi­dence in me, and saw more in me at that moment that I had seen in myself. I still was­n’t exact­ly sure what to do, but I had to acknowl­edge that this was an oppor­tu­ni­ty as much as it was a crisis.

That night I had some seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion with myself. I tried hard­er to put myself in Bil­l’s shoes. I tried hard­er to think about my assump­tions about him, my fear of him, and what I could do now. In the end I decid­ed to meet with him to explore what had hap­pened, how this thing could have gone so far awry. When we met, the first thing I did was offer an apol­o­gy. Not for doing some­thing wrong, but com­mu­ni­cat­ing in a way that cre­at­ed mis­un­der­stand­ing. And then, as we talked through it, we were able to clear the air. I left Bil­l’s office proud of my role in repair­ing the situation.

The hero of the sto­ry is Howard, of course, because he did­n’t fire me — and he did­n’t let me fire myself, either. What he offered was hope. What he did was what every­day lead­ers can do, which is find a way to turn some­thing dark into a chance once more to find light. It’s clear to me now, look­ing back after more than twen­ty years, that Howard, too, could have been at risk in the sit­u­a­tion. Bill, in fact, had more pow­er than he did, and could have dam­aged his rep­u­ta­tion as well as mine. But Howard took the more coura­geous route of trust­ing me to find a new capa­bil­i­ty in myself, even when I was so very unsure that it was there. 

It was a gift, and many times since then when I have won­dered where hope might come from, I have remem­bered the les­son, “you can do more than you think you can,” which he nev­er had to say, but was right there, always, in the mid­dle of his office, the one with pic­tures of his friends behind him, peo­ple he’d met while serv­ing in the Peace Corps in Africa, chiefs and oth­ers he had become close to. They were pic­tures of peo­ple smil­ing and dancing.

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