The Hope Theory of Leadership

I came to the overlapping fields of Leadership Development and Coaching through the stage door. I studied Theatre in college, have a graduate degree in Acting and started my adult life performing in Chicago’s Off-Loop theaters. Like my father in the newspaper business, I’ve grown up right alongside both the coaching profession and the field of “Leadership Studies,” just a few years to old to have discovered them as more viable alternatives for my higher education.

That’s okay.

Sitting beside me at my kitchen table tonight are two books that (in concert with 15 years in the nonprofit trenches and another 6+ as a coach) stand out as pinnacles of my self-styled higher education in leadership. They each connect profoundly, from different perspectives, with my own vision of a meaningful life.

They are:

1. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky, and
2. Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, by Margaret J. Wheatley.

The first is about purpose, perspective, connection, working outside your comfort zone, listening, risk, experimentation, failure, and trying again.

The second is about listening, connection, purpose, the common good, and hope.

Havel on Hope

Vaclav Havel wrote in Disturbing the Peace, “Hope … is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

The Hope Theory of Leadership suggests that each of the other theories of leadership is useful in certain situations. And not a single one is useful without the kind of hope, which Havel describes, that lives, and works, and continually tries new things.

Leadership is not leadership without hope. What are your hopes? What will you try? What else?