Careful, leaders: hope is an addiction

Why leaders need to balance hope with doubt

I'm currently reading Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. I think I'll write a more elaborate review later. But right now it got me thinking about hope as a double-edged sword.

In leadership research and practice, we tend to think of hope as an essential resource, something inherently positive. Leaders have to inspire confidence, be hopeful. Former CEO of American Express Kenneth Chenault likes to talk about a quote attributed to Napoleon: "A leader's job is to define reality, and then give hope." And it makes sense: we do find those leaders charismatic who promise a deep connection to hope, to a brighter future. We all remember the appeal of the Obama campaign 2008. It was entirely built around the notion of hope. But hope is not always a good thing.

Can there be too much hope?

Reading Carreyrou's book about the disturbing story of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, I wonder if hope is actually a blessing or a curse. Holmes founded Theranos, a biotech company in 2003. The promise: revolutionize blood testing. Theranos technology was designed to deliver standard blood tests based on a single drop of blood gained from a prick in the finger, replacing the need for syringes and the need to draw larger quantities of blood. Even better: the Theranos devices are constructed to be small enough to sit in people's homes, thus allowing for regular testing of patients without them having to visit their doctor. In 2015 Theranos was valued at $9bn, and the net worth of its founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was $4,5bn, ranking her #360 in the Forbes list of the wealthiest people in the world.

They only problem with Theranos: they never were able to build the technology they kept promising. The complete operation was a hoax, a sham. The biggest corporate fraud since Enron! Theranos is now in insolvency, and its glamorous founder is likely to face a long sentence in prison.

What I find intriguing about the Theranos story is not the hype and hollowness of Silicon Valley, as Carreyrou discribes it. Nor the cold-blooded evil-doings of Holmes and some of her closest allies later in the game. I've seen evil leaders elsewhere, and there is plenty of them. But I do wonder how a mission-driven college drop-out turned bad. How does the spark of hope turn rotten? How does a young bright woman who is afraid of syringes herself, who is willing to take risks and who believes in making the world a better place develop into a cheating monster, harassing employees, fooling investors, faking blood results jeopardizing the health of the very patients she initially set out to help?

No leadership without hope

No leader can develop momentum without hope. This is particularly true for founders. Having founded two smaller ventures myself I know that in the beginning hope is everything. It is even more important than having a good business ideas. Many founders completely change their business model after their initial idea fails, they pivot. But their hope remains and carries them forward.

As a founder you need to stay positive-spirited against the strongest adversity: You can't pay your people well, yet you need to inspire them to work hard. Your investors want results, but naturally you only have an early prototype, if at all. Your customers want to see your lofty promised delivered, but you can't. As sensemaking guru Karl Weick puts it, it is your job to "talk your organization into being". And the fuel for this is hope. As a leader you need to cultivate your hope. As a founder, you need to be even more aggressiv. You need to attach to hope like a leech to a body.

Like anything, hope can turn toxic

Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos let her hope grow out of control. When her team didn't manage to build the technology she envisioned, she came up with new hopeful ideas and pitched those to investors and potential customers. And she did that over and over again, and slowly her hope turned into a castle in the air. I've seen other founders make that mistake. If your hope to make it has grown out of control, you lose the ability to see and accept failure. Your hope has turned toxic.

No hope without doubt!

The most inspiring founders I have met are those who radiate integrity. Despite the high pressures of the startup scene, despite their celebrity status, despite the fact that they are required to tell and retell their rosy vision of the future over and over again until they become one with it – despite all this, they wear a surprising amount of insecurity on their sleeves. In my eyes, this is their strongest achievement as leaders.

At a workshop, I recently did a short meditation with the leadership team of a major European startup. I asked them to sense how they feel about things they experience as leaders. One trigger question I asked: "How do you feel about the admiration you receive as a leader?" The founder and CEO approached me afterwards. He felt a deep concern that he was receiving too much admiration lately. To him, it was a sign that he was failing in his role as CEO. If he was admired too much it meant he wasn't asking enough uncomfortable questions. I found this level of reflection and sober-mindedness breathtaking.

Ron Heifetz from the Harvard Kennedy School puts it in a nutshell: "Grandiosity sets you up for failure, because it isolates you from reality. In particular, you forget the creative role doubt plays in getting your organization or community to improve. Doubt reveals the parts of reality that you missed. Once you lose your ability to doubt, you only see that which confirms your own competence."