IS HOPE PART OF YOUR SCHOOL'S CULTURE?

I guess you would hope so! Especially for those of you whose school or organisation is a faith-based one, the question may seem unnecessary. Impertinent, perhaps. Even offensive. I hear some of you saying indignantly, Of course it is? What kind of a school doesn’t have hope as part of its culture?

But ask yourself again. Is hope part of your school’s culture? An endemic element in the way you approach things at your school? Are your people hopeful? Hope-filled? What about your students. Are they hopeful? Are some hopeless? Or hope-less?

In a recent Harvard Business Review Research Report, Katina Sawyer and Judy Clair recognise that the place of hope in the workplace is complicated (Research: The Complicated Role of Hope in the Workplace, in HBR, 18 October 2022), observing that emotions are a part of everyday life — both at work and outside of it. In the work context, emotions are particularly likely to emerge when organisations are working on ambitious or challenging projects. For example, large numbers of employees might experience shared joy if they take time to celebrate their successes in achieving project milestones. Or they might experience collective sadness as they mourn the failure of a product launch that was touted as the “next big thing.” According to Sawyer and Clair, joy and sadness, along with love, fear and joviality,?have all been demonstrated to play a key role in how some organisations function.

But, they point out, hope has been given short shrift in organisational research, despite how frequently organisations invoke hope when striving toward challenging goals. Indeed, they add, it is commonplace to hear organisations encouraging members to “keep hope alive” in the face of challenges or even to promise a more hopeful future to clients or customers via their products and services.

Sawyer and Clair go on to explain that while hope sounds like a purely positive emotion on the surface, in our research,?we found that hope plays a more complex role in organisations as they tackle challenging goals.

For an organisation, and this probably includes schools, the authors assert that hope is made up of three parts:

1. Your staff and your students – perhaps especially your students - need to have a shared vision for a hopeful future. That is, they must believe that it is possible to move beyond their current circumstances and stage of development to achieve more desirable outcomes. This applies to teachers and their students. It is why we teach.
2. Your staff and students have to believe that they know how to get to their goals, via methods and practices that seem appropriate and relevant. In other words, they need a clear sense of self-efficacy, a deeply felt confidence that they have, or by working at it, eventually will have, skills and competencies, intellectual, social and personal, necessary to achieve the goals they have set themselves or have been helped to set by their teachers.
3. You school – and this is the most important dimension of hope for an organisation like a school – your staff and students must embody a shared sense of motivation to strive toward their goals; and moreover, a shared sense that when times get tough, people – both staff and students - in a hopeful organisation like your school believe they have what it takes to weather the storms of life, to face down adversity, and, with resilience born of hope, to achieve success in spite of adversity. For students, this adversity may be intensely personal, or shared adversity, like a pandemic. What they need to feel is that your school is a hopeful organisation which acknowledges that we are all in this together, and more importantly, that together, as a school, staff and students alike, we can overcome the obstacles life throws in our way.

But, while hope partially embodies the idea that a better future is possible, Sawyer and Clair caution, this belief requires a simultaneous recognition that the present is not ideal – or even that it is bleak. When a school commits to continuous improvement – in academic results, character development, doing better – it is tacitly accepting that more is possible, that each student can achieve a higher level of performance, of competency, of capability, of coping. When school leaders outline a big vision, they need simultaneously to acknowledge, at least to their staff, if not to staff and students both, that failure is also a possibility – always a possibility - no matter strong the feeling of hope runs through the organisation.

But failure is part of human experience. Good leaders, strong leaders, never pretend that life is easy. Making mistakes, falling short, is human. It is from failing that we learn. It is our poor performances in tests or assessments as students that we learn where the need for improvement lies, where more effort needs to be applied. Being hopeful is not head-in-the-clouds - it is a way of accepting that our best selves are evolving, and if we fail, it is not the end. It is a matter of not yet, rather than not ever, so we pick ourselves up and try again. The story of human suffering and striving is the account of human history. Schools are communities of learners who hope against hope a lot of the time. We hope to succeed, but we learn more when we don’t. But we don’t give up. We don’t stop hoping. We pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and keep trying. Keep striving.

HARNESSING HOPE WISELY????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Sawyer and Clair argue that because hope can thus be a double-edged sword, organisations must harness hope wisely and productively to keep their teams looking forward. Hope – and hoping - is a strong motivation because it is infinite. The human spirit only reluctantly gives up all hope. Good school leaders, wise leaders, never give up hope, and strive to sustain the hope in the heart of each of their students and staff members. Good school leaders encourage members of their school communities to draw strength from each other and continue to hope.

Sawyer and Clair based their comments on their research into an organisation that was seeking to heal human trafficking victims from trauma. They studied this group for two years, collecting data through interviews as well as spending extensive time at the organisation. Let them tell it:

Through our research, we found that this organisation shared a hopeful vision for the future as part of everyday conversation. When times looked bleak, employees returned to the vision and reminded themselves that their efforts could help heal those who had been trafficked. They believed their methods, which included providing therapeutic, psychological, legal, and social services, were effective. Finally, they kept their motivation alive by providing opportunities for employees to socialise and bond, and leaders regularly emphasised the importance of sticking together when times were tough.

Sawyer and Clair found that at times, the organisation decided to expand its goals beyond their its scope, indicating that we found that emotional contagion, which is the transfer of moods among group members was a key driver in determining the impact of the hope culture on outcomes, and they go on to note that when events suggested that the organisation’s promises seemed within reach, hopeful stories spread throughout the team.Some survivors were making steady progress toward their goals, Sawyer and Clair enthuse, gaining internships or becoming peer mentors in drug and alcohol recovery programs, while also becoming more confident in themselves and the futures they wanted to attain. When positive stories like this were shared, Sawyer and Clair go on to say, the organisation remained steadfast in promoting recovery for survivors, and set out to achieve more than they originally planned.

WHEN HOPE BACKFIRES??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Sawyer and Clair acknowledge, however, that hope-centred cultures can backfire. Crucially, they affirm that a hope-centric culture is only positive when making progress toward its promises seems realistic. When events appear to contradict the hope culture’s claims or throw things off track, they continue, there’s a similar emotional contagion — but in a negative direction. When events occurred that called the hope culture into question, less hopeful emotions started to catch on. When trafficking survivors returned to using drugs or alcohol, or disappeared back onto the streets, organisation members discussed their struggles a lot. In turn, these stories sparked negative emotions within the organisation.

Sawyer and Clair outline the downward spiral that resulted when survivors appeared to be ?following the tenets of the organisation’s program, were supportive of other residents in their journeys, and seemed to believe in the positive vision the organisation promised — but still failed to recover — the gap between the promise of a hoped-for future, and reality, widened. As a result, the authors ruefully note, despair set in. When negative emotions reigned, the organisation became hope-less, and they began to abandon their goals.

Sawyer and Clair conclude that within hope-centred cultures, success can boost organisations to achieve outcomes they never thought possible — but when they fail to achieve their goals, less desirable events or outcomes undermine organisation members’ motivation when they occur.

LEVERAGING HOPE IN A POSITIVE WAY????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? So, how might organisations leverage hope in positive way, and avoid the pitfalls, Sawyer and Clair ask, suggesting that many organisations invoke hope when trying to solve important, but complex, problems, but warn that they should know that maintaining hope takes effort. ?

Schools – especially faith-based schools – stand a little apart on some of Sawyer and Clair’s conclusions, especially this one. Rather than accepting that maintaining hope takes effort, we believe and deeply understand that it is our hope that inspires and encourages our best efforts. Schools, with their hope-centred cultures, draw on the energy, the idealism, the impetuous optimism and the enthusiasm of their young people to sustain and enrich their sense of hope.

Indeed, education in and of itself is a human endeavour embedded in hope – the hope that we can better ourselves and become more useful, contributing, serving members of society the more we seek to grow and develop our skills and competencies and enhance our capabilities. We accept the legendary teachers’ report comment, Could try harder, and we do. As leaders, we ourselves try harder. We also encourage our staff to try harder and our students to try harder, because we believe that by trying harder, our hopes of becoming better people building a better society are more likely to be realised.?

Sawyer and Clair found from their research that the highs of hope cultures soar very high, but the lows can be difficult to manage. Their advice? Anticipating such fluctuations may help better prepare organisations for the difficulties they will face along their journeys. Sawyer and Clair advise that when developing a vision for the future that includes ambitious goals, leaders should discuss the realities that go along with goal achievement. They should let their people know it will not be straightforward — doubts will arise and setbacks will happen. The authors claim that urging employees to view this as a natural part of the process might deter them from feeling shocked or disappointed when things don’t go as planned. Further, it might help employees to push through hopelessness, instead of succumbing to it.

Good, wise school leaders know the truth of this implicitly. Having a bold vision is essential if an organisation, or a school, is to advance and not stagnate. There are always risks in striving for new goals, new objectives. But taking risks is a fundamental part of great leadership. Taking risks responsibly, of course, means acknowledging that this initiative or that innovation may not necessarily yield the planned-for outcomes, but acknowledging the risks is never a reason for not proceeding. Risk inspires and excites, stimulates and encourages, and taking a risk often produces an unanticipatedly successful outcome.

From our first faltering steps as humans, taking risk is part of living, and it is in embracing risk that we learn skills, learn what to avoid, learn to problem-solve, learn to decide, learn to evaluate. Little human progress results from being risk-averse. It is empowering for women and men when they embrace risks in hope; where their forward path is illuminated by a deeply-held belief that all things are possible, and where a willingness to fail is complemented by a commitment to learn from failing, so that faltering steps become confident strides, and new learning about ourselves as we strive to become better human beings results.

Sawyer and Clair offer a different view: in order to create more stability in hope-centred organisational cultures, they suggest, organisations might promote a more realistic form of hope. But is that not the same as learning from our mistakes? It is not the fault of a hope-centred culture per se that we sometimes miss our objectives. Human resilience – the capacity to bounce back, to pick ourselves up and keep going, is a human instinct.

Sawyer and Clair suggest when organisations face challenges or setbacks, they might discuss what’s still possible. Of course they might! Indeed, they must. To do so is essentially human. An authentically hope-centred organisational culture embodies the notion, noted by Sawyer and Clair, that when one door closes, organisations might ensure that employees don’t lose sight of those that are still open. Similarly, during tough times, authentically hope-centred organisational cultures draw upon the corporate memory referred to by Sawyer and Clair through which employees are reminded of previous time periods in which they were thriving and making positive progress toward achieving their goals. Hope-centred cultural narratives do restore employees’ hopes, by highlighting the universal experience that failures are often sandwiched between successes, and that better days may indeed be on the horizon, if they continue pushing toward their goals.

Overall, good, wise school leaders would strongly endorse Sawyer and Clair’s suggestion that if organisations do help and encourage their employees to embrace both the “highs” and the “lows” of hoping — and develop more enthusiastic narratives about the nature of hope — they certainly might better stay the course in successfully tackling their thorniest problems.

While our research reflects a first step toward understanding the role that hope plays in organisations, Sawyer and Clair conclude their report, we believe that it can be harnessed effectively — and propel organisations toward goal achievement. It would seem that schools are well down that path already. Human learning in all of its complexity inevitably involves failure to achieve goals and objectives, however large or small, and the key learning for organisations of all kinds in this is that regardless of their area of endeavour or enterprise, human organisations are full of motivated, curious, self-efficacious, striving human beings, whose nature it is to want to be better and to make a difference in the world for their fellow men and women.

The role of the leader is to embody that hope and that belief, to offer all their people, of all ages, of all levels of ability, of diverse skills and manifold experiences, so that when the vision of the organisation is set forth, the people say to themselves and to each other, We can do this!?Of course, they don’t always manage to do it right the first time, or the second. Yet rather than give up hope and stop striving, they pick themselves up and try again.

It is in their picking themselves up and trying again, their will to strive, that their essential humanity is best expressed. It is not the pain of hoping that must be recognised and appropriately managed in order for organisations to push through hard times, as Sawyer and Clair assert. Rather is it the joy of hope that gives people-intensive organisations like schools, and the teachers and students in those schools, the strength and the will to continue to do all we can for as many people as we can towards achieving our shared goals. This is more than invoking and managing hope, as Sawyer and Clair suggest. It is invoking hope as our reason for striving – a hope and a belief that we can be better, we can do better, giving us the courage and grit to grapple with large-scale challenges of all kinds.