When Hope Hurts

It’s almost midnight; she’s usually here by now. I sure hope she shows up. My sinking thinking was interrupted by the hallway light that flooded the laboratory as the door swung open. My Angel of the night drifted in.

“Ya workin’ another late night darlin’?” Her smile crawled across her face, revealing huge gaps between teeth. “If they ain’t payin’ ya nothin, why ya workin’ so much?” She laughed and pushed her big waste-barrel and 250 pound body into the laboratory, and began her midnight cleaning ritual.

A smiling face can be a beacon of hope during tough times. That’s what this wonderful, 50-year-old cleaning lady was to me when I was struggling through my internship at UCSD many years ago. She swept the floor and emptied trash cans. More importantly, for the brief time she was there, she listened to my “career” woes. She was a bright light during my dark night. She gave me hope that the sun would come out tomorrow.

And it did…but not for the reasons you probably think.

Although Hope (the name I’ve given her since I don’t remember her real name) brightened my nights with her smile and kind words, the positive expectations that flowed from her were not enough to get me where I needed to go. That’s because hope is a slender breakfast. Too many people sit around hoping things get better… and wonder why they don’t. Hope may get us up and moving, but it seldom keeps us going over the long haul. Like a flickering candle in a drafty cave, hope alone can’t survive the harsh realities of leadership.

What sustains you and your team (at work and home) through adversity? What happens when the leadership road steepens and hope is not enough? How do you keep climbing during tough times?

Benedict Arnold was a brilliant, highly decorated leader in the Continental Army during America’s war for independence … until he was blindsided by injury and insult (being passed over for promotion and colleagues claiming credit for his victories). General Arnold chose to face his career setbacks by turning his back on his country. In America, his name is now synonymous with traitor.

Contrast his failure to manage career adversity with how former U.S. President Jimmy Carter recovered from his 1980 reelection loss to Ronald Reagan. Carter chose to dedicate his life to the alleviation of human suffering, built The Carter Center, and won the Nobel Peace Prize two decades later “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” [i]

Why do some leaders make poor choices when smacked by career adversity while others handle this hardship like a rubber ball? Diane Coutu, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, studied resilient business leaders, Holocaust survivors, and children. [ii] She discovered that the most resilient individuals chose to:

1.    Accept reality
2.    Improvise
3.    Value meaning

Accept reality:

When leadership researcher and author Jim Collins interviewed Vice Admiral James Stockdale, held prisoner and tortured by the Vietcong for eight years, he asked Stockdale, “Who didn’t make it out of the prisoner camps?”

The leader responded, “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. They were the ones who said we are going to be out by Christmas. And then they said we’d be out by Easter, then the Fourth of July, then by Thanksgiving, and then it was Christmas again.” Then Stockdale added, “They died of a broken heart.” [iii]

Effective leaders see reality the way it is and have faith that it will get better if they take action based on reality. That’s what Collins calls the Stockdale paradox. The sun will come out, but maybe not tomorrow.

During my internship at UCSD, I decided to ask people for feedback about my work to understand reality. I learned that my east coast style of communication didn’t fit the Southern California culture.

Improvise:

The logistics company UPS considers service a core value. Executives empower their drivers to do whatever it takes (including improvise) to deliver packages on time. This is exactly what they did one day after Hurricane Andrew devastated southeast Florida. People were living in shelters and cars because the storm had reduced their homes to rubble. Yet the hurricane didn’t stop the UPS drivers from delivering critical packages to desperate customers. UPS quickly provided service by setting up diversion sites to sort packages amid the carnage.

How well do you improvise when you hit a stumbling block?

At UCSD, I tried novel communication strategies (At least they were novel to me at the time). I stopped trying to be the smartest guy in the room, asked more questions, and listened to the corrective feedback from my colleagues after I tried a new approach.

Value meaning:

Effective leaders make sense out of their struggles by searching for meaning based on their values. Values offer a way to interpret what is going on and where to go. Values are the North Star during an executive’s “dark night of the soul.” The self-serving values of Benedict Arnold (arrogant, prideful, victim mindset) contrast sharply with the servant leader values of Jimmy Carter (caring, compassionate, humanitarian).

Nelson Mandela is another example of a leader using values to make meaning out of adversity. To avert a civil war in South Africa (after spending 27 years in prison), Mandela felt he needed to assuage the fears of whites before addressing the many grievances of blacks. Because he placed a high value on unity, he chose to symbolize unity by focusing the nation on rugby, a sport usually ignored by blacks.

Despite great internal opposition, Mandela persisted in using rugby as a powerful metaphor to make unity meaningful for all his people. In the end, South Africa won the Rugby World Cup, and millions of black and white fans sang the team song in harmony. The nation marched down the path of reconciliation, not retaliation, because a leader chose to make meaning out of difficulty by focusing on the value of unity. [iv]

What meaning are you communicating to rally your team during tough times?

Mandela’s story also illustrates the importance of choosing to lead by managing meaning, not just information. We no longer live in the information age; we drown in the information overload age. Employees flounder in a flood of e-mails, instant messages, and Internet and intranet news. Effective executives help their managers focus on what is most important in this torrent of information, especially during stressful times. [v]

I believe that the negative reactions I initially experienced when I interned at UCSD were caused by my not paying attention to the communication differences between the east and west coasts. I chose to make meaning out of this experience by caring enough about my colleagues to adapt my communication style to the west coast.

I’m grateful for the hope the UCSD cleaning lady provided. I’m also thankful that I realized that hope was not enough to make things better for me. My circumstances only got better when I got better. In fact, at the end of my internship, I was hired in the same department were I interned. I spent five wonderful years conducting, publishing, and presenting research there.

I encourage you to use hope to see the light during your dark night. Once you’re up and going, I hope these three tools help you keep going.

How do you handle adversity? What helps you maintain your motivation when the going gets tough?