Optimism Is Now an Essential Leadership Skill

Alison Beard (0:02)

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Adi Ignatius (1:00)

And I'm Adi Ignatius. This is the HBR IdeaCast.

Alison Beard (1:11)

So Adi, your reign as editor-in-chief of HBR was very successful, but you also faced very big challenges. There was a rapidly changing media industry, shrinking print advertising dollars, pressures to downsize our workforce.

So at times, it must have been difficult to put on a happy face for everyone that you were managing, right?

Adi Ignatius (1:29)

Yeah. I mean, of course. Look, to keep things moving in a positive and productive way, it helps to have a vision and purpose so that there's something important you're moving toward directionally, even when there are bumps along the way. And to be honest, I think it helps to have a naturally sunny disposition.

Alison Beard (1:45)

I think what you're talking about is what our guest today calls Resilient Optimism, and that is the ability to acknowledge those bumps, the painful realities that people are facing, while still believing and helping others to see that it's possible to chart a positive path forward. So this is a tough balancing act, as you know, but it's hugely important for leaders, all kinds of teams and companies, so that workforces do stay motivated.

Adi Ignatius (2:12)

Change is brutally hard. You know, teams will not simply go along with the plan because it's there, so you need resilience, but you also need to achieve some wins along the way, so that you build momentum, right? That you can highlight, so you can tell a story that can actually be inspiring.

Alison Beard (2:26)

So, Michelle Gielan has spent years researching both optimism and resilience, and she has found that even if you're not sort of a naturally sunny person like you, you can cultivate that positive attitude, and you can use it to enhance not just individual, but also group performance. Again, if this isn't your nature, even when you're being hit with negative news each day, you can train yourself to be more optimistic, and you can spread the right kind of optimism through your team and organization. Her new book is Resilient Optimism, The Science of Sustaining a Positive Mindset in Tough Times, and she also wrote the HBR article, How Leaders Counter Pessimism in Trying Times. Here's our conversation.

So let's start with how you define Resilient Optimism. How does it differ from what people know or assume about both optimism and resilience?

Michelle Gielan (3:24)

So optimism is typically understood to be an expectation of good things to happen.

What Resilient Optimism is, is it's optimism that stays strong when it's tested. So instead of having this fleeting feeling of, I can do this, Resilient Optimism is being able to sustain that optimism when the setbacks keep stacking, when the challenge lasts longer than expected, when change just keeps coming or we're exhausted. The reason is that it's so easy to start with optimism, right? A new job, a new career, a new project, a new school year. We are so good at beginnings, but what happens when we are met with challenge or we're feeling burnt out? Resilient Optimism is that set of behaviors that we can turn to that makes positive change easier to start and it builds our resilience at the same time.

Alison Beard (4:15)

Yeah, I think that resonates with me because I'm, like many people, sometimes find it hard to be optimistic, particularly when things don't look great, you're worried about the state of the world, your company is struggling, your team has missed its targets. It can feel hard to shift away from pessimism. Pessimism almost feels protective.

So why should we fight that feeling both in ourselves and on our teams?

Michelle Gielan (4:44)

Right now, we're experiencing a time when the volume of problems feels louder than the volume of progress.

Meanwhile, though, optimism is one of the greatest performance advantages that we see available in the data. Optimism fuels nearly every single business, health, and educational outcome that we know how to track. 31 percent higher levels of productivity, 37 percent higher sales, 40 percent greater chance of promotion. We have an 11-year data set of more than 25,000 business professionals looking at optimism, resilience, and a host of other things. What we found is that people who are highly optimistic, so they score in that top quartel of that particular metric, they are three times more likely to be highly engaged at their work. They're five times less likely to burn out. Optimism even acts like a protective factor. When we make an investment in optimism, it acts like infrastructure for our lives, and it's literally some of the best fuel we can lean on, not just for our well-being, but for our performance as well.