Positive Principles Newsletter
October 2005
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“A
leader is a dealer in hope.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte
“When you extinguish
hope, you create desperation.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“Hope deferred makes the
heart sick.”
-
Proverbs 13:12
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This month's tip –
Create hope.
Leaders must create a
climate of hope if they want the people they lead to stay motivated and
energized. James Kouzes and Barry Posner put it this way in The
Leadership Challenge: “The climb to the top is arduous and long.
People become exhausted, frustrated, and disenchanted. They’re often
tempted to give up. Leaders encourage the heart of their constituents to
carry on.”
Recently, I heard of a
study conducted by psychologists at Duke University. In this study, they
put rats into containers with water that was too deep to stand in and far
enough from the top to keep the rats from escaping. The rats had to either
tread water or swim to survive. In my search to locate the source document,
I found two different descriptions of the experimental set-up. At this
point, I’m not sure whether this story is urban legend or real. Whatever
the case, it makes a good point for illustration.
As the story goes, the
researchers put one set of rats in the water and allowed them to swim until
they drowned. This apparently took about 17 minutes. Then they put another
set of rats in the water and removed them at about 15 minutes to rest. The
second set of rats were then put back in the water and continued to swim for
36 hours. The researcher’s conclusion? When the rats had the hope of
rescue, they fought for survival much longer.
It sometimes seems easier
to threaten and push and prod people than to encourage, to create rewards
and to inspire hope. The natural order of things tends towards negativity.
Creating a positive, hopeful environment takes work and focus. The benefit
is that people, like the rats in the story above, will hang on longer and
work harder if they have hope in a bright tomorrow. Remove that hope and
you have nothing but fear and intimidation to drive behavior.
So for now, I encourage you
to remember this month's tip . . .
Create hope.
Have a great day,
Guy Harris
The Recovering Engineer
