Hope is a feeling, but what many people don’t realize is that it’s also a mental construct. Here are tangible actions you can take to increase a sense of hopefulness in yourself and your team.

Set achievable goals.

If your team needs to get their mojo and confidence back, be sure to have them set achievable goals they know they can hit — and each time they do, you can watch with pride as their motivation rises. If you have a huge, seemingly insurmountable goal, break it down into smaller ones so you and your team can turn it into a series of smaller wins as you work towards it. 

Increase your team’s sense of agency (aka self-belief). 

Remind team members individually, or as a whole, of what they’ve achieved before and what they are capable of now. Set them up to succeed in many small ways (including having them nail those achievable goals). Build up their sense of personal agency step by step to boost hopefulness and confidence.

Create multiple pathways for reaching goals. 

Never set a goal without including various pathways to achieve it. The more possible paths you can use to reach your achievable goal, the better. Work on one at a time — and be clear about what you’re working on when — but know that if Plan A doesn’t work, then Plan B and Plan C are waiting in the wings. That will increase hope for the whole team. Just be sure to have everyone commit to one pathway at a time. If you do want to put action steps in place for multiple pathways, just be sure from the beginning that everyone is super clear on who is working on which.

Coach leaders to navigate ambiguity.

First of all, uncertainty is tough because, as a leader, you have others counting on you. Your decisions can and will affect the organization and people’s lives, and often there is no clear “right” choice. This is where knowing yourself and your core values become so critical; this is what will help you make the best possible choice when all you have is your internal compass. With this in mind, here are several approaches that help:

• Clearly understand your core leadership values and leadership philosophy. This is a core part of the work I do. One client recently said he doesn’t know how he ever made decisions before this process.

• Focus on the Four Factors that matter the most when leading through complexity:

1. Shared purpose
2. Perspective-taking capacity
3. Dialogue 
4. Mindfulness

• Focus on cultivating habits, including what’s known as “simple habits for complex times.”

• Double down on self-care and emotional self-management.

Control your emotional state within your organization and team.

Only one hundred percent of the time! Leaders’ emotional states permeate their organizations. An anxious leader creates an anxious organization. A reactive leader and leadership team create a reactive organization. A composed leader lowers anxiety in their organization.

Be aware that America has an addiction to positive thinking.

When we’re addicted to seeing only the positive, we fail to look at reality — including realities about ourselves. Most people feel that they have two options: to see everything positively or to come down hard on things and themselves and be critical and judgmental. Neither of these are useful. 

What is useful is a combination of compassion and curiosity. Compassion allows us to look at reality, including the truth about ourselves, without judgment — then our curiosity is enabled by that lack of judgment. This clear-eyed, curious approach to anything allows us to investigate things more deeply and therefore improve or solve them. 

I encourage people not to be overly positive about themselves but instead be positive and hopeful about their ability to create change in themselves and their lives. The important thing is to attain results without unnecessary suffering. Many people create so much additional pain in their lives due to their unwillingness to face the original suffering. 

Another issue an addiction to positive thinking creates is that it oversteps grief. When a leader or an organization is stuck, that “stuckness” can often be traced to unprocessed grief. So many times, I have raised the possibility of unprocessed grief with clients to find that they instantly recognize it in themselves or their organizations. By paying attention to that grief, honoring and processing it, things are freed up to move forward. 

Stay focused.

Most clients seek help to shift from being a leader that raises anxiety in their team to being a leader that lowers anxiety. This includes things as diverse as having the discipline to set boundaries and remain focused on an achievable goal, through to being able to create an atmosphere of safety for people to try new things. It depends on the leader and their situation, but creating safety is always crucial. 

An example of this is an organization I’ve just started working with that has two idea-generating entrepreneurial founders who are continually coming up with new directions and possibilities for their organization, not realizing the thrash this creates for their leadership team and beyond. In this instance, lowering anxiety requires creating more clarity, consistency, and composure for their organization, which takes self-awareness and discipline on the founders’ part. 

Learn from difficult personal or professional challenges from the past.

They already have a successful strategy for overcoming things. They could ask themselves, “What have I learned from how I have overcome things in the past? How can I apply those approaches again when coming up against new challenges? What may need to be adapted or refreshed?” 

I would also say that one of the most important things we can have in adult life is a strong sense of agency or self-belief. Having overcome challenges in the past builds this sense of agency. You can draw from it in challenging times and help others around you do the same by reflecting on how they have successfully overcome hurdles in their own lives. This approach can also be used successfully with teams. 

Just as the First World War precipitated the society of that time into the twentieth century, it could well be that the year 2020 brought us similar disruption.

A microscopic virus managed to destabilize our lives, our habits, and our certainties. One year ago, who could have expected such turmoil? This virus has managed to traumatize many of us with long queues of coffins, putting a short term to what we considered was standard, economic growth, and prosperity that taken as a given. This little monster’s punitive journey followed an erratic trajectory, hitting regions that did not expect its visit and hence were badly prepared for its arrival. The impact made us collectively rediscover the relativity of things.

This pandemic has gnarled people’s patience; hence, polemics opposing preventive sanitary measures to individual freedom. In fact, what is at stake is a fundamental re-evaluation of our society’s values. That crisis has once again revealed our collective inability to find concerted solutions to address a problem, which is global by essence. Each State tries to define its path and to apply its solutions. This turmoil is shaking a number of the current political systems. We cannot yet measure the full impact of this pandemics’ pernicious effects. It would appear that we are far from being out of the tunnel with the longer-term consequences of it. We have no real clue what the “new normal” will look like, except that Asia is prone to come out stronger from this crisis and that it has accelerated our entrance into the digital area.

Very few times in recent years have our trajectories been so near dependent on the evolution of society. What each of us is doing may appear in that context as relatively futile, but at the same time, this crisis acts as revelatory. It is up to each family, to each one of us, to reinvent its sustainability model. Some couples have experienced difficulties to overcome the confinement period together, while others have felt their ties reinforced.

However, those strange circumstances did not affect my working rhythm. It was merely necessary to adapt — as everybody did — to the new working tools. Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, and a few other Californian neologisms have become our new daily work companions. I’m at least four to five hours a day in communication with India, the United States, our European neighbors, Russia, China, Singapore, and the Middle East. To establish new trust relationships by internet is far from easy, but once the relationship exists, we save a great deal of time! No queues in the airports, and no traffic jams. Anyway, let us face it: nothing will ever replace face-to-face contact, a frank handshake, the warmth of a smile!

I am surprised by what it has been possible to undertake and implement this year, despite such odd circumstances. It happened in a different way than expected, but the results are there. Of course, like everyone else, I have travelled less than during previous years due to the pandemic. I did not visit more than a dozen countries.

Now that we are reaching the end of this somewhat strange year, let us welcome 2021, with renewed optimism and energy, under the sign of an improved sanitary situation and the return to multilateral relations more favorable to global solutions.

Leaders’ work lives have become a whirlwind of daily demands — packed schedules, urgent meetings, pressing deadlines, and grinding out as much productivity as possible. Notifications and other interruptions fracture their attention further, undermining the ability to advance their most vital efforts. 

While these obligations will always have a place, leaders can be more intentional about designing schedules that advance their most important work. Here are seven practices grounded leaders use to shape their lives. 

1. Think bigger. To-do lists and urgent demands narrow a leader’s focus resulting in days consumed with less significant tasks and smaller outcomes. Establish a weekly ritual to counteract this tendency by reconnecting with your most meaningful and valuable aspirations. With this improved vantage point, you will see more valuable actions and find the resolve to counter the forces that attempt to undermine better choices.

2. Unproductive patterns. Escaping unproductive work patterns is no easy task. Review how you invested your time during the prior week. Where did you fulfill your intentions? Where were you blown off course (external forces)? Where did you wander (internal resistance)? Design a countermeasure to break one of your unproductive patterns in the week ahead.

3. Think smaller. Escaping ingrained patterns requires better choices. Don’t fall into the trap of making too many changes at once. Commit to one behavioral change that will meaningfully impact your life. It’s easy to forget that small changes create the momentum that leads to big, enduring shifts. 

4. Leverage boundaries. You can expect to face 50–60 unplanned interruptions per day. Achieving anything of significance requires focused attention. Design your week to include protections that fence you off from people and devices. With protections from external distractions in place, you can more readily focus on advancing your most meaningful priorities. 

5. Blank canvas. Each week offers an unlimited number of ways to invest your time. Taking back control involves consciously designing days that enliven you versus unconsciously reacting to the whirlwind around you (an ongoing design challenge). Design time for health, fun, family, and friends — not just work. As importantly, be sure to design space for recovery and doing nothing at all.

6. Concentrated effort. Your most significant work is a function of uninterrupted time and the focus you bring. Arrive committed to applying focused effort, or you will sabotage your protected time with less demanding, superficial work that you perceive as more pressing. Become skilled in resisting these diversions. 

7. Daily escapes. The design you envision for your day will come under attack. Rather than succumbing to forces that could undermine your intentions, imagine and enact escape paths. It takes just one second to switch from a less effective choice to a better one. 

The power to manifest a professional life filled with greater meaning and impact comes down to the quality of your imagination and choices. Little by little, your weekly adjustments in thought and effort, stacked one atop the other, can create dramatic breakthroughs in the quality of your outcomes and work experience. 

Real leaders are not afraid of a challenge. But 2020 presented obstacles like never before. In response, tens of thousands of people worldwide stepped up to save lives while putting their own at risk. 

To me, humanitarian workers stand out as particularly inspiring. In addition to overcoming tremendous uncertainty and fear of Covid-19, they faced down floods, droughts, historic swarms of locusts, and other crises to treat potentially life-threatening malnutrition among the world’s most vulnerable communities.

Women also have been on the front lines of the global response, often directing teams, working remarkably long hours in unimaginably difficult situations, sacrificing the ability to spend time with their own families to help others. I see them as leadership heroes and want to spotlight three leaders working in places that rank among the worst in the world for poverty and hunger, saving hundreds of young lives in the process. This is what real leadership looks like, and I hope more people will step up to lead in the year ahead.

Pakistan 

Dr. Ayesha Aziz (pictured above) runs a nutrition program in Sindh, Pakistan, where nearly half of children under five suffer from severe acute malnutrition – the deadliest form of hunger. She oversees approximately 2,800 community health care workers who go door-to-door, screening children ages six months to five years. Those who need treatment are referred to a treatment center where they can receive therapeutic foods; or a local hospital if they have pneumonia or other complications. 

Sindh was the first region of Pakistan hit by COVID-19. A lockdown was instituted, and fear swept through communities and among health care workers. Many people stopped going to health centers to get the nutrition treatment they needed. “Just getting people out and reaching the sites is one of the major challenges,” said Dr. Aziz.  

Health care workers were concerned, as they lacked the personal protective equipment (PPE) essential to stay safe. Supply chains were interrupted, causing some nutrition and other medical treatments to be unavailable for days at a time. 

Nevertheless, the team worked tirelessly with the local, district, and national governments to ensure that the nutrition centers were able to remain open and safely operating. After several weeks, PPE was procured so that the health care workers could safely continue their work, but the number of children traveling for nutrition treatment fell by approximately 75%. 

Dr. Aziz and her team overcame all of the obstacles to screening almost 500,000 children and are working to screen nearly one million more in the next several months. About 80,000 have been treated for malnutrition. Despite the ongoing threat of COVID-19, the team still goes door-to-door to monitor the children’s progress and help their families avoid a relapse into malnutrition.

Somalia

At the beginning of the pandemic, the De Martini Hospital in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu was the country’s only coronavirus hospital, with just 71 beds to serve a city of more than two million. Fardosa Hussein, Action Against Hunger’s Somalia Communications Manager, visited the hospital to learn more about the facility and found something she didn’t expect: a close-knit community of women on the frontlines. These women were doctors, nurses, and other health care staff who left their families at home to live at the hospital – women who have been fighting to save every patient and support each other. 

“The reason I went to school to get an education is that, if such pandemics take place, I can be on the frontline to support my people,” said Xilwo Daud Ibrahim, a doctor who was not able to see her infant daughter or elderly parents for months. “I made a personal decision not to go home to reduce the risk of affecting my family.” 

Dr. Ibrahim said that many people in Somalia have been too scared to seek medical care due to the stigma of COVID-19; for those who did, there were not enough ventilators or other supplies. She and her colleagues watched many suffer and eventually die. 

Those suffering from malnutrition are much more vulnerable to the negative impacts of COVID-19, as their immune systems are already compromised. Even before the pandemic, one in three people in Somalia didn’t have enough food due to poverty, flooding, and swarms of locusts.

Despite these obstacles, doctors like Ibrahim showed up each day to save lives. “I will serve my people as long as I live,” she said. 

Bangladesh

When the first coronavirus case was confirmed in Cox’s Bazar on the southeast coast of Bangladesh, the government-imposed lockdowns. Suddenly, streets and buildings were emptied, markets and restaurants closed, and offices – once hives of activity – turned silent as staff members started working from home. 

But not every worker could stay indoors and protect themselves and their loved ones. During these difficult times, Abeda Sultana Liza, Action Against Hunger’s Supervisor for the Food For Peace Program, has been committed to fighting the virus and delivering essential services to those who depend on her. She considers herself a soldier in an army of dedicated humanitarian workers. 

Every day she wakes up early, shares her morning tea with her family, and sanitizes her motorcycle. Then she sets out with five other community facilitators, helping low-income families find ways to supplement their income to afford things like food, medicine, and school supplies. “We do not know who is sick and who is not, but we always make sure to keep a safe distance, sanitize our hands, clean equipment and have a big smile,” she said. 

Traveling between areas on her motorcycle, Liza’s days have gotten much longer due to COVID-19. She has put her professional life over her personal life, leaving her family early in the morning and coming home late, working hard to keep interactions with them to a bare minimum in case she has been exposed to the virus. “The first thing I will do after this ends is to give a big hug to my family, my team, and all the people I care about,” she said. “My fight with COVID-19 is not the only battle: I also fight hunger, poverty, inequality, discrimination, and global warming. I want everyone to have a better life. And I will keep on fighting.”

Of all the different trainings companies put employees through that they don’t think they need, imagine hearing that you will be required to undergo lessons about your character.

It doesn’t matter if you’re upper or middle management, the CEO, or a young rising star. When it comes to questions about character training, the responses I hear from even the most established leaders in Corporate America are pretty much the same.

“Why me?”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“What does this mean?”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Did I get put on a development plan without even knowing it?”

On a human level, I understand their defensiveness. It is jarring to feel as though your character is being questioned. Character is personal. It is linked to our sense of integrity, our perceived sound judgment, and who we fundamentally are. Questioning character is questioning our sense of self.

As an academic and a coach, I feel validated by the strong reactions. They prove that we feel so confident in our character that we do not even consider that we have flaws in our moral and ethical reasoning. With the same certainty and defensiveness echoed from those leaders, we all believe we are honest, have moral courage, and lead with integrity. We even believe we are humble! And this may be, for the most part, true. But if we can’t even for a moment consider that we have been shaped by biases of what we deem right or wrong, could we lack some of that humility we felt so strongly we had?

Consider why character training is so apt. Over the last few years, we have seen a major increase in CEO dismissals for ethical lapses, an increase in CEO turnover, and a rise in leadership failure within the first year and a half of a CEO assuming their new role. To me, the question isn’t, “why are we focusing on character training in leadership development?” but rather, “why has it taken until now to prioritize character in leadership development?”

Preventable ethical lapses have cost companies dearly. Shouldn’t we learn from these statistics that something can be done, helping save individuals and companies from scars to their reputations and bottom lines? Is the damaging, expensive, reactive way—how most things are currently done—the only way?

I’ve spent the last 40 years of my career coaching and studying successful people. I’ve trained 17 #1 athletes in their respective sport, numerous CEOs, NAVY seals and hostage rescue teams, and more than 400,000 executives through the B2B employee wellbeing and performance company I built and sold to Johnson & Johnson. The core of what I trained each of these very different groups in was the same: improving the performance of individuals, teams, and organizations for the long-term. Four decades have shown me that character is at the heart of sustained performance.

Performance vs. sustained performance (or performing at your best for the long-term) is an important distinction: no athlete’s ultimate goal is just to win a match; it’s to win the title. No CEO’s goal is to have one profitable year; it’s to succeed in that role for years to come and make an impact. If you’re mid-career or younger, your goal might be to move up in your organization and manage a bigger team. This is the long-game, over time. Character, too, plays the long-game.

Sure, we may get by fudging a number here or there, or keeping quiet when we believe the group is doing something ethically risky, or even outright lying now and again. But character, like strong performance, reveals itself over time. With repeated use, poor character traits that we didn’t bat a lash about become the new normal until one day something is done that is irreversible and leads to a dramatic end (losing a job, ending a relationship, creating a corporate crisis that takes years to emerge from, if the company ever does).

Character is challenged left and right, and it is often under the most difficult conditions that character strength and weakness come to light. Anyone can make a decision when the consequences are small, but it takes a special kind of strength to do the hard but right thing when your team is waiting for you to make a call and the pressure’s on. That strength is character strength.

As evidenced earlier by my not-quite warm welcomes introducing character training to executives, no one thinks they have flaws in their integrity. As humans, we are programmed to believe our actions are always serving our best interests. The truth is, no one is immune to character flaws or blind spots. Even the “best people” have work to do. Highlighting and training character is a new approach. Ultimately, it’s about helping people understand their natural tendencies and making the hard right decision when every bone in their body asks them to consent to make the easy, wrong decision.

If character is taken seriously–and is met with the same emphasis as other leadership imperatives– I believe we will see a positive transformation in years to come. Dismissals for ethical lapses will fall, and companies will be rewarded with leaders who work with integrity in all that they do.

When chaos and ambiguity are present, one of the first things to falter in both leaders and those within their organizations is hope.

Leaders’ emotional states impact their teams to a massive degree, so it’s crucial to cultivate hope early and often in the face of adversity to maintain your team’s motivation and strength of spirit. Many leaders and teams need an injection of hope right now. 

Hope is more than just a feeling; it has been proven to be a mental construct. And it can be cultivated — which is excellent news for any leader looking to rally their organization amid uncertainty. There are three things you can put in place in your life, your team, and your organization that will increase hope, based on Charles Snyder’s research into Hope Theory, and I’ll share a final fourth step as well. 

1. Create achievable goals

When people are feeling low on hope, it’s easy to have either no goal at all or have a really big goal. What’s needed in these times, however, is an achievable goal. For example, on a personal level, you might recognize that you can’t control the arc of the pandemic, but you can control your investment of time, your peak performance wellness habits, etc. 

At the business level, now may not the time to “go big” and, say, try to double your business. Instead, set an achievable goal like maintaining your existing revenue or retaining your staff during this time of crisis.

If your organization is kicking goals consistently, don’t worry about this so much. On the other hand, if they need to get their mojo and confidence back, be sure to set achievable goals, they know they can hit — then watch their motivation and confidence rise.

Another idea is to take that big, unruly goal you’re all addicted to and break it down into smaller ones. Keep it close. Keep it real. Keep it possible.

2. Build a sense of agency

Agency is our sense of self-belief, self-confidence. Encouraging your team’s sense of agency and integrity — and demonstrating these yourself — will boost their sense of hope. Ask yourself: 

• To what degree do I take committed action, then follow through with it to completion? 
• To what degree do I believe myself when I commit?

Working on your sense of agency and self-control and ensuring your team does the same will increase hope. Remind them individually, or as a team, of what they’ve achieved before — what they are capable of — and set them up to succeed in a lot of small ways (including having them nail and celebrate those achievable goals). Step by step, build their agency.

3. Establish multiple pathways

Don’t just have a Plan A to achieve your goals. Have a Plan B and a Plan C as well. Having multiple pathways to success will help ensure that your goals are met and will build confidence and hopefulness in you and your team along the way. 

The more potential pathways you can use to reach your achievable goal, the better. Knowing that if Plan A doesn’t work, then Plan B and Plan C are waiting in the wings increases hope. However, the critical thing is to be sure to work on one plan at a time, be super clear if and when you shift to the new plan, and very clear from the outset who is working on what. And one goal with multiple pathways is not to be confused with numerous goals, which most organizations suffer from. Know the difference. 

4. Elevate your perspective-taking capacity

If you’re unfamiliar with this term, it comes from Dr. Michael Cavanagh’s four-factor model for leading through complexity. Perspective-taking capacity is key to instilling more hope in your organization and your team. Put simply, it includes the wisdom that we’ve been through things in the past and have come through them and that we will go through things again and survive. The ability to see higher, broader, and farther than others in terms of impact and timelines is what distinguishes a leader’s perspective-taking capacity. For this reason, I often find that leaders with an interest in and knowledge of history have the greatest wisdom, composure, and perspective. They know that “this too shall pass,” and this ability to ground themselves positively impacts those around them. 

These are four evidence-based leadership approaches you can apply right now to cultivate a sense of hope when otherwise things feel out of control. Honing your ability to prioritize and build hope will serve as a guiding light for your organization and your team to ensure that, with your leadership, you will all emerge stronger than before. 

What are you paying attention to during this pandemic? What you’re focusing on can make a big difference to your business, career, and health.

Many people are very excited by the prospect of effective vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. This fantastic news has deservedly lifted the stock market, and many companies are moving to eliminate planned budget and staff cuts. 

Yet too many business leaders and stock investors are showing excessive enthusiasm over the attention to vaccine news. The vaccine rollout to the general public is slated for early Spring of 2021.

They’re not facing the reality of today’s third wave of COVID, which is flooding many hospitals and leaving patients stranded. The urgent requests by governors to stay at home and telecommute to tamp down the pandemic’s danger in early November have turned into renewed shutdowns by late November across the US to decrease the strain on the medical system. As a result, the economic situation will not improve, realistically speaking, until late Spring 2021.

It might seem hard to contemplate that the next few months will be even worse than the last few months, but that’s the reality we’re facing. If you’re not paying attention to the reality of the third wave, then your attention is misdirected, as it is for so many people.

Consider what catches and holds your attention whenever you read or watch the news. Most of us tend to be optimistic and focus on the bright side of life. Sure, we might acknowledge that it’s much wiser to balance optimism and pessimism about the future of the pandemic, given the combination of both good and bad news: good news in the long term of Summer 2021 onward, bad news in the short and medium-term of this Winter and Spring. 

Yet it’s hard for us to pay attention to contradictory ideas. Holding such opposing perspectives in our mind causes cognitive dissonance unless we train ourselves to accept complexity and nuance. Thus, most people prefer to let go of the negative information and focus on the positive, despite the danger to their business, career, and health.

Manufacturing Attention: A Case Study

Let’s consider James, the COO of a mid-size manufacturing company, founded in 2012 and growing quickly, whose senior leadership was determined to push through with its product expansion plans even during the onset of the pandemic. When COVID-19 made the news in December, James and the company’s CEO and CFO dismissed any thoughts that it could turn into anything serious. 

However, as COVID-19 numbers started to climb in the US in early March, James grew concerned and discussed with the other leaders the possibility of postponing their expansion plans. He suggested rerouting their resources towards boosting tech and security to prepare for a possible work from home migration. Then, there was the looming threat of loss of productivity in case of an outbreak and perhaps even a shutdown. 

The company had already been testing some equipment to automate more tasks with good results for the past few months, a technology that many of their competitors had already secured and implemented in the last couple of years. James urged the CEO to greenlight the purchase of this equipment and its wide-scale implementation, instead of waiting another 12 months, as initially planned. Using this equipment, many fewer workers with a more general skill set would be needed to produce the company’s products.

Unfortunately, the CEO was unconvinced and decided to push through with the expansion plans. Of course, you can already imagine what happened next, given the boom in COVID-19 cases and the wave of restrictions that were soon imposed on the country. James’ company, along with many other companies in the manufacturing industry, was heavily disrupted.

James decided to contact me for a consultation in late May after learning about my work through a webinar I conducted about how organizations can adapt to the changes brought by the pandemic. When he called me, his company was already embroiled in internal team conflicts, and its operations had already been severely disrupted. Even after the state allowed reopenings for businesses, many employees either refused or were unable to go to work due to quarantines, considerably slowing production. 

Even those who had desk jobs had many difficulties working remotely due to the company’s overall lack of preparation for a work from home setup. The company’s business continuity plan was entirely inadequate for such a significant disruption.  

COVID-19 and the Attentional Bias 

When I met with James and the company’s CEO and CFO over Zoom, I told them that we need to acknowledge that COVID-19 severely disrupted our world and will not disappear anytime soon. Believing otherwise helped drive many companies deep into chaos because business leaders failed to take the right action at the right time.

The refusal to recognize the gravity of the pandemic and even the act of downplaying it stems from a combination of three factors: 

● The nature of the virus itself

● The preexisting beliefs and plans of the business leaders

● The dangerous judgment errors we all tend to make that cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists call cognitive biases

The latter mental blindspots stem, in large part, from our evolutionary background. Our gut reactions evolved for the ancestral savanna environment, not the modern world. Yet gurus and business leaders alike overwhelmingly advocate going with our gut and following our intuition in making decisions instead of using effective decision-making processes.

One of these cognitive biases is the attentional bias, which caused James’ colleagues to decide erroneously at the onset, and amidst, this pandemic. 

Attentional bias refers to our tendency to pay attention to information that we find most emotionally engaging and ignore information that we don’t. Given the intense, in-the-moment nature of threats and opportunities in the ancestral savanna, this bias is understandable. Yet, in the modern environment, sometimes information that doesn’t feel emotionally salient is the most important data.

You need to pay attention to and accept the current reality of ongoing waves of restrictions as the new abnormal, instead of a temporary emergency. That means fundamentally changing your internal and external business model if you want your organization to survive and thrive during these troubled months.

Steering Back to Efficiency

When I last spoke with James at the end of June 2020, he told me that he, along with the CEO and CFO, decided to meet with all the senior and line managers to assess the most pressing issues in each department and come up with short- and long-term ways to address the pain points.

Next, the CEO held a company-wide virtual town hall meeting to update everyone about what was happening and present how senior management planned to solve its crisis.  

Due to the CEO’s efficient and engaging way of handling the town hall, much pent-up resentment was significantly reduced across the company. This paved the way for better cooperation, which was crucial for the significant steps that James, the CEO, and CFO took — starting with stopping all projects related to the product expansion and shelving it for the next two fiscal years. 

Fortunately, only about 30% of the budget resources had been released for the expansion-related projects when they first consulted me. As a result, the CEO, CFO, and James were able to make a timely and strategic plan on how they can reallocate the remaining 70%, including:

● Purchasing and installing the automation equipment

● Investing in necessary social distancing and hygiene measures at their manufacturing facilities to comply with CDC guidelines

● Boosting tech, security, and funding for home offices for an efficient work from home transition for all employees who could be moved to telecommuting

● Providing professional development for their workers, both in working from home collaboration and communication for those who worked from home and in using the new equipment and CDC guidelines compliance for those who needed to come to work

James told me that he and the leadership team were pleased with the results of the changes they made, especially once the numbers of COVID-19 cases began to increase in mid-June, prompting a pause of the reopening process that eventually led to a cycle of reopening and restrictions.

Conclusion

During these disruptive times of the pandemic, it’s essential to keep biases in check and pay attention to critical information. Remember that even if your company had trouble making the best decisions at the onset of the pandemic and fell into cognitive biases, you can still steer it back to the right path.  

The 2020 national election seems to have solidified the gulf between “us” and “them.” We’re polarized and paralyzed: collaboration is working with the enemy, and, worse, compromise is seen as losing to the enemy.

The traditional leadership style—where someone or some political party creates the vision and has the positional authority to lead us towards the future—can’t solve the large-scale collective problems that require systems change such as climate change, inequality, and the circular economy. We need different strategies for coordinating stakeholders.

Fortunately, many such strategies have been developed and tested by people working on the frontlines of sustainability in the cross-sector space where business, government, and civil society intersect. I’ve summarized them in a new book and provide two examples below: one uses identity management to change diets, the other uses accountability to change investing. Both can transform whole systems.        

Few sustainability challenges are more contentious than meat-centric diets: if cattle were a nation, they’d be the third-largest CO2 emitter behind China and the US. Yet few people will change what they eat because of the traditional assumptions around meat’s benefits. An alternative strategy would be to target food professionals. 

Most of us eat in restaurants, order take-out, and pick up ready-to-eat food from grocery stores. When we cook at home, we use premixed items and follow recipes promoted by chefs we admire. Thus, our food system is dominated by meals that food professionals design, prepare, and promote. Coordinating food professionals to advance plant-based diets could change the whole food system. The founder of Changing Tastes, Arlin Wasserman, explains: “The culinary profession and the restaurant industry decide what goes on the menu and provide the choices before us. Changing those choices gives consumers a safe way to try new things and decide to change their tastes, with a dash of sustainability and a smaller serving of carbon and water.”  

But foodservice professionals are poorly organized and widely distributed across restaurants, media, and multinational corporations. Wasserman realized that identity management might help enlist them to this cause. As the name implies, identity management appeals to the human desire to identify with a group, movement, or cause. Humans are social creatures, motivated by status, and want to be respected by members of our communities. We therefore defend, rationalize, and become advocates for the communities we join. 

One identity management technique is to recruit “celebrity” chefs to promote plant-forward diets. Other chefs and foodies then aspire to join the “in” group and promote similar plant-forward entrees, recipes, and ingredients. Another technique is to use awards and recognitions to build a sense of membership and community. The Plant Forward Global 50 list, for example, “recognizes significant achievement in rethinking menus and traditional restaurant concepts that reflect the critical role that culinary insight and the relentless pursuit of deliciousness play in advancing health and sustainability concerns.” Another technique is to organize competitions for the most plant-forward cuisine because competitions clarify goals and celebrate winners. 

Another strategy for coordinating the actions of diverse and dispersed stakeholders is accountability. The following example is used to reduce carbon emissions and water use in the hotel industry by coordinating investors, the companies they invest in, and the engineers and managers of the companies’ buildings. Accountability works by making the consequences of people’s actions visible to others. Actors causing harmful impacts are motivated to improve their practices to avoid shame and blame. As the famed judge Louis Brandeis reportedly remarked, “Sunshine is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Actors producing good outcomes, in contrast, are encouraged by boosts to reputation. As a result, best practices for creating more sustainable outcomes are distributed through the system, and worst practices get sanctioned. 

Host Hotels & Resorts is the world’s largest real estate investment trust and one of the largest owners of luxury and upper-upscale hotels. As part of its commitment to quality, Host has embraced sustainability as a core aspect of its business and is regularly recognized as an industry leader. Host began working with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) in 2017. SASB differs from other platforms that assess environmental, social, and governance indicators by devising indicators material to investment decisions.

Brian Macnamara, the Senior Vice President and Controller explains Host’s motivations: “We wanted to brag about all the smart sustainability money being spent on infrastructure at our hotels and prove to investors that it was making a difference to the bottom line.” Host already reports on common sustainability metrics such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and Global Reporting Initiative, but were attracted to indicators directly material to investment outcomes. Brian explains: “Host’s environmental engineers may be delighted with building retrofits that reduce long-term energy and water use and lower long-term operating costs. However, year-over-year savings may be relatively small, so every project must meet a return on investment threshold as well as create sustainable benefits.”           

SASB reporting efforts have already paid off for Host. The company recently issued the first green bond in the lodging industry, raising $650 million from investors. Other companies have adopted features of Host’s 10-K reporting. SASB accounting created a common language within Host that led to cross-department synergies that improved management efficiency and return on investment. 

We live at a time when our systems need to change, but traditional leadership by those with positional authority no longer seems up to the task. Fortunately, other strategies exist. Career success and professional impact, and the hope and promise of sustainable development increasingly depend on these strategies.

R Bruce Hull’s book is Leadership for Sustainability: Strategies for Tackling Wicked Problems

In healthcare, the undeniable truth is that impact is measured in outcomes. Communities thrive when health systems and their mission-oriented professionals deliver positive outcomes for both health and life. 

The margin for error is small, so hard-won lessons become mantras upon which we build public health programs. For business leaders and organizations seeking to deliver impact, some of these longstanding and universal truths learned from the healthcare experience can prove invaluable. 

For example, the knowledge that small, early interventions matter can form the foundation of any social impact program. In healthcare, evidence shows engaging (and subsequently treating) patients early, often, and incrementally can help stave off riskier and more expensive treatments necessitated when patients wait until a condition requires an Emergency Room visit or until it is ‘too late”. Impact professionals that can address or alleviate the root causes of a social crisis or systemic issue before it explodes will often expend less effort and resources quelling the risk. 

Similarly, healthcare teams’ understanding that nothing happens in a vacuum is critical for impact-minded leaders. Just as a combination of environmental factors, human decisions, and even treatment protocols can overlap to create, resolve, or exacerbate medical conditions like heart disease, so too can multiple conditions combine to create a larger social ill. Understanding the chemistry of economics and education and more is critical to addressing issues like financial inequity or mass incarceration. 

However, the sudden, unanticipated, and abrupt changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have forced the healthcare industry and necessitated a shuffling of priorities and methods to weather the ongoing crisis. Again, there are lessons leaders and impact-driven professionals in other sectors can absorb from this unprecedented healthcare response. Here are four:

1. Build on Solid Ground

COVID has undeniably proven that the health and emotional wellbeing of our nation’s caregivers determines our ability to deliver quality healthcare to everyone else. Applause from people in their homes or billboards showcasing “healthcare heroes” only go so far. The truth is that caregivers are stretched to the breaking point and feel unheard and unsupported by their institutions and communities even as the virus surges again. 

This unstable layer beneath our healthcare delivery system should serve as a wake-up call for an entire industry that our system is fragile. Not only from a clinical or financial perspective but a “caregiver” perspective. If we cannot protect those who give care while they are at work so that they can feel safe at home – and do it in a way that is second nature or woven throughout the fabric of our care model – then we are heading for a massive collision with the reality of staff shortages in the coming year and beyond. 

To avoid the perils of building on an unsteady foundation, business leaders and organizations across industries must also first evaluate and support their employees before engaging in any impact program.  

2. Triage, Triage, Triage 

Surges across the country have placed hospitals under enormous strain at different times this past year. Those facing the worst of it have had to make hard decisions about whom to treat and how. In recent weeks, stories circulated about hospitals around the country drawing up criteria for prioritizing patients’ treatments based on age, overall health, and other factors. 

Even those systems that escaped tremendous onslaughts of patients have likely made concessions about treating routine illnesses or providing preventive services to conserve resources or slow infection. 

Similar challenges are being felt in adjacent areas. Mile plus lines at food banks in Texas and other states have stretched already-thin supplies with homeless shelters, mental health centers, and others also bending under strain. As impact programs seek to serve those facing financial ruin, food insecurity, or other challenges, having a similar triage mentality or prioritization strategy will be important. 

3. Protocol as Suggestion 

One positive recurring trait demonstrated by healthcare pros throughout the pandemic has been creativity. Whether running IV lines outside of patient rooms to conserve PPE and limit staff exposure, embracing novel needle-free blood collection technologies to reduce staff exposure to COVID-19 patients, or building new treatment centers seemingly overnight, the industry has proven that necessity is indeed the mother of invention. 

In many cases, these novel and quick-thinking approaches were devised by modifying longstanding instructions or assumptions. Instead of walking around walls, people – in some cases, nurses and staff holding phones to dying patients’ ears so they could say goodbye to family – ran through them on behalf of their patients, creating new solutions in the process. Similarly, the pandemic knocked down many longstanding regulatory barriers and timelines to expedite treatments, expand telemedicine, and kickstart vaccine testing. 

So too, should leaders think outside of the box when seeking to deliver impact within this new normal. Drive-through food banks and laptop donations for remote schooling are just early examples of how organizations are creatively serving new populations and meeting unique needs amidst the pandemic.

4. Catalyze a Coalition of the Willing 

Before the virus became political, there was a sense that we were all in the fight together. Hospitals desperately seeking PPE were receiving facemasks from hobby seamstresses, face shields from 3D printing companies, and planeloads of equipment from sports team owners. 

The lesson for leaders is that everyone can play a role in impact programs if appropriately aware, inspired, and activated. We must cast the net wider than anticipated, drop down our barriers and instead be unafraid to ask. Impact-driven innovators that make their voices heard, and solutions seen stand the greatest chance for success.

These lessons and others will be vital as the pandemic has amplified a host of new and existing social, economic, and health issues while forcing many more of our neighbors into deeply unfortunate circumstances. Finding a way to make a meaningful difference within this new normal will require creativity, innovation, and determination – three skills demonstrated repeatedly and extensively by medical professionals throughout this year.