The Common Leadership Practices That Cultivate (Or Crush) Hope at Work

THE gap between what leaders say and what they do may be the single greatest destroyer of hope in organizations today. I learned this the hard way—by being that leader whose midnight emails contradicted my daytime messages about work-life balance. Often, without realizing the impact, organizations reinforce hopelessness across culture, policy, and procedure. From leaders and employees alike, I’ve heard consistent stories about what creates hopelessness in organizations. Frequently, it begins with the signals leaders send through their actions, including:

• Learned helplessness modeling: Leaders who themselves display resignation demonstrate that there’s no reason to push for change.
• Inconsistent standards: Different rules applied to different people without clear rationale leave everyone confused and can incite workplace paralysis.
• Information hoarding: Withholding context that would help employees understand decisions can spark a feeling of detachment.
• Mixed messaging: Saying one thing while incentivizing another implies there is no clear path to follow.
• Failure intolerance: Punishing well-intentioned experimentation that doesn’t succeed leads, predictably, to a lack of experimentation.

Leadership patterns influence organizations, quietly shaping what people believe is achievable. I noticed this dynamic unfold while coaching a new director. When our work together began, she approached her role with creative ideas and genuine enthusiasm. She would share thoughtful solutions in leadership meetings and engage her team in meaningful initiatives.

Over the next several months, however, I noticed a change in her approach. She started introducing her suggestions with phrases like, “I know this might be challenging, but…” and became more selective about which ideas she brought forward. During our coaching conversations, she would cautiously assess which situations merited her advocacy.

This shift wasn’t a reflection of her abilities. Rather, it seemed to develop through repeated exposure to subtle organizational signals suggesting that innovation, while publicly encouraged, faced numerous obstacles in practice. She had observed how established executives often highlighted potential problems with new approaches, had seen how resource allocations didn’t always align with stated innovation goals, and now recognized that maintaining current practices often received more positive attention than proposing change.

When there’s a disconnect between what’s communicated in formal settings and what’s reinforced through daily decisions and recognition, even the most highly motivated leaders may begin to question the potential for meaningful progress.

I recognized this same pattern in my own leadership. I found myself regularly telling my team to maintain work-life boundaries that I myself ignored. I’d send emails about wellbeing at midnight, speak about psychological safety in town halls while reacting defensively to challenging questions in private sessions, and emphasize the importance of rest while visibly exhausted. The realization was uncomfortable: what I said and what I did didn’t align, and this gap was gradually eroding my team’s trust in meaningful change.

Even more troubling was the unintended message I was sending: if you want to advance to a role like mine, you too must sacrifice balance and authenticity. Without realizing it, I was modeling the very behaviors I claimed to want to change. This insight transformed my approach. I began to see that creating hope means empowering others to do things differently — and perhaps better — than I had done. True leadership isn’t about demanding what we ourselves can’t demonstrate; it’s about creating conditions where others can surpass our own limitations, building environments more balanced and humane than the ones we inherited.

The path out of hopelessness isn’t paved with motivational posters or forced optimism. It begins with the step of acknowledging reality exactly as it is — including the legitimate reasons for feeling hopeless.

It’s not only okay to feel hopeless at times, it may be necessary. Hopelessness isn’t failure; it’s an honest recognition of reality that creates the possibility for authentic hope to emerge. Leadership expert Margaret Wheatley calls this “facing reality without fear.” It’s the difficult but essential practice of seeing clearly without becoming paralyzed.

Hopelessness can coexist with hope — sometimes within the same hour or meeting. This paradox confused me until I recognized that both stem from how we make meaning of our experiences. We can hold serious concern about climate change while feeling authentic hope about specific environmental programs. We can understand the shortcomings of current structures while building pockets of effectiveness within them.

This coexistence isn’t a contradiction — it’s a natural aspect of human experience.

Many people find that during recovery from professional challenges, they can hold both perspectives simultaneously. While recognizing limitations in certain organizational areas, they often discover new possibilities for contribution by shifting focus to areas where impact remains possible. The concerns don’t disappear, but they no longer define one’s professional approach.

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Jen Fisher is a global authority on workplace wellbeing, the bestselling author of Work Better Together and Hope Is the Strategy: The Underrated Skill That Transforms Work, Leadership, and Wellbeing. She is the founder and CEO of The Wellbeing Team. As Deloitte US’s first chief wellbeing officer, she pioneered a groundbreaking, human-centered approach to work that gained international recognition and reshaped how organizations view wellbeing. From her personal experiences with burnout and cancer to her role as a trailblazer in wellbeing intelligence and co-creator of WellQ360, Jen has dedicated her career to helping leaders build work cultures where people can thrive—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Jen is also the creator and host of The WorkWell Podcast, a TEDx speaker, and a sought-after voice at events such as Workhuman, SXSW, the Milken Global Conference, and Happiness Camp. She has taught at Harvard and UCLA, served as editor-at-large for Thrive Global, and contributed to leading media outlets, including Fortune and Harvard Business Review.