Optimism can make or break a team, but few leaders think it is worthy of being worked on.
Most people expect consultants to be realists. So when one tells clients to be positive and spread optimism within their enterprise, they think that the consultant either does not know what he is talking about or deliberately taking a stance removed from reality. But the fact is that optimism is not necessarily alternative to reality. In any case, most leaders tend to take optimism within their teams for granted. They do not think optimism is really worthy of being ‘worked on’. This, combined with the fact that too little research is available on optimism from an organisational behaviour perspective, has made the approach to this critical tool a rather ambiguous one.
Any modern-day enterprise works on its people to enhance productivity, team work, or other skills including strategic ability and even execution. But one element that’s just not being worked on enough is optimism. Leaders work overtime to get a ‘buy-in’ from their teams. They do this by promising material benefits such as monetary rewards or promotions on accomplishment of tasks. But intrinsic positivism is neither sought nor developed. Therefore, at the first sign of reversal, positivity and optimism evaporate. It then becomes very difficult, almost impossible, for the team leader to marshall his troops.
Not many trainers concentrate on this issue. Nor are there many tools that can improve the optimism quotient of an employee. Dr Aruna Broota, a Delhi-based clinical psychologist, believes that people who give up after one trial are the ones who have no faith in themselves and, therefore, are not optimistic. Such people, she says, have what is called a poor ego-strength. A manager or worker who has faith in his or her talent and skills will fail once, twice or even thrice but he or she will eventually rise to excel the fourth time. Such a person has ego-strength. It is not that these people do not get disheartened when things do not work out at first attempt. But this state doesn’t last for long and they soon analyse their efforts and put their skills to work differently till they succeed. Enterprises need to have people who possess this inherent optimism and the management has to ensure that such people are offered timely encouragement.
A team, however, is made up of all kinds of people. Those who are not inherently optimistic are — as psychologists call them — fragile, and their ego-strengths need to be worked on. What a leader needs to do is work on instilling self-belief in members of his team as a pre-cursor to a high-stake initiative or product rollout. All it requires is a simple, structured and experience-based approach. It takes establishing of faith. We saw this happen in the first edition of the IPL when Shane Warne led the least fancied team of the league to become champions despite losing in early matches by simply instilling self-belief in everyone — even in the rookies. We hear of similar tales at the Telco plants prior to the Tata Nano roll out.
The teams that are part of the operations and maintenance division of L&T, which is responsible for several toll-roads in India, are another case in point. Toll operations is a specialised business with long gestation periods. But one has to keep the facilities as modern and efficient as can be and people charged up all the time. Manoj Dave, who heads this division, constantly works on people’s optimism. “How else do you keep your team charged up?” he asks adding that if members of the team are optimistic, “you will find that some projects will generate surpluses long after they have moved on”.
Even when the going is not smooth, the leader has to work on the ego-strengths. Broota calls it the test of a leader. The rare breed of leaders tries to make people understand that there will be hurdles but these can be overcome together. But this approach falls slightly short of the classical definition of optimism: the belief that impediments can not only be overcome, but may even conspire with the individual in his or her attempt to successfully fulfill the task at hand.
[Giraj Sharma is a Delhi-based management consultant]
