The actor, Michael J. Fox had a special on television last week on Optimism. We teach the effectiveness of facilitating change from an optimistic stance at GISC, so I stayed up to watch the special, loosely based on his recent book Always Looking Up, the title a play on his height and his attitude. The book was a personal journey of his last 10 years since his retirement when his Parkinsons Disease made it too difficult for him to continue to film and produce a weekly TV series.
In this TV special though, Michael explored optimism in the world. He looked at the science of optimism, discovering after testing that he carried a gene for optimism. (I don’t think I want to know one way or the other if I have it. I prefer to think I do and don’t want to be proven wrong. Does that make me an optimist or a pessimist?)
He went to Wrigley Field in Chicago to investigate the optimism of baseball fans that come back year after year to cheer the Cubs, who have gone the longest without winning a World Series. Yet each year the fans say “this could be the year.”
He climbed mountains in the faraway country of Bhutan, which measures Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product. Interviewing the prime minister or some important leader, Fox was told that happiness is the purpose of life. (I think there’s a difference between happiness and optimism. To me happiness is a state in the present and optimism is how you view and how you approach what is to come. But you can only experience optimism in the present so maybe they are inextricably intertwined. )
I was particularly intrigued by his discussion of shared optimism – like the Cubs fans. What fun would it be to go to a game if only one or two fans “believed.” It got me thinking about the impact of shared optimism; teachers who believe their students will do well – and lo and behold they do well. I remember studying this “self-fulfilling prophecy” in reverse – the psych experiments where the teacher is told half the students in the class are below average, half above – even though they have all tested at exactly the same level. But after spending time in the presence of that teacher’s expectations, they start to perform at the level the teacher is expecting them to perform at. Those students who the teacher saw as below average started to demonstrate failure rates not consistent with their true capacity.
So if we can share optimism, can we share pessimism as well? If you bring your negative view and convince me to join you where does that take us both together?
Of course, that makes me think of how we teach the process of leading teams and facilitating change from a stance of optimism and seeing competence. For the first time I see it as shared optimism. It is both what I expect to see and what you come to expect to see by sharing that optimism. I believe I will see something in you individually or in our team that is working well. And of course I do. And I share it with you so you can see it too. That knowledge then leads you to believe that not only can you do that well but you can develop other competencies as well. Shared optimism.
When I talk about optimism, I get those folks who feel uncomfortable, who want me to focus on the negative, on the dark side. “Don’t sugar coat things,” they say. But that’s missing the point. Optimism and looking for competence isn’t about putting the good in between the bad, the way I’ve heard some managers describe how they’ve been taught to give performance feedback - the complement, criticism sandwich. It’s all about what I’m looking for and in what context I put what I see. I know a leader who always says” I expect my people aren’t waking up and coming to work wanting to screw up. They want to do a good job. It’s up to me to see that they can.” So when the coffee urn isn’t kep full in the lobby he looks at what is wrong with the coffee pot first, not what is wrong with his people.
Then there are others who are quick to point out that reality is reality, if things are bad, they’re bad. They forget the interpretation of the data is everything - the context you put it in, the decisions you make about what to do next. You know those folks who say numbers don’t lie? Well, they do all the time. Statistics was one of my favorite courses in college because I came to see how the same data can be interpreted many ways. Of course, we need some measure of pessimism, as well. We can’t walk out into a busy street of traffic and just be optimistic that we won’t get run over. But if we assume we’re going to get run over, we’ll never leave the curb. Then we’ll convince others of the danger and soon we’ll be a crowd of people too afraid to move. Until an optimist comes along and says “we can do this, we just have to figure out how.”
These are difficult times for individuals, for families, for organizations, for countries. There is plenty of danger to pay attention to. But I want to be with those who believe we can get through the challenges and want to figure out how. There is neurological research that says that that perspective will physically serve us well - making our brain function better. That the optimism causes the neurons to fire more effectively. That working from optimism increases the seratonin and endorphin levels in the brain which increase energy and a sense of excitement and potential, that causes us to look for opportunities and solutions.
So for today, I’m going to take a bit of Michael J. Fox with me into my world. I’m going to spend some time looking up. I do that in both ways Michael does – as a short person, too, I look up at most everyone around me. But I’m also going to look at all that is possible, all that is going well, and share it with those around me.
Optimism,teamwork,performance management,Michael J. Fox
