There is no single universal answer to the question of what followers expect from the people who lead them. But a recent landmark study from Gallup offers striking new clarity on this topic: when participants across 52 countries were asked to name up to three words that describe the most valuable contribution positive leaders make to their everyday lives, hope rose to the top as the most commonly cited need, named by 56 percent of all respondents.
Trust came in a distant second at 33 percent, while compassion (7 percent) and stability (4 percent) trailed far behind the two top responses.
The data also reveals a clear hierarchy among leadership roles: followers are considerably more likely to report they need hope from the most senior leaders heading an entire organization (64 percent) than from other leadership or peer roles within the same company, including frontline managers (59 percent) and fellow colleagues (58 percent). Put simply, the higher a leader sits in an organization’s ranks, the more their team turns to them to deliver hope and inspiration.
At first glance, these results caught Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and well-being, off guard. Harter had initially expected “stability” to top the list of ranked needs. But as he dug deeper into survey responses and open-ended discussion points from the study, the prevalence of hope started to make perfect sense.
“You can’t really feel a sense of stability if you can’t envision what comes next,” he explained. “That’s why hope is such a foundational need.” During the last major global recession, Harter led research exploring how workers felt about their overall quality of life. He noted, “People who had a leader that invested in encouraging their development and growth held far more positive outlooks on both their current standard of living and their future prospects. When people understand where they are going as a group and as individuals, that is core to what hope is.”
For Lindsay Recknell, a self-described “hope expert” and host of the Hope Motivates Action podcast, the study’s findings were far from surprising. Recknell consults with business clients to teach them about the power of hope in professional settings and how organizational teams can cultivate it intentionally.
She explains that while hope can take on many different meanings depending on the context, her work centers on “hope theory,” a well-studied framework developed by the late C.R. “Rick” Snyder, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas. Recknell describes hope theory as a clear, actionable formula that defines hope as the sum of three core components: goals (the outcomes we want to achieve or see happen), plus “agency thinking” (our internal motivation and core intrinsic reason for pursuing any goal), plus “pathways thinking” (our ability to navigate around barriers that stand between us and our desired outcome). She finds that this structured, actionable definition of hope is particularly useful and effective for guiding teams through periods of widespread uncertainty.
