ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: So Adi, your reign as editor-in-chief of HBR was very successful, but you also faced very big challenges. There was a rapidly changing media industry, shrinking print advertising dollars, pressures to downsize our workforce. So at times it must have been difficult to put on a happy face for everyone that you were managing, right?
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, I mean, of course. Look, to keep things moving in a positive and productive way, it helps to have a vision and purpose so that there’s something important you’re moving toward directionally, even when there are bumps along the way. And to be honest, I think it helps to have a naturally sunny disposition.
ALISON BEARD: I think what you’re talking about is what our guest today calls resilient optimism, and that is the ability to acknowledge those bumps, the painful realities that people are facing, while still believing and helping others to see that it’s possible to chart a positive path forward. So this is a tough balancing act, as you know, but it’s hugely important for leaders, all kinds of teams, and companies so that workforces do stay motivated.
ADI IGNATIUS: Change is brutally hard. Teams will not simply go along with the plan because it’s there. So you need resilience, but you also need to achieve some wins along the way so that you build momentum, that you can highlight, so you can tell a story that can actually be inspiring.
ALISON BEARD: Yes. So Michelle Gielan has spent years researching both optimism and resilience, and she has found that even if you’re not sort of a naturally sunny person like you, you can cultivate that positive attitude and you can use it to enhance not just individual, but also group performance. Again, if this isn’t your nature, even when you’re being hit with negative news each day, you can train yourself to be more optimistic and you can spread the right kind of optimism through your team and organization.
Her new book is ‘Resilient Optimism: The Science of Sustaining a Positive Mindset in Tough Times’. And she also wrote the HBR article, ‘How Leaders Counter Pessimism in Trying Times’. Here’s our conversation.
So let’s start with how you define resilient optimism. How does it differ from what people know or assume about both optimism and resilience?
MICHELLE GIELAN: So optimism is typically understood to be an expectation of good things to happen. What resilient optimism is, is its optimism that stays strong when it’s tested. So instead of having this fleeting feeling of, “I can do this,” resilient optimism is being able to sustain that optimism when the setbacks keep stacking, when the challenge lasts longer than expected, when change just keeps coming or where exhausted.
The reason is that it’s so easy to start with optimism, right? A new job, a new career, a new project, a new school year. We are so good at beginnings, but what happens when we are met with challenge or we’re feeling burnt out? Resilient optimism is that set of behaviors that we can turn to that makes positive change easier to start and it builds our resilience at the same time.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I think that resonates with me because I’m – like many people, sometimes find it hard to be optimistic, particularly when things don’t look great, you’re worried about the state of the world, your company is struggling, your team has missed its targets. It can feel hard to shift away from pessimism. Pessimism almost feels protective. So why should we fight that feeling both in ourselves and on our teams?
MICHELLE GIELAN: Right now, we’re experiencing a time when the volume of problems feels louder than the volume of progress. Meanwhile though, optimism is one of the greatest performance advantages that we see available in the data. Optimism fuels nearly every single business, health, and educational outcome that we know how to track: 31% higher levels of productivity, 37% higher sales, 40% greater chance of promotion.
We have an 11-year data set of more than 25,000 business professionals looking at optimism, resilience, and a host of other things. And what we found is that people who are highly optimistic, so they score in that top quartile of that particular metric, they are three times more likely to be highly engaged at their work. They’re five times less likely to burn out. So optimism even acts like a protective factor. When we make an investment in optimism, it acts like infrastructure for our lives and it’s literally some of the best fuel we can lean on, not just for our wellbeing, but for our performance as well.
ALISON BEARD: So before we get into how to build optimism, just tell me, how do you measure it in people?
MICHELLE GIELAN: Yeah, so there’s a scientifically validated scale, which is widely used in research called LOT-R. I consider myself an engineer and I love data. My background’s in engineering and I can pour through scientific journal articles all day long. What that tests for is dispositional optimism. So it’s how you look at the world.
In our data set, we included LOT-R, but we ask about it in the work domain. So how likely are you to act like an optimist and think like an optimist? But I think one thing that we should probably level set about optimism before anything else, because I’ve run into some crazy definitions. People sometimes think, “Oh, she’s talking about optimism. She must mean rose colored glasses, Pollyanna, ignoring reality.” My husband probably encountered the craziest version of optimism one time. So his name is Shawn Achor. He is also a happiness researcher, which I know we’re two married happiness researchers.
ALISON BEARD: Must make for a happy marriage. That’s good.
MICHELLE GIELAN: Yeah. We definitely have tools to keep it on the happier side. So one time he goes to give a talk at a company on the power of optimism. The CEO afterwards loved the research and said, “I’d love to embed this in my organization. Can I give you a ride to the airport so we can talk about it?” So Shawn gets in this guy’s car and he clicks on his seatbelt and the CEO gets in and doesn’t put on his seatbelt. So after a while there’s a seatbelt bell going off. And if you know Shawn, he has a really funny TED Talk. He’s very, very funny on the fly. And he turns to the CEO, he thinks he’s making a joke and he says, “Oh, so you don’t wear seat belts?” The guy’s like, “No, man. I saw your talk. I’m an optimist.” So such a great reminder.
Optimism doesn’t stop cars from hitting us or reality from negatively affecting us. What we’re talking about here in this research and what we measure is rational optimism. It’s taking a realistic assessment of the present moment while maintaining the belief that our behavior matters. So at our organizations, we want to be really clear about what’s happening in the markets with supply chains, with restructuring, layoffs.
We want to understand our business challenges and have a full picture. We just don’t want to leave the conversation there. We want to move the brain on to what we can do in the face of challenges. And that’s where resilient optimism comes in. It’s not just looking at the problem, but it’s saying, “I believe my behavior matters and what I do next will make a difference.”
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So I do come from that philosophy that people are sort of born glass half full types or glass half empty types. And I think there is psychological research on prevention mindset, which means you’re looking to avoid risk versus promotion mindset, which means you’re seeking opportunities. But you argue and have shown that people can sort of move the needle toward optimism and particularly toward resilient optimism. So what evidence do you have that that can happen, that people can change in that way?
MICHELLE GIELAN: Well, we’re all born with a genetic predisposition towards optimism or pessimism, like a lot of things that we can test for. Meanwhile, there has been study after study that shows that if we invest in positive interventions, these positive behavioral shifts that I talk about in the book, that we can move our set point higher. And that means that we’re at any point able to cultivate a more optimistic mindset.
The thing with pessimism, to your question earlier, is that pessimism, we are seeing if we’re rational, we’re seeing the landscape as it is, but pessimists just don’t believe their behavior will make a difference. And I think that’s an important distinction. That actually doesn’t do well for our organizations if we’re trying to troubleshoot problems. We do want people who can see risk. We want people who are identifying issues that we’re encountering, but we just don’t want to leave the story there. We don’t want to ultimately say, okay, well, we don’t believe our behavior matters because then we see in our organization’s disengagement, people, they put their head down, they’re asking, “Whatever. What I do doesn’t make a difference.” So that’s why optimism becomes so important.
ALISON BEARD: So let’s talk first about how an individual cultivates a more resilient, optimistic attitude. You said it starts with mindset. So what are some shifts that I might make?
MICHELLE GIELAN: So I think one of the biggest things you can do is making sure that the information that’s coming into your brain is feeding you the best way possible. I did a series of studies with Ariana Huffington looking at the impact of information on the brain. And in the first study, we split research participants randomly into two groups. One group we exposed to just three minutes of negative news. The other we exposed to three minutes of neutral news, and then we test them both on a whole host of psychological and performance metrics. And what we found is, as you would imagine, the people who had been exposed to three minutes of negative information actually experienced a decrease. But what made the study amazing is that we tested them six to eight hours later.
So six to eight hours later, as they are closing their laptop off after a busy day or they’re picking up their kids from schools, those that had been exposed to just three minutes of negative information had a 27% increased likelihood of reporting their day as negative.
ALISON BEARD: So I should stop scrolling social media in the morning, except for the cat videos?
MICHELLE GIELAN: Yeah. Well, the cat videos can be really good for you-
ALISON BEARD: Right.
MICHELLE GIELAN: … because they’re bolstering your positive resources.
ALISON BEARD: Amidst the news.
MICHELLE GIELAN: Yeah. Yes. And so yeah, I mean, it’s being mindful of what information is coming at us. And I think the follow-up study was significantly more hopeful and actually points us in the direction of where we want to take this research and how we operate in the world. It changed how I do my mornings.
So for that study, we exposed half of the participants to a serious problem and then the other half were exposed to that same problem, but they also read about solutions that they could take to help solve it. So we’re moving the brain again from the problem to what you can do about it, reminding their brain about the agency that they have. And what we found is that people that had thought about solutions were 20% better on creative problem solving tasks later on in the day. So as leaders, we have the opportunity to make our teams smarter and better at whatever they’re doing by just sometimes engaging them in a brainstorming discussion where they’re saying, “Here’s the problem and here’s what we can do about it.”
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So how have you changed your mornings?
MICHELLE GIELAN: Yeah, so I usually actually don’t get caught up on the news in the morning unless I’ve had an opportunity to bolster my positive resources. So making sure that I’m listening to a good podcast, that’s getting me to think about possibilities and the progress that we’ve made.
Or I look at a challenge, but I’m able to see what solutions other people have taken. If I’m reading a news story, I’m not just focused on the problem, or I think what is not the best use of our time, going down the list and getting filled up on all the problems in the world.
Instead, what I do is I get my news online. I spend 10 minutes or so getting caught up. Because it’s online, I get all the opportunities to choose or skip certain headlines. And then what I really try to do is when there’s a story that I think is exceptionally important, I will do whatever kind of research I can, or I follow people that have already done it for me, on what we can do in the face of this challenge. And so in that moment, I’m reminding my brain that, “Hey, I can make a difference here. Someone has made a difference here. This is what the potential is to overcome this challenge.” And I think that mindset fuels the rest of my day.
ALISON BEARD: You also talk about transforming your stress response. So how do you do that, particularly at work and in difficult professional circumstances?
MICHELLE GIELAN: Stress is one of the biggest challenges we’re all facing, but oftentimes I think the problem is not the stress itself, it’s misreading it. Pick it up here.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah.
MICHELLE GIELAN: There was a study that my husband Shawn and two researchers from Yale did at UBS with stressed out managers. What they did was they split them into two groups and they put one through a typical stress management training. And then the other group, they actually talked to them about the scientific benefits of stress. So stress can make you have higher levels of energy, have mental cognition that is more fluid, your memory improves. And then they taught them how to see, own, and use this stress to their advantage.
What they found was months later during a very stressful time in the industry, those that had gone through that training that taught them how to rethink their relationship with stress and basically read it in a different way, they were reporting a 23% drop in stress related symptoms like headaches, back aches, and fatigue. So what I recommend is the next time you’re feeling stressed, take an opportunity or take a moment to ask yourself, “What is this stress really telling me?” And oftentimes there’s a meaning behind the stress. You’re not stressed that your son hasn’t shown up for curfew just because you’re frustrated he’s not listening to you. That might be part of it, but probably it has to do with the safety and the fact that you’d like him to come home in a timely manner so that you know where he is. There’s oftentimes a story underneath that stress.
So I recommend something called the signal check where you ask yourself, what is the stress trying to tell me and how can I pivot my behavior in a way that’s more helpful? So there are organizations, instead of, for instance, getting frustrated with a team that they’re not following the deadline, instead of just saying that to them, you can ask yourself, “What can I do here to make their path easier to move through?” And ultimately you realize that the stress is coming from the fact that you really care about the results of your work and you want to help your team to thrive.
ALISON BEARD: You also talk about rethinking commitments, sort of looking at your schedule and as part of that, finding time to recharge. So talk about how a busy executive might make that happen?
MICHELLE GIELAN: A lot of times when we’re busy, we think, “Oh, I need to double down on work,” but not everything on our to-do list requires and should be given the same level of energy and attention. I recommend a tool that I call Commitment Triage, where you make sure that everything that’s on your list should actually be there. There’s three lists. You can divide all the things that you do into these three lists and it gives you a better picture of how you spend your energy. There’s the core impact list. This is probably why you were hired at your organization in the first place. These are activities that help move the needle. And as leaders, part of that usually is keeping your team motivated, keeping them educated, maybe the communication that you offer them. There is a not to do list, which is probably my favorite, but this is stuff that can be delegated, delayed or just dropped.
A lot of times we inherit things from the person who used to do our job before us or we think we should be doing stuff and our to-do list balloons. When we really take a close look, we realize that there’s sometimes you can put them on the not to do list and you save yourself a lot of time. Then there’s a secondary work list. This is stuff that we sort of have to do as part of our role. There, I think the question is, can you be more efficient?
I worked with a therapist and she was running a very busy therapy practice with many therapists under her. She also was managing a home renovation project and continuing to raise her two kids, so she was exceptionally busy. I put her through the Commitment Triage process, and what she found was her core impact list was seeing teenage patients and helping the parents through workshops that she was doing. The not to do list were a bunch of things that she had just decided were her responsibility, but she had an office manager to handle that stuff.
And then the secondary work list was where the magic actually happened. One example was she needed to give psychiatry referrals at the end of the patient visits and this email would be hanging over her head for the rest of the week. Instead, what she realized was, “Yeah, I’ve got to do this, but there has to be a better way.” So she just had a printout sitting in the office and she would be like, “Yep, you should see this person or this person. Here you go,” and hand it off at the end of the appointment.
That small shift, along with a couple other small tweaks to her schedule, gave her four hours of time back every single week. So I think it’s about being really conscious about how you spend your attention. And again, back to optimism, this is reminding your brain of the ways in which your behavior matters. If you’re constantly doing stuff but you don’t feel like you’re making progress, that is a problem and that is a quick way to chip away at your optimism.
ALISON BEARD: So once you’ve started to build these resilient optimism muscles, how do you become more intentional about it at work, especially as a leader so that you’re not just changing yourself, but you’re changing your team?
MICHELLE GIELAN: Yeah. And I think as leaders know, your team is constantly looking to you to explain how to process the world around them. That narrative is exceptionally important. The thing that I always get leaders to think about when I give keynotes at organizations is I want you to think of yourself as a broadcaster. My background is I was a national news anchor at CBS News during the height of the Great Recession, and there I saw what would happen when we changed the content of the news, how that would impact the national conversation. There what we did is we focused on what you can do in the face of financial challenges.
So we had a whole week of solutions-focused content. We got the greatest fear response of the year. And what it showed me was the power that we constantly have to transform other people, but I don’t think that power is actually reserved for broadcasters. Everyone at any level in an organization can influence other people. There was a phenomenal study done at the University of California Riverside where they got groups of strangers, these three people at a time, to sit in a room in silence for just two minutes, and they tested their mood and mindset before and after the experience. And what they found is that the person who is most non-verbally expressive of their mood and mindset actually significantly influenced the other two people.
So if they were sitting there with a scowl on their face or looking otherwise negative, they made the other two people feel more negative. Meanwhile, if they were relaxed or smiling, they made the other two people feel more positive. And that’s in two minutes in silence. So can you imagine what power the leaders have at our organizations to transform their teams?
The number one way that I recommend is using something I call the power lead, and as you can imagine, this is taken from my days in media. When you start off a conversation or a meeting, think about the first piece of information that you’re sharing with other people. Basically, what is your top story? Because that transforms the brain of the people in the room and how they process the information that they’re about to receive, especially if there’s a challenge that your team is facing by bringing in the progress that’s come before, the possibilities that you have, the resources, the people who are in your corner, by getting their brains to focus on those good things, we’re transforming what follows.
So the power lead is sharing one positive or optimistic thing, and then because you know people are socialized to reciprocate, the hope is then that their brains are thinking about all the good things too, that they could offer up as well. I’ve seen that transform organizations, and one quick story is they redid the morning meetings, along with a handful of other things, at Nationwide Insurance with the sales team. There it was focus on successes, small wins from the past 24 to 48 hours that the entire team might not have heard about. And then anyone who needed a little extra support that day, they were given an opportunity to speak up, their colleagues could rally around them. Can you imagine having your colleagues offer that help? It’s tremendous.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah.
MICHELLE GIELAN: So we track them over time. 18 months later, their new insurance application rate went up by 237%. Their gross revenues went up by 50%, which for them was $300 million. So the president-
ALISON BEARD: That’s extraordinary.
MICHELLE GIELAN: Yeah, the president, they gave a lot of pushback in the beginning about, “Oh, optimism, it can be perceived as a soft science.” Oh, he’s one of the greatest proponents of positive psychology research because he saw that it not only impacted the performance of the team, but it also positively impacted their wellbeing as well.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. In your book, you also talk about this idea of a ecosystem of optimism. I think we’ve talked about a few steps that leaders might employ to get themselves there, but what does that look like in practice when it happens? How do you get to that nirvana type state?
MICHELLE GIELAN: Well, so we have this 11-year data set of more than 25,000 business professionals, and I just did a re-analysis of it because I was curious, everyone talks about the changing landscape of optimism and pessimism over time, but what I wanted to know was about the behaviors. And what I found is that eight in 10 people in our study still consider themselves optimists, but their behavior tells a different story. And specifically, they’re less likely to express their optimism.
So if someone presents a new idea, they’re less likely to speak up and say something encouraging. If they’re thinking something optimistic, they’re less likely to tell someone else about it. And if they start a conversation, the power lead, they’re less likely to employ that. Why this is significant when we’re talking about culture is that optimism isn’t just a private belief. It is information, evidence that we transmit to other people about progress and possibility. And so if we’re keeping that stuff to ourselves, we’re literally missing out on the fuel that helps open our mind up and allow our brain to perform at the highest levels.
So for leaders, the good news is that you’ve got as many as eight in 10 people already optimistic, so you don’t actually need to transform them. I did a separate study a handful of years ago that found when we’re talking about expression and optimism, that 31% of people are optimistic, but they’re not expressive of it. So there’s still other people that are optimistic, right?
ALISON BEARD: Right.
MICHELLE GIELAN: And they’re saying stuff and whatnot. But now we’ve seen the expression over time drop even more dramatically. So as a leader, if you can open up a space for people to talk about the good, to talk about the progress, the meaning embedded in the work they’re doing, there are things they’re grateful for, you’re actually setting a stronger social script of optimism and ultimately reaping those benefits.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. This is making me think. I was on a ferr y this past weekend and there was a woman in a beautiful dress that almost the color of yours, and I had noticed sort of as we got on the ferry, and then as we were walking off the ferry, I said, “Hey, I just want to let you know I love your dress.” And I said, “And I’ve been admiring it since we got on the boat.” And my husband was like, “You sound like a stalker.” But as a middle-aged woman, I think it’s really important to share compliments. I think that’s sort of what you’re talking about. It’s like I have the power to put that lady in a good mood, and as a boss, you have the power to put your team in a good mood by complimenting them on any good work that they do, right?
MICHELLE GIELAN: Yes, and we’ve seen this play out in dramatic ways at the organizations we’ve worked with. So for instance, at Microsoft, there, the team lead had to deal with all the fires they needed to put out, and he would have a meeting first thing in the morning with his team. I mean, talk about a stressful job. He decided to start with three things he was grateful for. One thing about the team in general, one thing about someone specific on the team, and one thing he was grateful for about his own life in general. Not only did people attend the meeting more, but they also came at those problems with a totally different mindset.
I worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, and there, they decided to try to increase the amount of positive expressivity, and they would do it by starting meetings by saying, “For instance, what’s one thing that someone has done here recently at work that’s made your job easier? Or what’s one way that you’ve noticed effort has really paid off?” By just asking those, what I call positive leading questions, those questions that don’t get our brain to a specific answer, just get the brain to positive territory, you are modeling positive expressivity, you’re opening a space for it, and it’s activating all of those closet optimists to actually speak up.
Because the reality is, if someone presents an idea and you’re thinking, “Well, okay, this idea has potential,” and you don’t say anything, your optimism has no effect on the room. Meanwhile, the person sitting next to you is like, “I’ve got 12 reasons why this is not going to work.” If he says something, that is now the conversation. When optimists go quiet, pessimists get the floor. As we talked about, pessimism can be a destructive force at our organizations.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So we’ve talked about a lot of things that individuals can do and leaders can do to cultivate more resilient optimism. What is the one strategy that you feel like gives most bang for the buck in terms of one of our listeners walking into their office tomorrow and doing this thing and having a positive impact on those around them?
MICHELLE GIELAN: If we want to recalibrate our mindset and get our brain to focus on all the good that’s existing around now, I would say tonight when you get home, write down three to four good things that happened from the day. I started in the busy blur of the pandemic. I realized that there were good stuff happening. There was good stuff happening, but I was maybe not recording it because I was so exhausted. So I started sending my husband a text message with three to four good things. I was like, “Please don’t even respond. Don’t even throw a heart on it. I just want another phone to have these messages.” But the idea was I wasn’t asking, “Was today good?” I was asking, “What was good in today?”
And so that helps us, again, bolster our positive resources. And then for your team, you can hold a meeting where you ask, “Tell me something good that’s happened.” And you go around the room, “Tell me one way your effort mattered. Tell me one thing that the entire team might not have heard about that would be really good for us to know.” Getting that positive conversation to happen, it’s a fuel not only in the moment, but it’s sort of the opposite of the three minutes of negative news. It’ll help fuel them for the rest of the day.
ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Well, in what can feel like very trying times, I think this is an important message. Michelle, thank you so much for coming in and talking to me.
MICHELLE GIELAN: Thank you so much for having me.
ALISON BEARD: That was Michelle Gielan, author of the book ‘Resilient Optimism: The Science of Sustaining a Positive Mindset in Tough Times’ and the HBR article, “How Leaders Counter Pessimism in Trying Times.”
Check back in the feed on Thursday as we wrap up our special fall AI series talking all things AI and strategy with Wharton’s Ethan Mollick. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to HBR.org/subscribe.
Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe and senior production editor Kristin Murphy Romano and our broadcast team, Dave Di lulio, Ellie Honein, and Simona Sparane. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new regular episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
