Hope Is Now The Most In-Demand Leadership Trait. Heres How To Engineer It

Every leadership team I work with is actively building a strategic futures capability to explore what comes next and embedding that work into their planning and delivery capabilities. They have all the tools—project dashboards, scenario decks, AI explorations of signals and trends, design fiction explorations—and are having conversations at the top table while sharing their visions with the market and investors.

Regardless of this futures work, the mood in these rooms has not shifted. These teams see further and more clearly than any generation of leaders before them and still find themselves cycling between standing still and the urge to do something, anything, that delivers change. We can call it well-informed paralysis: every tool for seeing what’s coming, and no confidence that what you do will shape it.

There is another way. Hope is emerging as a practical way to build individual and team energy for motivation, resilience and change and as a vital part of how organizations succeed.

It’s been proven to be in demand. Gallup’s 2025 Global Leadership Report asked people across 52 countries to name the leader with the most positive influence on their life, then describe what that person gives them. Hope dominated the responses. It accounted for 56 percent of every attribute people named as being the most important, well ahead of trust, the second-ranked need, at 33 percent, and far beyond compassion and stability. Hope is also in demand from the team with 64 percent of followers saying they need hope from the leaders of their organization.

We can see hope as a capability that can be built, that we create the conditions from which hopeful futures emerge. That makes us hope engineers – those that explore futures to prime the goals, actions and agency-driven pathways.

Here are four practices that you can follow to build a high-hope, futures-aware mindset and a team that drives forward with motivation, resilience and delivery excellence.

Practice 1: Set audacious goals

Strategy presents objectives, actions and the risk landscape and sets financial targets. However, we’re often left with risk as the opening frame and that makes people distance themselves from the strategy they’re meant to own. Risk still gets managed. It just shouldn’t be the thing that organizes and guides our thinking and planning.

Unfortunately, most corporate goals are not, and nobody stays focused when a small impact is at stake.

We can embrace strategic foresight to help look beyond the risk and consider what is probable and what is preferable based on our goal. That allows us to work backwards from the futures we imagine. That requires a defined future destination described in sufficient detail with guiding signals, trends and questions that are specific enough to organize our work around and meaningful enough to be worth the trouble.

The question a leader asks determines the posture of the room so having clarity with a view to significant impact is important. “We don’t know what is going to happen?” produces anxiety, futures theater and deference to whoever sounds most confident that everything is going to be OK. “What might happen, and what would we do about it?” produces options and shared ownership of the exploration needed.

You need to keep an open eye for new and exciting opportunities then track one or two signals of change each week. It trains you to start with a destination, not the risk

Practice 2: Explore multiple pathways

Hope is diminished the moment people believe there is only one way through and forward. A single pathway forward turns every obstacle into an existential event and every change of course into an admission that we have failed to deliver.

Charles R. Snyder’s research on high-hope individuals—and subsequent findings—found that leaders with hope generate alternate routes quickly and treat blockers as terrain rather than verdicts. Resilient organizations think in pathways while brittle ones defend a plan. One plan creates dependency. Multiple pathways create agency so design three ways forward, not one.

It’s crucial to build the alternates before you need them. Not a contingency paragraph in an email or deck, but pathways with owners and actions and dependencies stated clearly so the team knows what happens if the way forward hits a chokepoint or closes.

Practice 3: Build agency in the team

Hope requires the belief that the work, and the people doing it, matter to the organization. Most organizations remove belief by accident, through layered approvals, permanent restructuring and transformation programs designed at the top and dictated to everybody else.

Agency is not a feeling you install through communications and a monthly team meeting. It’s a structural property of where decisions sit, and of whether people have explicit permission to shape, question and remix the work in front of them. I’m reminded of this in the work I do.

A couple of years ago I worked with the leadership team of a large European agriculture and food supply business. We explored signals and emerging trends and integrated key elements of foresight into the C-Suite’s monthly briefing. It was in one of those briefings when the CEO stopped me mid-sentence. I was taking them through a section on climate disruption to Southern European growing seasons, especially in Spain and Italy. The company was two weeks away from investing millions in a partnership in a fruit growing operation in southern Spain.

She asked what we would do differently if warming and hotter summers with unknown effects of drought and wildfires were to become more normal occurrences.

Over the next three days—the only window we had to do the work with the right people in the room—we built scenarios, a risk profile and a register, and came back with recommendations to restructure the partnership investment. The deal went ahead at a different scale and on more flexible terms. It’s still proven to be flexible and resilient today, considering how things are unfolding now.

That is an agency win, not a foresight one. The signal had been circulating in the briefing pack for some weeks. What changed that day wasn’t the quality of the insight—it was that the one person who could redirect the money happened to be in the room when it was considered. Send that same briefing to a regional team, or a strategy function, or anyone who would have needed to write a memo upwards, and the investment—with the unchecked risk—would have closed on schedule with effects on profitability, the partnership and the bottom line.

High-hope leaders become architects of agency and move the decision closer to the work. They set decision rights, budget, and explicit permission that it is fine to try and be wrong at the place they are most needed—where the work is. They hold fast on the destination and let go of the route.

Practice 4: Make experiments mandatory

Certainty is a consequence of movement rather than a prerequisite for it and high-hope organizations do not wait for certainty before acting. This is the mechanism that makes hope self-reinforcing. Movement forward creates evidence and that creates confidence. These builds hope as an energy for change in your organization because people believe their actions matter and that proves agency is working.

This is an argument against pure-play 18-month transformation programs and for a portfolio of small, funded and time-boxed experiments. The fact is that 10 experiments at a fraction of the cost will tell you more about what’s coming than a single strategy document, and it distributes agency across 10 teams instead of concentrating it in a steering committee.

Becoming a hope engineer

The job is to design the conditions in which people can see a future worth pursuing, credible pathways toward it and evidence that what they do changes outcomes.

None of this is about making people feel better. That’s a useful by-product, not the goal. Hope is a capacity to act, and the four practices are how you audit that. They set you up to build a hopeful organization and a mindset for motivation and resiliency where transformation is needed.

To mobilize this thinking—and to check that you have a high-hope organization—you have a hopeful mindset checklist:

Are we thinking about big goals? Stop five people at random and ask where the organization is going in 10 years. Count how many give you the same answer.

Have we considered multiple pathways? When a route closes, how many days pass before the team is moving on another one? If you’re answering in quarters, you had a plan, not pathways.

Is team-wide agency supported and encouraged? Ask five people at the delivery layer to name a decision they made in the last 90 days that stuck. Count the answers, not the enthusiasm.

Are we executing with an experimental mindset? Ask how many experiments are running, and how many you killed. If nothing has been killed this year, they aren’t experiments. They’re projects with better branding.

Here’s a reminder that building hope is also a personal discipline and it starts with reflection. Begin tomorrow with one sentence, “Today, we are working towards a future where…” along with your goal-driven proclamation. You must finish it out loud, in front of the people who must deliver transformation. You’ll find out quickly whether you can, and whether they believe that a clear goal and agency-driven pathways exist and that we have hope as an energy for change.