The town hall is over, the optimism was genuine, and somewhere in your organization a capable group still waits for something to believe in.
Hope appears in 56 percent of the attributes people name for influential leaders, across 52 countries [1]. It is not encouragement. 69 percent of employees who strongly agree their leadership makes them enthusiastically hoping are engaged – against one percent who disagree, which is the most powerful engagement question Gallup measured [2]. Reality in most organizations though: The people expected to supply hope are busy elsewhere. Leaders spend almost all their time reacting, not initiating [2]/[3]. When Gallup prompted executives toward the future, they reverted to reacting – so even being aware they couldn’t help themselves, which makes it structural [2]/[3]. Who only reacts, does not initiate, does not produce hope.
The consensus advice that hope follows encouragement is wrong. It is produced, not incited. It is produced by direction. What your people are waiting for is navigable direction. Producing it is a leadership capacity, and capacities can be built.
See first how little leaders and team members are getting what they need, and that the issue starts deeper.
Hope Is the Highest-Stakes Employee Need – and Leaders Supply It Least
Missing needs starts on the supply side and the structural conditions. Of the four needs people consistently bring to those who lead them, hope ranks highest [1]. Simultaneously this is being flagged as the one posing the greatest leadership challenge.
The need is preceded by a baseline structural condition. If not met, hope will not be able to exist.
Only 22 percent of workers worldwide strongly agree their job is safe, leaving 78 percent to carry insecurity into every planning cycle, every exchange with others and their leaders [4] – a workforce the coverage describes as consumed by fear. Living in fear, will block all reception of hope and highly impact engagement at work. This needs to be addressed first.
Unfortunately: Managers report 22 percent engagement, 19 percent for individual contributors, so the group expected to supply hope runs barely ahead of the group waiting for it [5]. A negative spiral: Feeling less safe leads to less engagement, leads to reactiveness, leads to lesser engagement, leads to feeling more unsafe.
There is hope to break the cycle despite those numbers. What looks like a motivation problem is a production problem – direction is something leaders can produce, or fail to, independent of engagement. And done consistently, it actually leads to engagement.
Hope Is Produced by Initiating Direction – a Present Task Informed by a Future Purpose
The simple mechanism behind producing direction exists in the one place leaders already control: the choice to initiate. When leaders choose to initiate, the very act can create hope for the future [2].
A concrete example: Facing a downturn, one chief executive chose to “gun it” – hiring more people and pursuing new business – while others cut, and the choice to show initiating not reacting created hope while eliminating helplessness [3]. What produced the hope was a decision about direction, made and moved on, rather than any message about better days ahead.
Intent is clear direction, a present task informed by a future purpose. The future end-state will stay a dream, unless it becomes action in the present. Intent therefore can also be described as navigable direction set by leadership – something to work on now. A direction people walk and work on now, not an encouragement to do so.
What produced the hope was a decision about direction, made and moved on, rather than any message about better days ahead.
Positive side effects of clear direction are also felt in the realm of insecurity – for leaders and team members alike. In psychological-safety research the first gate for higher safety marks is ambiguity reduction, making the implicit explicit. On the contrary, even a neutral predicted response tends, under loss aversion, to register on the negative side of the bar [6]. Further, the future orientation of the intent works as a belonging cue – signaling the relationship will continue.
This resolves the fear block and the reduced brain’s threat-detection, creating psychological-safety for all involved, allowing for higher-order cognition – more solutions become available. A 47-country study names that safety is the bedrock of high-performing teams [7].
Plenty of organizations now run structures that negatively impact that gate to create higher safety marks. Job insecurity, role ambiguity, and heightened cognitive demands may diminish psychological safety [8]. This needs to be tackled, to increase the likelihood of arriving at the future purpose.
Adjacent research on visionary leadership operates on principles consistent with the mechanism: Leaders who depict a positive future in vivid, clear terms and share it see in turn people include the leader in their own sense of self and begin taking charge unprompted [9]. Separate work on trust, by Skiba and Wildman, traces the same process – engagement improves as workplace uncertainty falls [10].
A direction people walk and work on now, not an encouragement to do so.
Encouragement was not once part of the real story: More talk does not lead to more clarity, the missing direction is the difference. Beware though: A “vision” announced from inside the reacting mode is still reacting, but in costume.
Vision Is Navigable Direction – Prediction Theater Is the Counterfeit
Direction still needs an object, and the object decides whether the production works. The direction that produces hope is navigable: walkable now, without destination coordinates. The two ends hold each other up – the future purpose gives the present task its direction, the present task gives the future purpose its reality – so nobody needs tomorrow’s map to take today’s step.
Under pressure “to have a vision” often leads to less substantial results: the six-month pivot cycle shows up, the debate shifts from “where are we going” to “what is the best route,” and strategy without vision optimizes for whatever problem is loudest this quarter [11].
We call this prediction theater – direction that pretends to navigate but cannot be walked on now. A “direction” people cannot start walking this week leaves them waiting for the next forecast signal, and then the next, and the next. Constantly checking, if they are hitting the forecast accurately, and in consequence never moving.
Navigable direction produces the opposite – teams move faster when direction is settled, and a clear vision is what makes a confident no possible when appropriate [11].
Forecasts may be right or not, but vision is to be fulfilled regardless [12].
A “direction” people cannot start walking this week leaves them waiting for the next forecast signal, and then the next, and the next.
Navigable direction asks for honesty about the present and commitment to a purpose; prediction theater asks for certainty about the future – the one input no leader can manufacture.
Four Moves to Build Vision – Content, Communication, Backing, and Practice
Visionary direction-setting leadership is a set of learnable skills rather than an innate trait – practice in strategic thinking, communication, and building systems that connect daily work to long-term goals [13]. A baseline and four moves, in sequence:
Set a safe Baseline. One foundational condition applies: Where fear dominates the daily climate, hope production fails until the psychological-safety floor is laid, because people under threat cannot engage a future [7]/[8]. Setting direction will help, but check structural issues blocking people, producing threat.
1. Build the content. Direction has to exist before anyone can communicate it. Depict the positive future of your organization in a vivid and clear way – the first of the two core elements visionary leadership research identifies, ahead of any sharing [9]. Write the future purpose concretely enough to inform a present task; that concreteness is the property navigable direction lives on. This can be a joint process with your team of course.
2. Communicate it as a present task. Share the vision the way work gets done: name the present task the future purpose informs, so people can act this week rather than admire a destination [9]. Do not make them wait to initiate. Allow everyone to use the energy of the moment.
3. Back it with resources. Allocate organizational resources to support the vision: such backing can significantly increase the effectiveness of visionary leadership, and these investments potentially strengthen the legitimacy of vision communication [14]. A vision no one funds stays a poster on the wall; a funded one becomes a direction people can watch their leader choose.
4. Run the practice loop. Build or deploy realistic scenarios that match your actual leadership challenges – how you communicate strategic decisions under uncertainty, how you handle stakeholder conflict in real time [15]. Score a baseline, practice, and remeasure at week eight and week twelve [15].
A vision no one funds stays a poster on the wall; a funded one becomes a direction people can watch their leader choose.
Start Monday at the scale of one initiative. Initiate one direction – a present task informed by a future purpose – communicate it where your team members work, and back it with a resource someone can point to. Repeat next initiative; the capacity accumulates in the repetition.
From below, hope is what navigable direction feels like: people stop waiting for something to believe in once they have been handed something to act on. The backward-looking need, trust, resolves through integrity; the forward-looking need resolves through vision.
Hope is produced by vision – and the four moves that build it are yours to run.
Sources
- Gallup (via LinkedIn) — Leadership Needs: Hope, Trust, Compassion, Stability in a Changing World (~Dec 2025)
- Gallup (Brian J. Brim, Ed.D.) — Strengths-Based Leadership: The 4 Things Followers Need (2015, upd. 2021)
- Rath, T. & Conchie, B. — Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow (Gallup Press, 2008)
- Nick Lichtenberg — Workers around the world are scared. A massive new survey shows just how much (Mar 2026)
- Gallup — Global Data Summary — State of the Global Workplace 2026
- Tom Geraghty — Ambiguity, predictability, and psychological safety (May 2026)
- Center for Organizational Effectiveness (COE) — The 2026 Psychological Safety Study (Mar 2026)
- Byung-Jik Kim, Min-Jik Kim, Julak Lee — The dark side of artificial intelligence adoption: linking AI adoption to employee depression via psychological safety and ethical leadership (2025)
- Liu, Zhang, Zhu, & Li (Huazhong Univ. / Zhongnan Univ.) — How and When Does Visionary Leadership Promote Followers’ Taking Charge? The Roles of Inclusion of Leader in Self and Future Orientation (2022)
- Kleynhans, Heyns & Stander (North-West University, SA Journal of Industrial Psychology) — Authentic leadership and follower trust in the leader: The effect of precariousness (2021)
- Dave Scarola (The Alternative Board) — Vision vs. Strategy: What Comes First and Why It Matters (Jul 2026)
- Tony Cooke (Tony Cooke Ministries) — Vision vs. Forecast (~2020)
- monday.com (Org) — How to become a visionary leader: 7 steps to inspire and drive change in 2026 (upd. Jul 2026)
- Bilgin, B. (Erasmus Research Institute of Management) — Visionary Leadership and the Pursuit of Organizational Visions (2024)
- Retorio AI Coaching Insight Team (editorial review: Dr. Patrick Oehler) — Leadership Development Process: 5 Steps and Stages (2024, upd. Aug 2026)
Please note: 51even is an AI-first organization. We embrace AI at every step of our value creation and build our processes with a deep integration of human-AI capability. Humans always have the last decision. But this text was heavily built with AI.