Optimism Is Now an Essential Leadership Skill

Host Alison Beard and co-host Adi Ignatius introduce the episode by contrasting optimism with the difficult realities leaders face: a changing media industry, shrinking print advertising, workforce reductions, missed targets, and pressure to keep teams motivated. Ignatius says a leader needs a vision and purpose to keep moving productively through setbacks, while Beard frames the guest’s idea of “resilient optimism” as acknowledging painful realities while still helping people see a positive path forward. They emphasize that change is difficult and that leaders need both resilience and visible wins to build momentum and tell an inspiring story. Michelle Gielan defines ordinary optimism as an expectation that good things will happen. Resilient optimism, by contrast, is optimism that “stays strong when it’s tested”—when setbacks stack up, challenges last longer than expected, change keeps coming, or people are exhausted. She describes it as a set of behaviors that makes positive change easier to start while building resilience at the same time. Gielan rejects the idea that optimism means rose-colored glasses or ignoring reality. Her preferred term is “rational optimism”: making a realistic assessment of the present while maintaining the belief that one’s behavior matters and that what one does next can make a difference.

Beard asks why people should fight pessimism when pessimism can feel protective during worrying periods, such as global instability, a struggling company, or a team that has missed its targets. Gielan says the volume of problems currently feels louder than the volume of progress, but argues that optimism is one of the strongest performance advantages available in the data. She cites 31% higher productivity, 37% higher sales, and a 40% greater chance of promotion among outcomes associated with optimism. Her research draws on an 11-year dataset of more than 25,000 business professionals. People in the top quartile for optimism were three times more likely to be highly engaged at work and five times less likely to burn out. Gielan says optimism functions like “infrastructure” or fuel for both well-being and performance. She explains that optimism can be measured with the scientifically validated LOT-R scale, adapted in her research to ask how people think and act as optimists in the work domain. The distinction from pessimism is not necessarily whether someone sees risks accurately: pessimists may recognize the landscape, but they do not believe their behavior will change it. Organizations need people who identify risks, Gielan says, but not people who stop at “what I do doesn’t make a difference.”

Gielan says people may have genetic predispositions toward optimism or pessimism, but positive behavioral interventions can move their baseline or “set point” higher. One place to begin is with the information entering the brain. In studies conducted with Arianna Huffington, participants who watched three minutes of negative news later had a 27% greater likelihood—six to eight hours afterward—of describing their day as negative than participants who watched three minutes of neutral news. Gielan tells Beard that cat videos can be useful when they bolster positive resources amid difficult news. A follow-up study exposed participants either to a serious problem alone or to the same problem paired with possible solutions. Those who considered solutions performed 20% better later on creative problem-solving tasks. Gielan applies this finding to leaders: after acknowledging a problem, they should move the group toward what it can do about it. She also recommends a “signal check” for stress: ask what the stress is trying to communicate and how behavior can be redirected helpfully. Stress may reflect care about safety, results, or a team’s success, rather than simply irritation. In a study of stressed UBS managers, people taught to reinterpret stress as a source of energy, cognition, and improved memory later reported a 23% decrease in stress-related symptoms such as headaches, backaches, and fatigue.

Gielan’s second individual practice is “commitment triage,” a way to examine whether everything on a busy schedule deserves the same energy and attention. She divides responsibilities into three lists. The “core impact” list contains the work that moves the needle and likely explains why the person was hired, including for leaders the work of motivating, educating, and communicating with their teams. The “not-to-do” list includes responsibilities that can be delegated, delayed, or dropped; Gielan notes that people often inherit tasks from a predecessor or assume duties belong to them when they do not. The “secondary work” list contains necessary responsibilities that should be made more efficient. Gielan gives the example of a therapist who ran a busy practice, managed a home renovation, and raised two children. Her core impact work was seeing teenage patients and conducting parent workshops. She realized that an office manager could handle many items on her not-to-do list. For psychiatry referrals, instead of sending an email after each appointment and carrying the task through the week, she kept a printed referral list in the office and handed it to patients immediately. That change, along with other schedule adjustments, returned four hours per week. Gielan says visible progress matters because constantly working without feeling effective quickly erodes optimism.

Gielan compares leaders to broadcasters because teams look to them to explain how to process the surrounding world. Drawing on her experience as a national news anchor at CBS during the Great Recession, she recalls that a week of coverage focused on solutions to financial challenges generated the year’s strongest viewer response. She says influence is not reserved for professional broadcasters: a University of California, Riverside study placed groups of three strangers in a room silently for two minutes and found that the person whose mood was most visible nonverbally significantly influenced the other two. A scowling person made the others more negative, while a relaxed or smiling person made them more positive. Her main leadership tool is the “power lead,” borrowed from journalism. At the beginning of a meeting, leaders should deliberately choose the first important information they share—the meeting’s “top story.” When a team faces a challenge, the leader can first mention prior progress, available possibilities, resources, or people who can help, then address the difficulty. Gielan says this primes people to process the rest of the conversation with a more constructive mindset and invites them to contribute positive information themselves. At Nationwide Insurance, a sales team began morning meetings by sharing small wins from the prior 24 to 48 hours and giving people who needed support a chance to speak. Eighteen months later, new insurance applications had risen 237%, and gross revenue had increased 50%, or $300 million. A skeptical president became a strong supporter after seeing the effects on performance and well-being.

Gielan’s analysis of the 11-year dataset found that eight in ten participants still considered themselves optimists, but their behavior showed declining expression of that optimism. They were less likely to encourage a new idea, tell someone else about an optimistic thought, or begin a conversation with a power lead. Gielan stresses that optimism is not only a private belief; it is information about progress and possibility that people transmit to one another. When optimistic people keep quiet, the group loses fuel that could open minds and improve performance. Her earlier work found that 31% of people were optimistic but not expressive of it, and she says the expressive gap has widened. Leaders can create an “ecosystem of optimism” by making positive expression socially acceptable and routine. At Microsoft, a team leader facing constant fires began meetings with three things he was grateful for: one about the team generally, one about a specific person, and one about his life outside work. Attendance increased, and people approached problems with a different mindset. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, meetings began with questions such as, “What’s one thing someone has done here recently that’s made your job easier?” or “What’s one way you’ve noticed effort really paid off?” These questions do not dictate an answer but move the group into positive territory and help “closet optimists” speak. Gielan’s simplest personal practice is to write down three or four good things that happened during the day—or, as she did during the pandemic, text them to her husband without asking for a reply. For teams, she recommends asking what went well or where someone’s effort mattered.