I believe that the first fundamental is hope.

Hope balances all our perspectives. I believe that we go off track, so to speak, when we don't have hope in relation to our dreams. We need dreams; we need to dream big; but we also need perspective with our dreams. In this age of affirming mistakes and failure that organizations are so good at in an effort sometimes to show 'they're with it,' too often we collapse when our dreams collapse. Why? Because we lack this important ingredient called hope. Organizations that don't cultivate an ethic of hope doom their big dreams and realistic failures because there is no fall back.

Consider Keynote Planning Inc. (KPI), an organization specializing in manufacturing precision instruments for the airline industry. Bill Reid, the CEO, was briefing his senior staff about the upcoming downsizing they were expected to execute. But they could never have anticipated what would happen. What happened?

"What happened" was rather simple to explain. All the logic and strategic reasons were in place to make the downsizing; what was missing was the "human factor." The company didn't factor in how deeply the staff would feel about this action. Even the VP of Human Resources, Barb Simpson, remarked after, "Wow! The backlash was something else! We certainly didn't expect that!"

So KPI went on with business after the downsizing, but the anticipated gains didn't materialize. Part of the human factor that was shattered was the missing hope for the remaining employees, for one thing. Employees were constantly on edge all the time rather than focusing on what they had to do; they didn't see a very bright future ahead of them; their hope had been shattered. "Will I be next?" "If they do this to people who've been here a long time, what about the rest of us?" "Why should we put in any extra effort if this is how it's all going to end up?

I am constantly amazed that many companies don't realize that at the end of the working day, they are basically 'bankrupt.' Why? Because their employees leave! And why is that such a 'bankrupting' event? Because these employees walk out with the intellectual capital that is needed to make the business work. Yesteryear it was 'financial capital' or 'physical capital' (like machines, tables, etc.). Today, it is 'brain capital.' And brain capital is only in the heads of employees. One employee remarked to me, "Do you think I'm ever going to let this company download my brain after what they just did? Forget it!"

An ethic of hope positions the new workplace differently. An ethic of hope creates a new balance sheet. It doesn't ignore the obvious balance sheet of ROI, but it acknowledges and honours the new balance sheet: ROIR – "Return-on-Investment-in-Relationships," or "Return-on-Integrity-in-Relationships" or "Return-on-Intelligence-in-Relationships." No longer can organizations expect their employees to park their brains at the entrance of the building and then put in a day's work. Employee brains are the sine qua non, the 'very stuff' of how the new organization creates a positive balance sheet and a future worth going to. We can very legitimately say today that "it is the hard stuff that gets us hired; it is the soft stuff that gets us fired!" I would even go further and say, based on the research results working with emotional intelligence and its integral place in the new workplace: the soft stuff accounts for at least 70% of the dynamic. In other words, when we study what I call the "EQ Pie," we notice that there are three pie slices: EQ, IQ, and SQ.

• "EQ" is emotional intelligence: our ability to manage our emotions in such a way as to effect positive and productive results in our working relationships. My personal definition is as follows: "EQ is the ability to engage our emotionality in intelligent ways in order to facilitate constructive outcomes in our relationships."
• "IQ" is our mental intelligence: our ability to have the necessary understandings of what the business is and how it works.
• "SQ" is strategic intelligence: our ability to set clear goals and build a future worth going to.

The EQ Pie makes sense because (a) managers are in their positions because they are academically prepared (IQ); (b) these same managers know what the targets and corporate goals are (SQ); but (c) oftentimes these goals are either not met or met inadequately because they have been unable to form a nexus of relationships that will support the goals (EQ). This nexus of relationships is the art and skill of fostering, nurturing and harnessing the best intuitions and energies of employees to support the strategic vision and goals of the organization. Dr. Margaret Wheatley puts is this way: "Leadership is always dependent on the context, but the context is established by the relationships we value."

The logical question to this discussion is the following: how do we create such a workplace, a workplace that embodies an ethic of hope? The short answer is this: we create a worthplace!

Other Articles in this Series
#1: The Ethics of Hope
#2: Leadership as Presence
#3: Emotionally Intelligent Workplaces
#4: The Fine Art of Business
#5: The New Balance Sheet