As a business leader one of your primary roles is to ensure your staff have a belief in the future sustainability of the business, or perhaps more precisely, to create hope.

Yet this is not quite as simple as creating a vision for the business. Although that is part of it, this belief has to be a compelling future that your people believe is possible, is something that they desire and is aligned to their personal ambitions and needs.

It must answer the critical questions that exist in everyone’s minds:

• Do I want to be part of it?
• Does this organisation have the capability to get there?
• Do I believe that the leaders are up to it?
• What does it mean for me?

Your people want to know where you are leading them and, critically, they want to know why this is the right direction. Your picture of the future must demonstrate an understanding of where your customers are going, how your competition are developing and the threats and opportunities of your commercial environment. Remember, you may be thinking long-term, but your employees may be worried only about getting through the year.

Always remember that events can change, so your vision will need some flexibility. If you continue to pursue a vision that current realities are proving to be unrealistic, do not be surprised if your people start to lose hope.

In his book 'Good to Great', Jim Collins talks about 'getting the right people on the bus'. The right people are those who have consciously chosen that your picture of the future is one that inspires them and is one to which they wish to commit their passion and energy.

Equally, it is a responsibility of leadership to choose those people who are not right for your organisation and ensure that they are not recruited in the first place or, if they have been recruited, to help them leave with dignity.

If your picture is compelling, but your people do not believe that the organisation is fundamentally capable of getting there, there will be no hope.

One of our clients in the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe has enjoyed a compound growth rate of more than 30% for the last five years and is forecast to experience similar growth into the future.

The survival issues on the minds of their employees therefore were not security of employment, but the ability of the organisation to implement common systems, to build robust processes and to develop the appropriate management and leadership capability. Their commitment to the challenging vision that was being laid before them was based not on the potential within the market, but upon their faith that the leadership team understood these issues and, most importantly, was capable of addressing them.

People follow leaders because they believe they are capable of taking them to where they want to go and not just because they are the ‘appointed leaders’.

Your leadership team is under constant and highly critical scrutiny from the people who work in your business, as they decide whether to entrust their futures in your combined abilities. Your team must be seen to be working as one, aligning their energies and efforts to a single and unifying ambition for the business.

While differences of opinion and conflict are healthy within a team, your employees cannot see this or your success will be undermined.

Now that you have a clear picture of what your business will look like and need to deliver in the future, you know what organisational capability you need to develop, and you know the culture that you need to create or sustain. You can then accurately define the competencies that your leaders of the future will need to possess, which will almost certainly differ in some ways from those of today’s leaders.

One of our clients in China understood that in order to deliver their long-term business objectives, they needed to create 100 new first line managers. At the same time, they faced an acute shortage of available talent in the market. Not only would head-hunting be expensive in the short-term, it is totally unsustainable in the long-term. Having identified the people that they really wanted to keep, they used development programmes as a key retention strategy. In short this is one way of giving these people hope for their individual futures.

One definition of insanity is to continue to do everything you have done in the past, but expect different results. Your people work with the daily reality of your business – they know what is working and what is not and it is against such pragmatic and tangible evidence that they will finally assess their level of hope.

In any cycle of change, either driven by harsh economic conditions or indeed buoyant growth, there will come a time when your people experience feelings of frustration, fear, denial, uncertainty and even anger.

These feelings are often triggers that create employee disengagement, a disease that according to Gallup is costing the UK economy between £37 and £39 billion per annum. The same research also showed that each actively disengaged worker costs their employer nearly £9,000 per year in lost productivity, that senior management’s attitude towards employees has a greater impact on engagement than day-to-day factors, and that the top driver of employee engagement is senior management’s ‘sincere’ interest in employee well-being.

Thus, a genuine sense of hope for the future is what inspires people to move on from these negative feelings and will re-engage your people in helping you to move from survival to sustainable growth.