Page 165 - Anne Bruce - Building A HIgh Morale Workplace (2002)

Winning Back Morale in Emotional Times 145

tragedies are well prepared. They know how to quickly mobilize
help in a hurry. Then they make a deliberate and conscious
effort to draw on the passion, energy, and inspiration of the peo-

ple around them. They keeping workers well informed and they
always tell the truth about the situation, not candy-coating criti-
cal information no matter how painful.
Will you be that kind of manager in a crisis?

Navigating Toward Survival and Hope

Managers who instinctively and repeatedly instill feelings of
hope and positive morale into their employees will find these
feelings sustaining them and their people through the best and
worst of times. These instincts become a manager’s inner com-

pass for navigating toward survival, confronting problems with
greater confidence, and making resilience a personal declara-
tion, eventually becoming an ongoing source of revitalization
and even heroism when necessary.

Real-World Navigator of Survival and Hope
Dr. Pam Hinds, director of nursing research at St. Jude
Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, has been

navigating the survival and hope of her patients, their families,
and her staff for more than 17 years. In an environment where
catastrophic childhood illnesses are a daily reality, Dr. Hinds has
helped to create an environment for her staff where hope and

high morale are the orders of the day.
“I point out to people that this work is not about focusing on
the intensity of sadness and death that can result from these ill-
nesses. Instead we learn to focus on the moment-to-moment
miracles that happen here, at St. Jude’s, every single day. If you
stop focusing on all of the remarkable possibilities, there can be

chaos,” says Dr. Hinds.
Here are some of the suggestions that Dr. Hinds offers her
staff when it comes to sustaining high morale in an environment
where fear for what might be and hope for what can be come

together on a daily basis.