What The Knicks Taught Me About Hope and Leadership

We were in Austria when it happened.

My husband — born and bred in Brooklyn, a lifelong Knicks fan who has lived through every heartbreak this team has so generously provided over the decades — was not in New York for the moment he has been waiting for most of his adult life.

We were in Vienna. The trip had been planned long before we could ever entertain the possibility of the Knicks actually making it to the Finals. And so there we were, over 4,000 miles away, watching from a distance. Getting up at 2am for every game, starting with the Eastern Conference Finals, just to watch it live, cheer on our team and revel in the moment.

By Game 5 of the Finals, we weren't just following the final moments live on TV. But we followed them on our phones. Then on Instagram. Then in the news. Then in the messages flooding in from family and friends who were there — in the bars, in the streets, in that beautiful, chaotic, collective eruption that only New York City can produce when something truly extraordinary happens.

And yet.

Even from thousands of miles away. Even through a screen. Even without the crowd, the noise, the physical presence of the city we love —

We felt it.

THAT thing. That specific, electric, almost indescribable thing that happens when an entire group of people — in this case, a city— experiences something at exactly the same moment. When individual excitement becomes collective joy. When strangers become, briefly and brilliantly, one thing.

There is a term for this in sociology: collective effervescence. The phenomenon first described by Émile Durkheim — the energy that emerges when people come together around a shared experience and something larger than any individual is briefly, powerfully felt.

We felt it in Vienna.

And what surprised me most was not the joy — though there was plenty of that.

It was what came with it. More subtle, deeper and more lasting than the celebration.

It was hope.

The Core Insight

Hope is an underrated emotion.

We tend to treat it as naive. As passive. As the thing people reach for when they don't have a better plan — the last resort of the optimist in a room full of realists.

But hope is none of those things.

Hope — real hope, not wishful thinking — is one of the most psychologically sophisticated and strategically important states a human being can inhabit.

Psychologists who study hope make a distinction that matters enormously: hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is a disposition — a general expectation that things will turn out well. It is largely passive. It doesn't require action.

Hope is different. Hope is active. It requires two things working together: the belief that a better outcome is possible, and the sense that you have some agency in moving toward it.

Hope says: things could be different. And I have a role in making them so.

That combination — possibility plus agency — is extraordinarily powerful.

Research consistently shows that people with high levels of hope are more resilient in the face of setbacks, more creative in finding solutions, more persistent in pursuing goals, and more likely to recover from adversity without losing their sense of direction.

Hope is not a feeling you wait for.

It is a capacity you build. And a choice you make, sometimes in the face of significant evidence to the contrary.

Which is why, sitting in Vienna watching New York celebrate, I found myself thinking not just about basketball — but about leadership.

And about how rarely we talk about hope as a leadership skill.

What the Knicks Actually Won

For those who don't follow basketball — or who follow it but perhaps not with the particular devotion of a lifelong Brooklyn fan such as my husband— let me explain something about what this moment meant.

The Knicks have not always been easy to love.

They have been, for long stretches of time, a study in disappointment. A team that asked for loyalty and returned heartbreak. A franchise that tested the hope of its fans not once but repeatedly, across years that could try the patience of even the most devoted.

And yet the fans stayed. The hope persisted. Not blindly — these are New Yorkers after all; they are not naïve. But stubbornly. Faithfully. With the particular resilience of people who have decided that the team they love is worth believing in even when the evidence suggests otherwise.

And then — finally, improbably, beautifully — something changed.

What the Knicks won was not just a game, or a series, or a season.

They won back something that had been deferred for a very long time.

They restored hope to the people who had kept it alive.

And that restoration — that moment when the thing you believed in despite everything finally, actually happens — produces a feeling that is unlike almost any other.

Not just joy. Not just relief.

A profound, collective, almost cellular confirmation that hope was worth it.

That holding on mattered.

That the belief — sustained through the losses and the disappointments and the long years of almost — was not foolish.

It was faithful. And faithfulness, eventually, was rewarded.

I want to hold onto that feeling. I want to cherish it and understand it. Because I think it has something important to teach us — about leadership, about what we owe the people who follow us, and about the particular kind of courage it takes to keep hope alive when the evidence for it is thin.

Hope as a Leadership Responsibility

Here is something I believe deeply, after years of working with leaders at every level:

Hope is not a byproduct of good leadership. It is a prerequisite for it.

The leader who has lost hope — in their organization, in their team, in the possibility of meaningful change — cannot lead effectively. They can manage. They can maintain. They can keep things moving through the inertia of existing systems.

But they cannot inspire. They cannot ask people to give more than is strictly required. They cannot create the conditions under which people do their best, most creative, most committed work.

Because people follow leaders into difficulty only when they believe the difficulty leads somewhere worth going.

And that belief — that the effort will matter, that the change is possible, that the direction they're being asked to move in is genuinely worth moving toward — is hope.

The leader's job is not just to have a strategy. It is to make hope credible.

Not through false positivity. Not through the performative optimism that papers over real problems with relentless enthusiasm and makes people feel, correctly, that they are not being told the truth.

But through the honest, grounded, evidence-based articulation of why the future they're working toward is genuinely possible — and what their specific role in making it happen actually is.

That is the leadership version of hope: possibility plus agency, made real and specific and believable for the people you lead.

And it is harder than it sounds.

Because to offer hope credibly, you have to have it yourself.

Where Hope Goes — And How to Find It Again

Hope is not a permanent state. It is not something you achieve once and maintain forever.

It fades. Under pressure, under prolonged difficulty, under the accumulation of setbacks that weren't supposed to happen and the goals that keep getting deferred.

I have worked with leaders who started with enormous hope — in their organization's mission, in their team's potential, in their own capacity to make a meaningful difference — and who arrived, after years of grinding reality, in a place where that hope had become very quiet.

Not gone. But quiet. Buried under the weight of what hadn't worked, what hadn't changed, what had been tried and tried again without the breakthrough that was supposed to come.

And what I've found, in those conversations, is that hope rarely disappears entirely. It goes underground.

It waits.

Sometimes it waits for a result — a win, a breakthrough, a moment when something finally works the way it was supposed to.

Sometimes it waits for a conversation — someone who asks the right question and creates enough space for the buried thing to surface.

Sometimes it waits for a reminder — of why the work mattered in the first place, before the difficulty of doing it started to obscure the reason for doing it.

And sometimes — like a fan in Brooklyn watching their team finally win — it waits for a moment of collective effervescence. A reminder that you are not alone in what you're carrying. That others have been hoping too. That the thing you've been believing in — despite the evidence, despite the years, despite the accumulated weight of not-yet — is real and worth believing in still.

Finding hope again is not about pretending the difficulty wasn't real. It is about reconnecting with the reason the difficulty was worth enduring.

How to Cultivate Hope — In Yourself and In the People You Lead

1. Reconnect with the original why. Hope doesn't live in the strategy deck. It lives in the reason the work matters. When hope fades, it is almost always because the connection to that original reason has been lost under the weight of the day-to-day. Go back to it. Ask yourself — and your team — why this work matters. Not what you're trying to achieve. Why it matters that you achieve it. The answer to that question is where hope lives. Return to it regularly.

2. Name what's working — specifically and honestly. Hope erodes when people can only see what hasn't worked. It rebuilds when someone takes the time to identify, specifically and honestly, what has. Not false positivity — real evidence. The progress that is real, even if it's partial. The things that are genuinely better, even if the goal is still distant. Specific, honest acknowledgment of real progress is one of the most powerful hope-building acts a leader can offer their team.

3. Make the possible feel real. Hope requires believability. The vision of a better future needs to be specific enough, grounded enough, and connected enough to current reality that people can actually imagine it. Abstract aspiration doesn't sustain hope. Concrete, believable possibility does. The leader's job is to make the future real — not through certainty, but through specificity. Here is what is possible. Here is why I believe it. Here is the role you play in making it happen.

4. Find your sources of renewal. Hope needs replenishment. Identify the things — the conversations, the experiences, the places, the people — that restore your sense of possibility when it has been depleted. Protect time for them. Not as indulgence. As leadership infrastructure. You cannot give what you do not have. And a leader who has lost hope cannot generate it in others.

5. Let yourself be moved. Sometimes hope arrives not through strategy or reflection but through experience. A moment of collective joy. A conversation that reminds you why people matter. A win — even someone else's — that confirms that the thing you've been working toward is actually possible. Let those moments in. Let them do their work. The Knicks win reminded an entire city — including two people watching from Austria — that the things worth believing in are worth believing in still. That is not a small thing. It is, sometimes, exactly what is needed.

6. Tell the honest story — including the hard parts. False hope — the kind that ignores real problems and covers up genuine difficulty — is not hope at all. It is avoidance. And people see through it immediately, which destroys trust and makes real hope harder to access. The leaders who generate the most durable hope are the ones who tell the truth about where things are — including the hard parts — and then make a credible case for why the future is still worth working toward. Honesty and hope are not opposites. In good leadership, they are inseparable.

The Courage Shift

Maintaining hope in difficult circumstances is one of the most courageous things a leader can do.

Because it would be easier not to.

It would be easier to become cynical — to protect yourself from disappointment by lowering your expectations, by hedging your commitments, by maintaining a careful emotional distance from the outcomes that matter most.

Cynicism is comfortable. It is also, over time, a slow form of leadership death.

Because the people around you are watching. They take their cues from you about what is possible and what isn't. About whether the effort is worth making and whether the belief is worth sustaining.

And a leader who has stopped hoping — even silently, even behind a professional exterior — communicates that hopelessness to the people they lead in ways they may not even be aware of.

The courage of hope is the courage to keep believing in a better future — specifically, actively, honestly — even when the evidence for it is incomplete. Even when the path is longer than you expected. Even when the loss column is longer than you'd like.

That is not naivety.

It is one of the most sophisticated and demanding forms of leadership courage there is.

A Courage Challenge

This week, I want to ask you to do two things.

First — find your hope. Ask yourself honestly: where has hope gone quiet in your leadership? In your organization, your team, your own career? Where has the accumulated weight of difficulty compressed something that used to feel more alive?

And then ask: is it gone — or is it underground, waiting?

Second — share it. Find one person on your team who needs to hear, from you, a credible and honest articulation of why the future you're working toward is worth working toward. Not a speech. Not a presentation. A conversation. Specific. Human. Real.

Tell them what you believe is possible. Tell them why. Tell them what their role is in making it happen.

Because hope, like collective effervescence, is contagious.

It moves from person to person. It builds on itself. It turns individual belief into something larger — a team, a culture, a city — that is capable of more than any of its parts.

The Knicks reminded a city — and both my husband and I — that the things worth believing in are worth believing in still.

That the long wait doesn't mean the thing isn't coming.

That faithfulness to a belief, sustained through the difficulty, is not foolish.

It is, in the end, how every worthwhile thing gets built.

Hold onto your hope.

Nurture it when it starts to fade.

And share it — generously, honestly, courageously — with the people who are following you.

They need it more than you know.