The #1 Thing Your Team Needs From You (Hint: It’s Not What You Think)
Leaders, do you know the #1 thing your team needs from you?
The answer may surprise you.
According to Gallup’s Global Leadership Report: What Followers Want (Feb 2025), the top thing teams need from their leaders across cultures and roles isn’t expertise, authority, or even clarity.
It’s hope.
This is true whether you’re an organizational leader (64% of responses), a manager (59% of responses), or a colleague (58% of responses).
While other critical needs – like trust, compassion, and stability – were all identified as important, hope was far and away the #1 need "followers" have of leaders.
And that makes sense.
In times like:
→ the ones we find ourselves now in the U.S. – when the nonprofit sector is under attack, or
→ the ones we’ve found ourselves recently, during global pandemics and natural disasters, or
→ the ones we find ourselves frequently, needing to enact important changes that are both necessary and disruptive to our ways of working
Finding ways to provide hope to our teams can feel hard.
Leaders who can inspire hope give their teams something powerful: the courage to keep going.
But what does hope look like in practice?
According to Gallup, hope is demonstrated through:
Inspiration, vision, and personal integrity
Growth, learning, development, and achievement
Financial growth, support, and independence
You don’t have to be perfect. But you do have to be intentional. Understanding the needs of your team is essential to good leadership.
Use these questions to reflect as a leader:
How can we meet our team’s need for hope by improving in one (or more) of these areas?
What skills, time, or clarity do we need to grow as managers who foster hope?
As we budget for this year, how can we prioritize investments that elevate hope within our team culture?
Hope is more than optimism — it’s strategic. It’s stabilizing. And it’s a powerful leadership tool when used well.
What aspects of hope have you seen be most impactful for leaders, teams and organizations?
Join the conversation on LinkedIn — share your thoughts on how hope shows up in leadership and check out the Gallup study linked in the comments.