POWER OF COURAGE: Chapt.7
HOW TO DEVELOP COURAGE IN LEADERSHIP
The good news is everyone has the capacity for being courageous. I know this first-hand. From an early age, I've had a gripping fear of heights. What did I do about this fear? I became a high diver! Fear is an invitation to courage, and I accepted the invitation. Over a long period—and by trying, trusting, and telling courage—I was able to dominate my fear of heights instead of letting them dominate me. Though I remain afraid of heights, I was able to master my fear enough to perform more than 1,500 high dives from heights that scaled to over 100 feet. I long ago traded my Speedo for a business suit, and these days I devote my life to helping people and organizations be more courageous. The most important lesson my clients have taught me is that the entire workforce wins when everyone shows up to work each day with more courage. With less fear and more courage, workers take on harder projects, deal better with change and speak up more willingly about important issues. In short, courageous workers try more, trust more and tell more. As a business leader and entrepreneur, your job is to put courage inside of people— to encourage them. By applying the three different types of courage, as well as the tips above, courage can be put to good use in your own workplace. Why is courage important in leadership? This is a question posed by many leaders and organizations as they determine the importance of including courage as a vital attribute for their leaders of the future. Our immediate response is that it is vital for organizations serious about disrupting the status quo and creating success in an uncertain, ambiguous, volatile and complex business environment that increasingly demands speed. Speed to respond, to take action, to make decisions, to create value and to engage in constructive and meaningful ways with all the critical stakeholders in their business and personal lives.
When you accept business, leaders bring 6 types of courage to the way they lead themselves, others and the business you can begin to "see" why courage is so important as we forge our way through the business world to create sustainable success:
1.PHYSICAL COURAGE: This is the type of courage many of us think of first - it is the bravery when faced with the risk of bodily harm or death andinvolves developing physical strength, resiliency, and awareness examples of this kind of courage are running into burning buildings as a firefighter, facing an enemy on the battlefield, undergoing chemotherapy, climbing a mountain. Although many leaders invite their colleagues into demonstrating this kind of courage in "team building" activities - in our experience it is not the most needed type of courage within most businesses.
2. SOCIAL COURAGE: Social courage is about standing up tall, being able to greet the world with your head held high, feeling comfortable in your own skin. Social courage means not conforming to the expectations of others, and being willing to show your true self even if it means risking social disapproval or retribution. It means being able to express opinions and thoughts without checking to see if they are in line with "everyone else's" opinions and thoughts. In our experience, this is one of the most challenging types of courage for individual leaders to demonstrate - as they don't want to be "the one" to rock the boat and break ranks with the comfortable way they have built to relate with each other.
3. MORAL COURAGE: Moral courage is about doing the right thing even at the risk ofinconvenience, ridicule, retribution, loss of job or security, or social status. Moral courage requires us to rise above the apathy, complacency, hatred, cynicism, and fear-mongering in our political systems, organizational cultures, socioeconomic divisions, and cultural/religious differences. Doing the right thing means listening to our conscience; the quiet voice within. Ignoring that voice can lead to feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and diminished personal integrity. Moral courage requires us to make judgments about what actions or behaviours are supportive of being ideal self, and which ones are destructive. It asks us to recognize our responsibilities and see the consequences of our actions and choices.
4. EMOTIONAL COURAGE: This type of courage is about being open to feeling the full spectrum of emotional experience, both positive and negative. The most universal are happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. All are associated with biological intelligence and a drive to survive. Emotional courage is about being willing to be vulnerable, truthful, and aware of your conscious experience of these core emotions. Emotional courage also means loving yourself, being proud of yourself, and believing that you are worthy of love and happiness. Essentially, it is related to self-acceptance, coupled with a willingness to move outside your comfort zone. In our experience, many businesses leaders fear demonstrating this courage more than physical courage - give me a 50-meter wall to abseil down rather than asking me to make myself vulnerable by sharing how I feel and listening to others share how they feel.
5. INTELLECTUAL COURAGE: Intellectual courage means being willing to grapple with difficult or confusing concepts, ask questions, struggle to gain understanding, and risk making mistakes. Sometimes what we learn challenges previously accepted ideas, or contradicts earlier teachings. Intellectual courage will be required more and more in the future, as complex structural problems of the environment, economy, and society challenge conventional problem-solving. Intellectual courage means being intrinsically motivated to learn and question. Integrity and authenticity are interwoven with intellectual courage; it means telling the truth no matter how uncomfortable.
6. SPIRITUAL COURAGE: Spiritual courage means being available to the deepest questions about why we are here, what is my life for, do I have a purpose? These are profound existential questions and can be quite43frightening, which suggests why fundamentalism of all kinds can gain mastery over us. Spiritual courage means accepting you are unlikely to find answers, but asking the questions anyway. We all call upon spiritual courage when we consider our own mortality. Spiritual courage means opening ourselves up to our own vulnerability and the mysteries of life. Courage is at the very essence of being authentic and developing trust in you and where you are taking the business - vitally important to the long-term and sustainable success of any business and leader. Courage enables the speed being sought -sharing what we really think and feel and listening as others share with us. Nurturing strong and capable leaders is a top priority for organizations today. Research by the Centre for Creative Leadership shows that firms committed to cultivating leadership talent experience:• Improved financial performance• Success in navigating organizational change• Higher employee attraction and retention rates• A greater ability to drive strategic execution While there is a range of workplace competencies that characterize effective leadership, such as knowing how to give feedback and communicate organizational change, there are also key emotional traits and behaviours that professionals need to access and nurture to bring out the best in themselves and others. Among those traits is courage. "A courageous leader is an individual who's capable of making themselves better and stronger when the stakes are high and circumstances turn against that person,"says Harvard Business School Professor Nancy Koehn, who teaches a free, online leadership lesson about legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton. "Most of our lives, we're beset by crises. Courageous leaders are not cowed or intimidated. They realize that, amid turbulence, there lies an extraordinary opportunity to grow and rise."If you want to guide your team with conviction and transform business challenges into opportunities for positive change, here are five characteristics of courageous leaders you should develop to unleash your potential and advance your career.