Courage gets discussed as a trait, which makes it a property of people rather than of situations, and leaves anyone who does not feel especially brave with nothing to do about it.
The leaders who appear to have it are mostly not braver than anyone else. They have thought about the moment before arriving in it, which is a different thing entirely and is available to everybody.
The moments are few and they repeat
Across a career, the occasions that genuinely require this are not numerous and not varied. Six cover almost all of them.
Saying the thing everyone in the room already knows and nobody has said. The project is not going to work. The candidate is the chairman’s nephew. The number in the third column is not real.
Giving an unwelcome answer to somebody with power over you. A board that wants to hear the timeline is fine, a funder who wants a metric you cannot honestly report, an owner who has already told the customer.
Ending the employment of somebody who deserves it and is widely liked. The hardest of the six for most people, and the one the organization watches most closely.
Admitting a significant error while admitting it still costs something. Afterward, once it is obvious, is not the same act.
Turning down money on principle. A client, a donor, a contract that would solve the quarter and require something you will not do.
Holding a position after the room has converged against it. Not obstinacy, which is this without the reasoning. Continuing to say a thing you believe when the social cost of saying it has become obvious.
Why deciding in advance works
Inside the moment, the two sides of the ledger are not equally visible, and the asymmetry is severe.
The cost of acting is immediate, specific, and physically present: the faces, the silence, the conversation you will have to have this afternoon. The cost of not acting is diffuse, delayed, and easy to discount, and there is nearly always a version of the situation in which somebody else raises it later or the problem resolves on its own. Anyone reasoning in real time will find that version, because it is the only path that avoids everything vivid.
Deciding beforehand, while neither side is vivid, produces a different and better answer. The useful form is specific rather than aspirational. Not a resolution to be brave, which will not survive contact, but a settled position on a named situation: if the safety finding is what I think it is, I say it at the meeting on the ninth regardless of who is present.
The counterfeit
A great deal of what presents as courage costs the person nothing, and the tell is straightforward.
Bluntness with subordinates. Contrarianism in a room where being contrarian is admired. Criticising an absent party, a distant institution, or a predecessor. Telling difficult truths to people who cannot affect your position. Each of these can be performed at length by somebody who has never once said anything that endangered them.
Real instances have a price attached and the price is paid by the person speaking. If nothing was risked, what occurred was a style of communication, and it should not be confused with the thing it resembles. Organizations frequently promote the resemblance, because it is more visible and considerably more comfortable to be around.
What one absence does
The moments are watched, and the failures are remembered longer than the successes.
A leader who was in the room when the thing should have been said, and did not say it, has been observed by everybody else who also did not say it. What that establishes is not that the leader is weak. It is that the safe move is available at this level, which means it is available at every level below, and the next person facing a version of the same choice now has a precedent.
This is the mechanism by which organizations become unable to discuss their own problems. Not through any policy, and rarely through anyone being punished for speaking. Through an accumulation of occasions on which the person best positioned to say it chose not to, each of which was individually reasonable.
Fear is the wrong measure
People sometimes conclude they lack this because the moments frighten them. That is a misreading of what is being asked.
The requirement was never to feel calm. A person who is not apprehensive before ending a long-serving employee’s job has probably not understood the situation. What is being asked is narrower and more achievable: that the apprehension not be the thing that decides. Preparation does not remove the fear. It removes the fear’s vote.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD