Choosing Courage

The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work

Jim Detert

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781647820084
• eBook ISBN: 9781647820091
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

An inspirational, practical, and research-based guide for embracing risk and making a powerful impact at work.

Have you ever wanted to disagree with your boss in a meeting? Speak up about your company's lack of diversity or unequal pay practices? Make a tough decision that you know will be unpopular?

We all have opportunities to be courageous at work. But since courage requires risk—to our reputations, our social standing, and, in some cases, our jobs—we often fail to act, which leaves us feeling powerless and regretful for not doing what we know is right. There's a better way to work and live—and Choosing Courage provides the moral imperative and research-based tactics to help you make better use of your courageous instincts at work.

Doing for courage what Angela Duckworth has done for grit and Brene Brown for vulnerability, Jim Detert, the world's foremost expert on workplace courage, explains that courage isn't a character trait that only a few possess; it's a virtue developed through practice. And, with the right attitude and approach, you can learn to hone it like any other skill and incorporate it into your everyday life.

Full of stories of ordinary people who've acted courageously Choosing Courage will give you a fresh perspective on the power of voicing your authentic ideas and opinions. Whether you're looking to make a mark, stay true to your values, act with more integrity, or simply want to grow as a professional, this is the guide you need to achieve greater impact at work.

PART ONE

THE NATURE OF WORKPLACE COURAGE

CHAPTER 2

Truth to Power

As adults, we know what we’d like to do when it matters most at work: we hope we’d tell the truth, stand up for ourselves or others, and say “no” when going along would be wrong.

For example, if you were Rebecca, who works at a New York investment firm, and realized you were making only a fraction of what your male colleagues were making despite significantly outperforming them, you’d like to think you’d confront the male founders on behalf of yourself and other women facing this systemic inequity. Or that if you (like too many accountants, sales managers, and safety experts) got told to “make the numbers look better” or “downplay the severity of the risks,” you’d push back and refuse to do something that’s misleading and possibly illegal or dangerous.

Sadly, people face similar choices every day and often don’t speak up or push back. Feeling scared, unclear how to voice their concerns effectively, and trapped, they instead carry on silently and hope for the best. They lose respect for those above them and perhaps for themselves for their complicity. Over time, they’re likely to start giving less and less of their best selves to their work and struggle to feel committed or engaged. They “quit before leaving.”¹

Why We Fear Power

The fact that we’re highly attuned to, and hesitant to offend, those above us in any hierarchy—those with power over us—isn’t news to anybody. We depend on powerful people for all sorts of resources, and we need to stay on their good side to avoid negative consequences.

Our fear of power is deep-seated. We’ve been socialized since childhood to listen to those above us, whether that means our parents, teachers, religious figures, or other group leaders. Whether it’s “Eat your peas,” “Be quiet in class,” or “Listen to the minister,” we’re surrounded by instructions to conform to the wishes of those in authority if we want to have our social and material needs met and avoid rejection or expulsion.² Indeed, as Professors Herbert Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton remind us, “the duty to obey is inherent in the very concept of authority.”³

Evolution has most likely played a role in our tendency to organize ourselves into hierarchies and be deferential to those above us. Our nearest relatives (as a species) are the great apes, and they are . . . not egalitarian. The alpha males abuse rivals, while the beta males bully everyone besides the alpha (to whom they are deferential).⁴ Likewise, signs of rank ordering in humans goes back thousands of years.⁵ Higher-rank individuals slept in the safest part of the house (the rear), while those of lowest rank (slaves) slept inside the front door in case of a raid. Humans too have evolved all sorts of dominance and submission signals and behaviors that tend to keep the hierarchy intact. Fortunately, these days we tend to stop short (in the United States, anyway) of physical altercations, imprisonment, or murder as hierarchy enforcement mechanisms.⁶ But we still make it clear who’s in charge, whether that’s reflected by the size or location of an office, how people dress, where they sit in meetings, and lots of rules that make it more likely that the challenger of authority, not the challenged, faces formal or informal sanctions in the case of disagreement.⁷

The truth is, when we fear challenging authority, we don’t know with certainty how likely or severe any negative consequences might be. If your job is to jump out of airplanes, there’s objective risk. But when we’re talking about disagreeing with a boss, taking a problem to a higher-up, or admitting a mistake, we almost never know for sure what’s going to happen. The person you confront might be 100 percent OK with what you say or do, and 0 percent likely to retaliate. Or the odds might be 50/50. Even if you’d argue with me that you do know with some certainty, I’d simply reply: “That doesn’t really matter. It’s your belief that doing something is risky that affects your decision to do it.” Similarly, others’ belief that you did something worthwhile despite it being risky is what leads them to label it courageous. They don’t know how risky it was, objectively or from your perspective—they are calling you courageous based only on their perception of the situation.

One last thing about our perception of workplace risks: if we had a perfect way of measuring actual risk levels (that is, determining after the fact exactly what happened across a huge range of situations), it’s quite likely we’d find that most people overestimate them. It’s only natural, literally. If you think you see a poisonous snake ten times and automatically jump back and run away, your flight instinct has kept you alive even if, all ten times, the “snake” was actually a stick. But if you fail to perceive the snake that is actually there even a single time, you might be in serious trouble. In short, evolution favors self-protection.⁸ We have primitive brain components that help us start to protect ourselves before we even consciously perceive danger (or use more recently evolved parts of our brain to process whether it’s real) and memory and behavior activation systems that favor “bad” over “good” and “false positives” (you think there’s a snake when there’s not) over “false negatives” (you fail to perceive an actual snake).⁹ False positives lead us to waste some energy (e.g., jumping back, starting to run), but we’re still alive; false negatives could mean death (that stick actually was a poisonous snake that bit you when you got too close).¹⁰

In short, courage is often in short supply not just because the world of work is filled with objective risk, but also because we’re hardwired to overestimate it. We’re also not very good at testing those estimates or updating them over time.

One manufacturing operator I interviewed told me he no longer speaks up because he’s sure there will be trouble. This seemed unusual, since the reason I was visiting his plant was that it had been identified in a recent all-employee survey as one of the safest environments for speaking up in the whole company. And he acknowledged that the current plant manager and his direct boss were very open and approachable. I pressed him—why was he nonetheless sure it wasn’t safe? Because he “got threatened with retaliation after speaking up twelve years ago” by the plant manager who was “three plant managers ago.” So was it really professionally risky for him to speak up at the time I was talking to him? Probably not. But he was still using the incident to justify his silence, even though he recognized in telling me that this wasn’t a very rational basis for his current fear or behavior.

So we’ve got lots of real reasons to be afraid of challenging those above us, and a natural tendency to automatically overestimate that risk on top of it.¹¹ Put that all together, and it’s no surprise that we often see silence and inaction. Whether in my own or others’ research, the data is clear: people routinely forgo opportunities to speak truth to power.¹²

What Truth to Power Looks Like

Despite the risks of challenging or otherwise upsetting those with the power to harm us, not everyone stays silent or chooses inaction. Some people do defy expectations for conformity and deference to authority, becoming what author Ira Chaleff calls “courageous followers.”¹³ In fact, if authority structures can lead to what Kelman and Hamilton called “crimes of obedience,” my research has revealed that they also set the stage for what I call the courage of disobedience.

When I started studying workplace courage, I interviewed people in all kinds of jobs and simply asked them to tell me about a specific example where they or someone around them did (or didn’t do) something they considered courageous. As these examples accumulated into the hundreds, and my research assistants and I started to categorize them by type of behavior, one thing immediately stood out: acts involving, and usually directed at, those higher up the organizational chain of command were by far the most common. While only about one-third of the questions on the Workplace Courage Acts Index (WCAI) Evan Bruno and I created directly involve “truth to power” behaviors, about half of all the workplace courage stories I’ve been told (well over a thousand at this point) are of this type. In many ways, challenging, confronting, defying, or in other ways making oneself vulnerable to those with more formal power is the prototype of a courageous work act in a world where most of us need the pay, benefits, and various forms of social and psychological identity afforded by jobs in structured hierarchies. Put simply, angering those above us in an economy where so much is tied to our ongoing employment and most of us can be easily fired involves real risk, even when we’re acting for quite legitimate purposes.

The Workplace Courage Acts Index

Below is a list of eleven behaviors that collectively represent a fairly comprehensive set of ways that people with less power can do worthy things that are risky (primarily because they might incur the anger or disappointment of those with more power at work). These are, in short, behaviors that are often considered courageous by the actors themselves or by others who observe the behavior. Remember: I consider workplace courage to be an act done for a worthy cause despite significant potential risks. Thus, the WCAI assesses specific behaviors that people engage in on identifiable occasions, not some kind of personality disposition or stable character assessment of a person.

On the WCAI, respondents first rate how courageous the behavior would be in the environment directly around them, from “not at all” to “extremely.” They then estimate how often that kind of behavior actually happens around them when opportunities for it exist, from 0 percent to 100 percent. Jarrod, for example, might report that challenging a direct boss about strategic or operating policies or practices is “extremely” courageous in his environment, and therefore happens only about 20 percent of the time it could. Quinetta, who works in a different environment, might report that the same behavior is only “moderately” courageous and happens about 50 percent of the time it could.

TRUTH TO POWER

Challenging authority figures

• Challenging/pushing back on direct boss about strategic or operating policies or practices
• Confronting direct boss about their disrespectful, hurtful, unprofessional, or inappropriate behavior
• Speaking up or standing up to a boss about their unethical or illegal behavior
• Challenging/pushing back on a leader above one’s direct supervisor about strategic or operating policies or practices
• Speaking up to a leader above one’s direct supervisor about others’ unacceptable behavior
• Reporting unethical or illegal behavior to a leader above one’s direct supervisor or other internal authorities

Demonstrating agency

• Operating with more autonomy than currently granted by job description/internal authorities
• Explicitly defying, saying no to, or refusing to go along with a direct boss’s problematic orders, expectations, or decisions
• Advocating for subordinates or peers
• Taking the hit for subordinates or peers (for their mistakes, efforts, decisions)
• Admitting one’s significant mistake to a boss or higher-ups

Across all respondents to date—and this represents people in all kinds of work environments—the behaviors shown above are seen on the whole as requiring significant courage and not happening nearly as frequently as we’d like. For example, about 75 percent of all WCAI respondents say it’s at least moderately courageous to challenge a direct boss about strategic or operating policies or practices in their proximal environment; more than a quarter say it’s “very much” or “extremely” courageous to do this. As a result, this type of honest upward input happens only about 40 percent of the time when it could. When the challenge becomes more personal or about more intense matters—as captured by some of the other questions—the percentages become even more discouraging. For example, when it comes to confronting their boss about his or her disrespectful, hurtful, unprofessional, or inappropriate interpersonal behavior, 84 percent of all respondents say it’s at least moderately courageous to do so; 45 percent say very much or extremely so. The percentage of time this behavior is said to happen when it could drops to less than one-third of the time.

So we know that these kinds of behaviors are often seen as quite courageous and that they don’t happen as much as we need them to. But clearly some people are doing them. Who are these people? What kind of people accept the potential risks involved in doing the kinds of things described above? The short answer: All kinds of people.

If you look for patterns in the WCAI or in other courage data I and others have collected, there are no strong “those kind of people” results to share.¹⁴ Risking the wrath of higher-ups isn’t easier or more likely to happen based on any obvious individual differences. On the WCAI, for example, there are no consistent differences in how these behaviors are rated across demographic categories like respondents’ gender or place in their organization’s hierarchy. Being in a formal managerial position doesn’t systematically change views, nor does being closer to the top or bottom of one’s organizational hierarchy. Nor are there stark differences in responses from people in different industries.

In short, if you’re looking for a reason to conclude that these behaviors are important, but should come from other kinds of people, I can’t help you out with that rationalization. These courageous acts toward those with more power come from men and women, from people with PhDs and people who have not completed a high school education, from people in higher- and lower-level jobs, from people in huge bureaucracies and smaller, newer organizations. People of all types take on power, whether or not they’ve got...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: A Time for Courage
• Part One: The Nature of Workplace Courage
• Part Two: How to Be Competently Courageous
• Part Three: Climbing Your Courage Ladder
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author