The Courageous Leader

How to Face Any Challenge and Lead Your Team to Success

Angela Sebaly

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781119331612
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119331810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Tap into everyday courage for extraordinary results

The Courageous Leader presents a much-needed reminder for leaders everywhere: it takes courage. Courage is not just about heroic acts in grandiose situations—it's about everyday, solid-as-a-rock support and leadership that motivates, inspires, and delivers. It's about taking a risk on a great idea, and it's about seeing opportunities in the day-to-day. Courageous leaders aren't necessarily the bold "Navy SEALS" of the workplace; they're the everyday people who lead steadily through rough waters. They don't seek out discomfort, but accept it as part of the process when it occurs, and still deliver exceptional results. This book shows you how to tap into your courage reserves and build your steel. Real stories of everyday leaders show you how it's done, and provide a new lens for seeing real strength in adversity—and practicing it yourself.

Tough situations do arise, but great leaders show courage every day. Keeping your strength in reserve for the big problems leaves you operating at less-than-full capacity the rest of the time—and your people deserve better. This book shows you how to exercise courage every day in small situations to build the unshakeable foundation of a great leader.

• Move beyond your comfort zone
• Develop your ability to focus through tough times
• Tap into your natural courage and hone your leadership ability
• Leverage your strength in situations large and small

The more you exercise courage, the stronger it gets; this book shows you how to use it every day to more effectively navigate small challenges—when the big problems arise, you'll face them with The Courageous Leader.

1
The Business Case for Courage

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.¹

—Anaïs Nin

Anna is the kind of person we all want to work with. She is considerate, compassionate, and approachable. In an industry where attracting and retaining talent is nearly impossible, Anna has been extraordinarily successful at keeping her people happy. When I first met Anna, I was in the process of visiting various locations throughout her organization to facilitate feedback from employees in the field. Before meeting Anna and her team, I had heard nothing but gripes from overworked and underpaid employees in other locations, most of whom pointed their fingers at poor leadership—especially in the “disconnected” corporate office. But Anna’s team offered a very different perspective. Their unique account of their experiences was uplifting. I spoke with one team member who held one of the least desirable jobs in the company, having to work at all hours of the night to dispatch calls from employees in the field. He said, “Even if the competition paid me double, I wouldn’t leave this company. Anna treats us like family.”

Anna did, in fact, strike me as a warm and caring matriarch, protectively hovering and providing for her flock. My visit fell on a Friday morning, and per tradition, Anna had brought in her homemade pastries. Before she could set them down on the breakroom table, greedy hands dug in, and her team clustered together to catch up on the week. I used this time as an opportunity to informally learn more about Anna’s leadership. I heard nothing but praise for Anna’s kindness and generosity.

After such an unusual visit, I returned to the corporate office to report back to the divisional president, excited to share a success story amid the myriad of dysfunctional stories I had cataloged during previous site visits. When I concluded sharing my testimonial to Anna’s great leadership, the president shook his head in disappointment. He then pulled up an Excel spreadsheet and began walking me through Anna’s key performance indicators compared to her peers in similar positions around the country.

On average, Anna paid her employees 25 percent more than other teams, even though the cost of living in her region was significantly less expensive. She had three times more resources allocated to the team’s workload than her counterparts, and yet her branch was underperforming in every metric the company measured. In fact, year after year, the problems had progressively gotten worse. The president said, “Anna’s people are happy and they don’t leave because she babies them and lets them get away with not working. She doesn’t do the hard stuff, and she is failing.” He continued, “If she really cared about her people, she’d make some tough decisions because as it stands now, her branch is in jeopardy of being eliminated altogether.” Six months later, Anna and her 60 employees were let go, and her office was closed.

Throughout the world, a business’s success ultimately hinges on two things: the ability to increase revenue and the ability to drive down costs. Even if the business is a nonprofit whose mission is to save lives, without donations coming in and cost being managed, the mission cannot be achieved. In an ever increasingly competitive marketplace of doing more with less, it’s not what you did for me yesterday that matters but what you can do for me today. Shareholders want to see progress, customers want innovations, end users want enhancements, and patients want cures. These lofty goals don’t manifest themselves. They require risk, overcoming obstacles, facing fears, and challenging the status quo. They require a courageous leader.

The Fear of Discomfort and Pain

When you were growing up, if you were lucky, you may have had one or more parents who said you could be anything you wanted to be—if you just wanted it badly enough and worked hard enough. But desire and work ethic alone are not enough. Courage is a fundamental building block to success. It is what differentiates the dreamers from the achievers. When we think of courageous people, we often associate their courage with their behaviors. And although how we see courage is in action, we often miss an inherent and important step that comes first—our emotions.

To explore this further, consider how you would feel encountering three possible scenarios for yourself. In each of these scenarios, take note of your emotions.

Scenario 1. You just ran into your college roommate for the first time in many years. Imagine for a moment how this encounter would likely play out. Would you be excited to see each other, spilling into old stories about fall homecoming games and late nights studying at the local café? Or would you be embarrassed and ashamed, his or her presence a reminder of how foolish and young you once were? In either case, you likely would feel something. Would you categorize that encounter as pleasant or painful?

Scenario 2. Imagine you are meeting a coworker in the cafeteria the morning following a dispute. You have been concerned that your coworker is unfairly targeting one of your team members and creating unnecessary conflict. On the other hand, he believes you are trying to cover up for your team’s poor performance rather than taking responsibility. Your last conversation was heated, and you agreed to disagree. Now, there he is standing in front of you. How do you feel? Do you imagine this encounter to be pleasant or painful?

Scenario 3. Imagine you are leaving a meeting with your boss during which you both presented to customers. During the presentation, your boss took credit for your ideas and eagerly accepted the praise of the customer. She seems to be oblivious to the problem while you are left baffled. How do you imagine this encounter would likely play out? Would you describe it as pleasant or painful?

The Courageous Leader is about being courageous in tough times. So, what are tough times, and what, exactly, is courage?

• Tough times are situations or people we encounter that create some level of discomfort or pain.
• Courage is what moves us to action in the face of tough times.

Recall a time when you were asked to assess your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, with 2 being little pain, 6 moderate pain, and 10 the worst pain you’ve ever felt. Now, think about the exercise we just completed, considering your emotional responses when you encountered the three different people. What was the level of pain each scenario would have created for you? (Refer to Figure 1.1.)

Figure 1.1 Pain Scale

Most of the time, when we encounter unpleasant people or situations, we experience some level of discomfort and even pain. If you are like most people, confronting your boss about taking credit for your ideas would likely not be comfortable and may even be painful. The fear of that pain is what stalls most leaders. Leaders who lack courage don’t have the necessary conversations with their bosses. Instead, they hedge their bets that somehow miraculously the bosses will figure out how they feel and change their behavior accordingly without them having to say or do anything that creates pain. But let’s take a step back into Reality Ville for a minute and talk about what really happens. What really happens is that the boss keeps taking credit for work that isn’t hers to claim, and the leader puts a lid on the pot of resentment, hoping it doesn’t boil over.

After many years of teaching leaders across the globe how to have tough conversations, I noticed one very consistent dilemma arises time and time again. Individuals would leave the class motivated to provide tough feedback to a boss or stand up for themselves to a peer, or talk with a family member about an unresolved dispute. They would also leave armed with new skills, having practiced the conversations competently, and yet nine times out of 10, they would never hold the conversation, or at least not the version they had prepared for. It left me speechless and wondering what was going on. After considering this more carefully, what I’ve come to understand is that in each of these scenarios, the individuals were both motivated and skilled at facing their tough situation or person head-on, but they lacked the courage to move forward in the face of the pain.

Let’s be clear; tough times are more than just tough conversations. Tough times are tough decisions, tough encounters, tough changes, and tough circumstances. The list of scenarios is endless, but here are some examples that commonly show up in the workplace:

• Standing up to the boss about unethical behavior
• Telling an employee he isn’t cutting it when he seems to be giving it his all
• Restructuring your organization and elimi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 The Business Case for Courage
• 2 The Courage to Get Unstuck
• 3 The Courage to Take a Stand
• 4 The Courage to Be Humble
• 5 The Courage to Be Confident
• 6 The Courage to Delegate
• 7 The Courage to Give and Receive Feedback
• 8 The Courage to Be in the Middle (and Not Be in the Middle)
• 9 Grow, Recover, Repeat
• 10 Big Dreams, Big Moves
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Epilogue
• Index
• EULA