On Courage as a Learned Behaviour

When you listen to today’s Superhero you can tell why he is being featured - his calm and assured demeanour only serves to further underline the passion he carries. For the work and for the people.?Most importantly, the fearlessness. It is his lack of fear that I need us to focus on today.?

VIDEO

We can all use models of fearlessness. Perhaps we need them even more so at the top because we can’t witness the fear and lack of teaming and do the opposite.

We’re very fortunate at PeopleNotTech to be around oodles of courage. We meet tens of people every month who are as passionate and perhaps as heroic with the only difference being they can’t be featured anywhere, the beast in the belly of which they reside wouldn’t allow it, but they are fighting as hard and being as brave.

It’s an interesting thing this bravery topic. We measure Courage in our software and we did agonise on the measurement and the title of it as well back in the day when we poured over the extensive peer review we did that identified the behavioural dimensions we ought to be measuring in our software for people.?

“Courage”’?- a slightly melodramatic word. One that encompasses everything. The very core of Psychological Safety - is the need to not be led by fear. To us, the task wasn’t to measure how much absence of fear we would find but how many instances there would have been when people had the willingness to act despite the fear. That’s brave. And that’s what’s worth encouraging as a behaviour and celebrating.

The conversation about bravery seemed to be accompanied by the same “ah there we go with the fluffy stuff’ executives’ eye-rolling that is ultimately responsible for all HumanDebt which, if you recall I have defined as:?

"HumanDebt? is the equivalent to Technical Debt but for people.”

Thankfully the flip side of courage?- vulnerability, is a term that has entered the everyday lexicon of every exec over the past 5 years mainly thanks to Brené Brown’s amazing work and for that, we owe her a depth of gratitude, but it has yet to mean more than a supposed model for execs to follow.?

For the record, while we believe it serves as an EQ exercise and it is a definite hygiene factor, modelling vulnerability has very little measurable effect in the Psychological Safety of the team or even on their overall Courage from our data. With everyone out there insisting on the modelling you have to wonder why that is - it’s because behaviours need more than pure show-and-tell level awareness for them to shift. Behaviours are, as we all know, notoriously hard to shift but what they must have in order to change are “intentionality” and “regularity”.

This means that simply observing the correct behaviour is good but not good enough, ask any smoker living with non-smokers or any drinker amongst designated drivers. It takes hard and intentional repetitive work to modify the way we respond to anything.

We said this time and again, that our Dashboard which gives teams a space to do the human work and lower the Human Debt themselves is just that - a CBT tool for teams so their positive, high-performing behaviours are highlighted and negative ones are being noticed and worked on. A continuous improvement tool. A space to keep doing the human work while being led by true feedback and data. When it comes to Courage, my team noticed the other day - it’s the most accessed tab in our Playbook and people are considering those plays even if they do not end up doing them. That shows we all instinctively know there is more courage to be had, more bravery in our actions we can show, and more fearless behaviour to exhibit.?

This is why, the PeopleNotTech measurement we are most proud of is that, even when asked a mere few weeks into usage 76% of the people using our software report they see a difference in their behaviour. That is massive.

Now of course, in the absence of clear, sustained and empowered organisational support that can easily be squandered because once there is a shift in behaviour it needs intentional and prolonged action to “make it stick” as a new way of behaving with each other. If teams used to engage in unproductive conflict or were eternally “storming” for the sheer fun of it then making them fearlessly admit they are doing it then having them instead start “norming” or even performing” as a result of say a Courage Hackathon or some other team action we suggested in the software to repair that behavioural path, is great but not good enough till it becomes a habit.

Which, as I was saying in my book, is the heavy centre of what we need to accomplish when it comes to the human work- intentional, sustained, repetitive human work on EQ and team dynamics that is eventually translated into new and healthy behaviours and engagement patterns for the team.?

None of that will happen without the Bryans of the world. Without doing all this work intentionally. Without understanding all team interactions and dynamics and vowing to work on each of the negative ones and increase the positive ones. Without the organisation being smart enough to enthusiastically reward and promote the human work by empowering teams and giving the tools they need. It simply will not.?

Come talk to us about a demo or just about tips on how you can do some of this hard -but most urgent and important- human work by “pen and paper” if your organisation isn’t yet smart enough to give you true empowerment (and with it tools), just email us at [email protected] and say you’re ready to take your courage up a notch and help those around you do so too and we'll come over and dust your cape off.?

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At?PeopleNotTech?we make?software?that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams, come see a DEMO.

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon?link