Memoirs of GB Episode 97: Practicing Courage at Workplace

Choosing Courage in our personal life is much easier than at our workplace. People who have workplace courage in India is rare, much rarer than what it should be. People are scared of the higher ups to share their views, there is no way to agreeably disagree in a given context.

?You will not get workplace courage if disagreement is seen as disloyalty. People who show workplace courage are committed to a set of principles ahead of self-interest. Their commitment to principles translates as workplace courage. Truthful Honesty is crucial, it is the ability to stand up for what you have done or commissioned, the ability to stand up for the team when the team is challenged, the ability to call out underperformance in subordinates who are not stepping up, especially on basic company values, the ability to call a spade a spade. Workplace courage is needed at appraisal time, to be fair, to judge people on meritocracy and contribution, many companies and bosses fail to call out underperformance and try to be nice and diplomatic.

Here are few pointers related to Choosing Courage in our Personal life and at Workplace.

The first courage needed is about balancing your self-image with your actual capabilities in your own eyes. Many people overestimate their personal qualities by a factor of 5 or 10 when in reality they are nowhere close. After a few years they wonder why they are not achieving what they desire. This requires you to have a close set of people around you who will tell you the real truth, invariably, in most cases it can only be family or a close friend or a mentor.

Courage to decline something that benefits you. A manager in a company declined a double promotion because she felt it would send the wrong signal in the organization, even though she deserved it since her previous promotion was delayed!!

The courage to ask for help. All of us go through some challenge or the other. The pandemic is a good example. In this pandemic, one of the young managers reached out and sought therapy because he/she was going through a rough patch. This was enormous courage to accept that help was necessary.

Every manager needs reinvention every two years, our skills are getting obsolete. According to the World Economic Forum, the three skills necessary for the future are : Creativity, Complex Problem Solving and Critical thinking. Rate yourself on these three, get better, that requires courage. It requires courage to stretch beyond your comfort zone.

The courage to collaborate is another area, many people at work do not collaborate for fear of thinking that credit needs to be shared. Here’s my learning for you. When you share credit ,it multiplies, it’s like a linked in forward or like, many more people get aware and your overall credit multiplies. So, don’t let this fear stop you from collaborating.

It takes courage not to complain about the context. This is a rare type of personal courage, I find 99 % of people will moan and groan about the challenges – cyclone, lockdown, economy, competitor etc. etc. It requires a strong head and a set of steel nerves not to offer excuses every day. This I find rare. State it once but move on and address it, that will help everyone. When a leader moans and groans, then people below him/her will think that this is the strategy, and we should all do it and you will end up coming across as a cribbing organization.

?It takes personal courage to accept that your industry is getting reshaped. Many times this personal courage of speaking the truth is liberating for the organization. The same is true for sustainability. It is never the law, it’s the spirit of the law that needs personal courage.

It also takes courage to evaluate your subordinates, bosses and peers rationally. We tend to get emotional; we rate ourselves the best, the boss slightly lower and our peers the worst and we try to be nice to our subordinates. This is a sure fail formula.

The courage to be boring, everyone expects leaders to be flashy, to be flamboyant etc. I think boring is good, if its about time, about discipline, about thoroughness. Mc Enroe,Connors, Agassi were seen as flamboyant tennis players, on the other hand Federer, Lendl, Samparas, Nadal etc. might be seen as boring but they were very effective. Most people see disciplined people as boring, that requires courage to be disciplined. Guess who won more. The boring guys!!

You will have personal courage if you don’t worry about failure and if you are desperate to impress. The more you are scared of failure, the less you will be show personal courage.

Godspeed

Dinesh Chandrasekar DC*

P.S: All views expressed here are my personal views and opinion and have no bearing to the organization I work

Source: Inspired by the book Choosing Courage by Jim Detert, Professor at Darden, Virginia & Some thoughts I borrowed from Industry Veterans on this topic.

https://www.amazon.in/Choosing-Courage-Everyday-Guide-Being-ebook/dp/B08CXDBWGR