Embarrassment is a powerful emotion. People will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it and its consequences. I have known people whom out of embarrassment, have pretended to have died to avoid confronting friends they owed money to. Fear and self preservation is another powerful emotion that will make people do seemingly strange things. I once sat in a meeting where a CEO challenged his top 200 leaders to indicate whether they used the company’s products. Only one person stood up and provided reasons for why they did not use the company’s products. In corridor talk, I overheard someone remark of the person who stood up “he is either very brave or stupid”. It turned out that over 30% of the leaders used a rival product. Clearly a missed opportunity to have a frank conversation about customer experience and ways to improve the company’s offering.
Embarrassment and fear are two things that could hold us back from achieving our potential. Yet, achieving our potential as leaders requires us to confront our short comings and potential opportunities in systematic ways. It takes courage to address our short comings as a leader and courage to actualize potential opportunities.
Leadership courage is not walking about with a puffed chest and mean look, ready to confront anyone and anything that upsets your apple cart. Courage in leadership includes honest assessments of how your motivations and behaviour affect a given situation. It requires leaders to look at a situation for what it is, consider their blind spots and take actions necessary to address shortcomings and overcome challenges. Courage can be the difference allowing a bad situation to worsen or addressing an opportunity
My father was a dashing figure, an adventurer, who gave up a degree in pharmacy to become an airforce pilot. Iconic in his Ray-Bans, he was the most courageous man I knew. To be a soldier requires courage, to survive multiple crashes and still fly requires courage, but this was not why I found him courageous. No, his courage lay in his ability to admit when he was wrong and apologise. This quality endeared him to many and, together with other qualities, allowed him to consistently create deep and long-lasting relationships throughout his life.If you need to dream bigger, be kinder, accept when you are wrong, achieve your health goals, stand up to bullying in the work place, build stronger teams or whatever it is that is holding you back from making the kind of impact only you know you can have, you will need courage to start and embed change.
But how does one practice courage? In the words of one of my mentors, “like a toddler learning to walk, decide, take the step, fall over, get up and take another”
By Papa Sekyiamah