Chapter 10

The Courageous Choice

An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.

John H. Patterson

All of the chapters thus far have led to one fundamental question: Will courage go to work with you or not? Your answer will have a huge impact on the performance of your people as well as on your own well-being as a manager. The stakes, in short, are high. Thus, before you answer, please consider, by reading these contrasting views, the outcomes that your choice is likely to produce.

The first version of the story illustrates what the work-place looks and acts like when courage is lacking.

A Tale of Two Teams

Part I: Spilling Buckets

Bzzzzzt.

“Crap. Does this phone ever sleep? It’s 6:30 a.m., for God’s sake.” You keep one hand on the steering wheel as you read the text. It’s your boss.

“Heads up. Tanker is hunting for you. He’s PO’d. Nobody on your team submitted their time reports again.”

You swallow your last mouthful of latte, thinking to yourself, “Stan Tanker is an ass.” Steering the car with your knees, you type, “Thx for the hds up. I’ll get on them.”

You inch your way through the morning traffic sludge, wondering how things could have gotten this bad. A year ago you couldn’t wait to be promoted to manager. Now you feel trapped in your own life. All you hear about are complaints: from your boss, from your customers, and from your employees. This isn’t what you signed up for.

By the time you reach the parking lot, you are tight with anxiety. “What the hell is wrong with them?” you think. “No matter how much I get on them about the stupid time reports, they just blow me off. What did I ever do wrong to deserve such a bunch of dregs and losers? No wonder the CFO is pissed off.”

A year ago you were full of excitement. The company you work for had just won a huge outsourcing deal. As part of the arrangement, your company would manage the IT function of a large banking client. It seemed like an easy enough proposition. Your company would inherit a thousand employees from the client company and would institute new management to improve operations. Information technology wasn’t the bank’s core competency, and therefore it wasn’t using IT in a way that would create strategic and competitive advantages for the company. The value proposition was that by outsourcing the IT function and by offloading its IT employees to your company, the client would be able to raise output and quality and cut IT costs.

The opportunity had presented you with a chance to fast-track it to manager. All you’d have to do was manage a group of legacy but experienced employees. The challenge would be winning over their hearts and minds so that they could make the transition to full-fledged members of your company’s workforce. While people would still be working in their same jobs, alongside their same colleagues, they would no longer work for the bank. It would be critical for you to help them make the cultural shift between the two companies, lest they not make the performance gains that were promised to the client.

The transition turned out to be much harder than you or anyone else expected. First of all, the average age of the outsourced IT employees is forty-six. That wouldn’t be much of a problem except that you are thirty-three. Even though they nod politely when you give them direction, you feel like they’re secretly thinking, “Who the hell is this chick, telling us how to do jobs that we were doing before she was born?” Second, your company vastly underestimated the cultural challenges. In your company, things move at “eSpeed” and multitasking is a premium skill. But as banking employees, they grew up in a highly regulated environment where all decisions were bumped up to the highest levels before action could be taken. Knowing how to create a paper trail in order to CYA was a critical skill.

As you walk into the building, you sigh, thinking, “Another day at the salt mine. Another day of lame excuses and negative attitudes. Another day of having to micromanage people just so they’ll do their jobs. Another day dealing with ungrateful bosses.”

“Stan, I’m sorry,” you say upon entering his office. “I must have told my group a thousand times to take this time-reporting stuff seriously. It’s just that time reporting is a new concept to them. The bank didn’t use a time-tracking system. All of us managers are finding it hard getting them to comply with our policies. They just won’t try new things.” Stan winces, as though he’s smelling bad cheese. “I’ve heard that they think we’re tracking their time because we don’t trust them. But no one asks any questions when I tell them why we’re doing it, so …”

Dismissively, Stan rolls his hand in little circles, trying to get you to fast-forward to the point. “If I had a meat cleaver, I’d slice that hand right off your puny little body,” you say in your head. Out loud you say, “Sorry, Stan. I’ll get on them.”

“Once again,” you think, “instead of telling Stan what a jerk he is, I bite my tongue. Who the hell does that twerp think he is, putting me on fast forward? And what’s wrong with me that I let myself get so afraid of him?”

When you get to your workstation, everyone is oblivious to the crow you just ate. “Hey,” you say, at a volume high enough to get people’s attention. “Do you realize the shovelful of crap I just got from Stan Tanker about your late time reports? What are you, a bunch of grown-up kindergartners? How many times do I have to tell you to turn in your frickin’ time reports? Do you realize that our company bills the bank based on the data in those reports? When you don’t do them, we can’t bill them. Here’s the new rule: Submit your time reports on time or I’ll fire you. Does anyone have a problem with that?”

No one says a word.

This second version of the story shows what happens when courage permeates throughout the workforce. Hopefully you’ll find it more reflective of the environment you work in.

A Tale of Two Teams

Part II: Full-Bucket Management

Bzzzzzt.

“Crap. Does this phone ever sleep? It’s 6:30 a.m., for God’s sake.” You keep one hand on the steering wheel as you read the text. It’s Stan Tanker.

“Come to my office when you get in.”

Steering the car with your knees, you type, “Will do.”

As you inch your way through the morning traffic sludge, you think back to a year ago, when you would have misinterpreted Stan’s short message as terse or disrespectful. But over the last year, and since “the talk,” you’ve come to appreciate Stan’s no-nonsense style. “Stan doesn’t contact me directly much,” you think, “so it must be important.”

When you think back to “the talk,” it’s almost as though you had been standing outside your body watching yourself when it happened. Just under a year ago, Stan had walked into your work area while you were on the phone with a key client, but instead of waiting for you to finish the call, he abruptly said, “Get off the phone; I need to talk to you.” Though you politely apologized to your client about having to get back to him, you knew that this was your chance to set a boundary with Stan. A mentor had suggested that you’d never amount to much of a manager if you didn’t have the courage to assert yourself to your bosses. “In the long run,” your mentor had told you, “ass kissing is career killing.”

Looking back with the hindsight of a year, it seems surreal, as if some braver you had taken over your body. You stood ten inches from Stan, looked him intently in the eyes, and said, “Stan, we need to talk. But not here. Let’s go to a small conference room.” Stan visibly shook his head, like you had just tapped his jaw with a little punch. But, surprisingly, he followed you.

“Listen, Stan,” you began, “I know you’re going to tell me something important; I respect that. But before you do, I need to say something to you. It is not okay to interrupt me—in fact, it’s completely disrespectful and unprofessional. From now on, if you need to get my attention when I’m talking to someone else, just give me a quick heads-up. I promise I’ll make it a priority to get back to you.”

It seemed like time had slowed to a stop before Stan answered you. He tilted his head, squinted slightly, and then, after exhaling, said, “I know, I know. Things are moving way too fast and I’m under the gun. I know I come on strong sometimes; it’s not you. There are just a lot of loose items that I can’t afford to drop right now.”

In his own way, Stan had given you an apology. From that moment on, things were different between you and Stan. So now, a year later, you actually feel eager to find out what he wants to talk about.

By the time you reach the parking lot, you are ready for the day. “This managing stuff is actually fun,” you think. “I mean, how many people get to interact directly with the CFO? How cool is that? And how many people get to lead a team of such experienced professionals? My team blows me away!”

As you walk into the building, you smile a bit, thinking back to the early days of the project. Though things got off to a rocky start, you learned a lot in the past year. You learned, for example, that the best way to get people to try new things is to give them a voice in shaping how those things will be done. The time reports were a good example. One of the reasons why people resisted the idea was that it wasn’t always clear how to allocate their time. Each activity was supposed to match a specific job code, but a lot of time-consuming tasks, like generating management reports or attending company outings, didn’t have job codes. So employees were basically forced to lie about where they spent the time for tasks that lacked job codes. But after you recognized that forcing employees to comply with a flawed system was unfair to them, and after you started praising them whenever they took the initiative to create solutions to inefficiencies that they identified, they became more proactive in their approach. For example, the team came up with a list of suggested job codes for the unaccounted-for tasks, which you then presented to Stan. In the process, not only did your team make a positive impression on the CFO, but the changes they had suggested made a positive impact on the entire IT organization as well.

You also learned that people trust you more when you put your ego aside. Turns out your micromanaging style had as much to do with your pride as it did with your need to control things. The truest reason for grabbing tasks back was that you were afraid the mistakes of other people would impact how you were judged as a manager. You had a reputation to protect! But in the process of protecting your ego, your behavior sent a strong message to your employees that you didn’t trust them. Had it not been for all the comments you had gotten on a confidential 360-degree leadership feedback survey, you might never have learned the importance of letting go and trusting your team.

Reflecting back, the biggest lesson you learned during the past year was that your job is to manage how people respond to comfort and fear, and that the best way to do that is to focus on building their courage. As you have attempted to be more courageous yourself, your team’s courage has grown, too. With courage, your team members look forward to new challenges. With courage, team members trust that each other’s intentions are positive. With courage, people talk to each other respectfully but assertively. Courage has become, for you and the team, a positive energizer. So by the time you reach Stan’s office, you’re ready for whatever challenge he throws your way.

“Hey Stan, what’s up?” you say after entering his office.

“Oh, hi. Come on in. Listen, our banking client called me this morning, and you’re not going to believe this, but it seems that the improved performance of our IT department has caught their attention.” Stan is grinning like a kid on the verge of revealing a secret.

“And … ?” you playfully say.

“And, they want our IT department to help them implement a time-reporting system in their company!” Stan smiles, tickled by the irony. “So, given your team’s hard-earned experiences with time reporting last year, I figured it would be the best one to lead the project. The bank wants us to start by creating an FAQ document and hosting a series of learning forums to help their employees prepare for the changes.”

“That’s amazing, Stan. You know my team will be up for it. But before I go back to them, there’s one question that I need to ask you because I know they’ll ask me—”

“Yes!” he interrupts, and then smiles sheepishly. “Um, sorry. I just knew what you were going to ask. Yes, I’ve already created a job code for this work.”

Courageous managers are sorely needed in the workplace. But becoming one means making a choice, and then committing yourself to living courageously, despite the constant pressures that comfort and fear present. What will your choice be?

Now What?

Well, here we are. You, hopefully, contemplating all you’ve read and standing at the threshold of a choice. Me hoping that I can help you with the most important career high dive you’ll ever take.

After you’ve considered the contrasting stories above, I hope the merits of courageous management are obvious. When your behaviors are directed by courageous impulses, you are operating out of your best and braver self. When other people witness your newfound behaviors and the positive results the behaviors cause, they gradually step into their own courage, too. As they do, the energy level of your team lifts. People begin engaging with one another with honesty, accuracy, and passion. A can-do spirit takes hold as people start to support one another. “Problems” are increasingly viewed as opportunities and challenges. Workers begin to initiate forward-moving projects to advance the goals of the team, department, and organization. The work environment becomes imbued with a feeling of momentum. Courage refreshes, recharges, and recommits workers to their projects, teammates, and careers.

In light of such benefits, the decision to pursue management by courage would seem obvious. But we both know that opting for courage means holding yourself to higher standards and ideals, which comes with its own set of challenges and realities. As you grapple with your decision of whether to become a courageous manager, here are some additional considerations to help you make an informed choice:

• Be Careful What You Wish For: The CEO of an insurance company once asked me to work with one of his VPs in hopes of helping the VP to become more assertive. He was considering the VP as a possible successor but was worried that the VP didn’t have enough executive presence and that he wasn’t tough enough. Before agreeing to coach the VP, I told the CEO that when the VP became more assertive, it might not come in the exact form that the CEO expected. I explained that early on, the CEO himself might become the target of the VP’s assertiveness, which he might find unsettling. The CEO claimed he understood.

Sure enough, after about two months of coaching the VP, I got a call from the CEO. “Bill,” he said, “I’m troubled by a rather acerbic e-mail that I got from Rodney yesterday. He basically told me that I am perceived as coming off as disrespectful when dealing with the people in his division. Frankly, I was offended. He works for me, not the other way around.”

I reminded the CEO about the conversation we’d had before the coaching process began. Rodney was just doing what the CEO had asked for—being more assertive and tough … only tough on the CEO. For the CEO it was a big lesson in how easy it is to want to put people back in the same box that we found them in, even after encouraging them to escape from the box.

This whole book has been dedicated to helping you build your people’s courage. Well, guess what? They’ll probably start being more courageous! As they spread their courage wings, the changes you get will defy the preexisting definition you already have of them—for better or for worse. When employees are more courageous, they won’t sit in their cubicles taking orders like well-trained circus animals. Their courage won’t always be directed in ways you can control. Courageous employees will press to take on more challenging roles. Courageous employees will voice their opinions and objections more freely. Courageous employees will challenge, and aspire, and risk, and think, and lead. While that may look inviting on the surface, it could also make them hold you to a higher standard.

• You’ll Need More Than Courage: If all you want to be is courageous, go stick a sword down your throat. Courage without brains is like ethics without a soul. There’s smart courage and there’s stupid courage. Just because you’re courageous doesn’t mean you’re applying your courage toward the right aims or in the right way. Undisciplined courage is a wild beast.

You’ll notice that I haven’t spent much time talking about morality in this book. The way I see it, you have to bring the morality to the courage. And you should. If the early 2000s taught us anything, it is that the immorality of a handful of senior-level individuals can corrupt entire organizations and institutions. Courage, like power, leadership, and ambition, can be a misused means to an immoral end.

Courage takes its fullest and noblest form when it is shaped and tempered by intelligence, discipline, focus, and morality. As a manager, you would be wise to build these things in your people, too.

• Get Ready to Enter Naysayer Territory: Just as often as courage wins admiration, it provokes anger and outrage. Certainly the people who marched in Selma, Alabama, were being courageous. But they were also spit at, sprayed with water hoses, attacked with dogs, and beaten with clubs … in many instances by the very people who were supposed to protect them: law enforcement. The courage that brings out the best in you or your employees may bring out the worst in others.

Naysayers surround courageous people the way zombies surround the hero in a horror movie. For example, I coached the medical director of a hospital who oversaw a staff of a hundred but who hated his job of twenty years. His secret desire was to become a high school teacher. What stood in his way? His naysaying wife. She’d harp on him, complaining, “You want to give up your six-figure salary to become a poorly paid teacher? Forget it!”

Naysayers often position their opposition as being in your best interest. “But you might get hurt! I’m only trying to protect you!” they say. More often than not, though, they are trying to protect themselves. Their real worry is that your courage will cause them harm. The deepest concern of the medical director’s wife, for example, wasn’t her husband’s well-being; it was losing a lifestyle to which she had become accustomed.

Having said that, let’s recognize that for every ten naysayers there will be at least one powerful yeasayer cheering from the sidelines. So powerful, in fact, that his or her cheering will likely have a counterbalancing, and possibly neutralizing, effect on all those naysayers. Courage is inspirational and attractive. Courage inspires because, like leadership, it is an aspirational concept. We all have a certain unused capacity to be even more courageous. So when we see others using their capacity to the fullest, we feel a mixture of awe and envy. By being courageous, they are confronting the very fears that are still gripping us. Thus we have a vested interest in their success; their courage just might provide us with the solution to our fears.

• A Moment of Courage Can Have an Enduring Career Impact: I once asked a senior executive whom I was coaching about the most courageous thing he had ever done at work. He replied, “That would have to be when I came out of the closet.

“Let me tell you something, it was a different world twenty years ago,” he explained. “I wasn’t about to wave my rainbow flag and bring attention to myself. So for years I went on pretending I was someone who I wasn’t. And I hated it. The more time went on, the guiltier I felt for betraying myself. Eventually I realized that no job is important enough for me to have to come to work as a fraud each day.”

For the executive, one singular courageous moment would impact the rest of his life. Had he continued shying away from that moment, he would have moved from self-betrayal to self-contempt. To live a fulfilling life, one has to be able to live within his or her own skin. By coming out, the executive was being respectful to himself. He was saying, “I am not willing to hide who I am just to make you comfortable. This is who I am, and I am not going to pretend to be someone I am not.” The temporary anguish he went through as he walked into his courage (in this case, TRUST Courage, because he was trusting himself) has been eclipsed by an enduring sense of satisfaction that comes from knowing that he stood up for himself.

One moment of courage can change the entire trajectory of your life. This courage stuff is serious business! When you decide to start your own business, or buck for a promotion, or quit your six-figure job to become a teacher, you’re going to be a very different person in the long run.

So, are you inching toward the edge of your decision? Are you ready to join the Fraternal Order of Courageous Managers? I sure hope so. Here’s why: The world of work needs more courageous executives. It’s true. Here we are in the twenty-first century, with unprecedented access to leading-edge management knowledge—knowledge that has been accumulating, maturing, and assumedly evolving for hundreds of years—and yet too many people in too many organizations are profoundly unhappy. Despite advancements in nearly every aspect of organizational life, for all its progressiveness the modern organization remains hopelessly backward when it comes to the treatment of people. It makes no difference whether you work for an aging institution or a groovy start-up venture with a foosball table in the middle of the office; when pressures mount and dollars dwindle, too many managers succumb to controlling and abusive behavior as the primary means of motivating workers. Such behavior takes neither courage nor intelligence. In fact, it takes the abdication of those things, giving in to base impulses.

You and your courage are needed because you have the best chance of bringing positive change to the world of work. The fact is, whether you respect them or not, your bosses will eventually retire from the workforce. When they do, you will move into their place. What will you do with all that power and responsibility? How will you do things differently than your bosses did? What kind of role model will you be? What will your employees learn from you by the way you treat them? What kinds of changes will you advocate and promote? What will you stand for and against? When you get ready to leave the workforce, what impact will you hope to have had? How might having more courage impact how you answer all those questions?

The Courageous Commitment

If your aspiration is to progress to higher levels in your organization, if you aim to have a greater and more positive impact on those around you, and if you are ready to respond to comfort and fear with greater backbone, then now is the time to sign the following declaration:

From this moment forward, I will deliberately take on work challenges that put me outside my comfort zone. I will place greater trust in the people I lead, and in the people who lead me. I will speak more freely and assertively, even when doing so may be unpopular with others.

From this moment forward, I will search for opportunities to fill the courage buckets of each worker I am responsible for. I will provide meaningful work challenges that stretch their capabilities so that they can demonstrate TRY Courage. I will be candid and consistent and deliver on my promises so that people can have more TRUST Courage. I will create an environment of TELL Courage, where people can express themselves honestly and assertively, regardless of whether their opinions are aligned with my own.

From this moment forward, I will be a Courageous Manager.

Signed: ____________________________________________

Today’s Date: _______________________________________

Date When You Will Evaluate Your Progress: ____________