Leadership Conversation

Bret Simmons Explores the Need for Courage and 

Appreciation for Understanding

Bret L. Simmons is a professor of management at the University of Nevada where he teaches classes in organizational behavior. He previously worked in government and industry. Bret's forte is his ability to meld philosophical and evidence-based standpoints on leadership. His popular blog, P.O.B. Positive Organizational Behavior, embraces acute essays on leadership behavior, branding, research findings and book summaries. You can find out more about Bret on this site, including his research interests plus the corporate training and speaking opportunities he offers through his company, Sierra Management Research, Inc. Bret brings a strong, clear voice on the nature of organizations today and need for personal responsibility and courage.

Bret, let's talk about courage in organizational life. Why is this topic so important to you and why should it be more important for organizations?

I believe courage is a critical concept for leaders. I take my definition from Ira Chaleff's much under-read book, The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders. He defines courage as the ability to move forward through fear. Since leadership involves real change, uncertainty and risk, and those are all accompanied by fear, courage is necessary. Leadership lives and dies on the ability to move yourself and others through fear. I call that encouragement - helping others move forward through fear. Discouragement is enhancing and supporting the fear that is already present and keeping people from the courage they need to change and improve. Our organizations today are full of discouragement - some do it purposefully, some inadvertently. Real conversations about things that matter are rare. There are so many people who hedge their words and are afraid to say what needs to be said. Our organizations currently are full of people who have been robbed of courage and rob others of courage, in turn. But this may not be obvious. Many leaders and organizations try to mask it. We play charades in organizations when we assume roles and play parts when everyone knows the truth is radically different.

Many suppose that charisma is the same as courage, but it's not. A courageous person may not be charismatic at all. Charismatic people have a talent for how they carry and package themselves, but the things they say and do may not touch what actually matters. A charismatic leader may be a wonderful talking head who in fact discourages others completely.

Given the state of our organizations, how do any of us develop our courage to change things?

Springboarding off Chaleff's perspective, I'd say the courage you find as a follower is essential to your courage as a leader. If you as a follower never experience the importance of doing and saying the right things regardless of how others react, as a leader you'll develop that same behavior in others. You will enact rules where it is not acceptable to receive a challenge. Some of the most discouraging leaders seem not to be mean at all, but they still express a rhetoric of control, a rhetoric of "sit down and shut up." There are a lot of micro-behaviors that give this away, including their use of such terms as "loyalty," "respect" and "professionalism" that in fact kill the messenger. There's a sugar coating that contains an implicit threat. To stand outside of all that means first to learn how to courageously challenge your own assumptions, to challenge the way you think. Thinking about thinking is crucial but it's a rare individual who actually knows how to do that, to create a radical change in his or her own mind first, so that when the leadership opportunity presents itself day-to-day, that person is ready.

The other thing I would say is that to develop your courage you have to become a "purposeful actor." To be a purposeful actor means that you understand why your work matters and behave according to a larger organizational purpose. To be other than that is to be selfish and egocentric. It's difficult to be a purposeful actor because it requires courage; however, the larger purpose is its source. There's got to be a reason why you would risk stepping forward, and that's what you have to find. Part of the encouragement process, if you are acting as a true leader, is helping others see the larger purpose of what they do. Real leaders guide others through the discovery process because it has to touch each individual personally. The leader helps give that purpose voice, but it would be inauthentic to just say, "Here it is" or "This is why," and leave it at that. That's asking for compliance not each person's process of personal reflection and discovery. If you want your people to be more courageous, help them become more purposeful.

Let me take that a step further. I think it's everyone's responsibility to discover their purpose at work, and having an unpurposeful leader can never be used as an excuse. If you don't learn how to do it for yourself as a follower, you won't have it when you are given the privilege to lead others. The question is, "Why does this organization matter, and why does my work matter to this organization?" If leadership does not formally provide this, then you must find it. It's your responsibility and discipline. For any activity you must ask yourself: what's my role here and how can I enhance that larger purpose through this role. Purpose provides self-authorizing direction to daily behavior.

Bret, in your own life, how did you achieve this perspective?

I do wonder how I got this way. I think at an early age I discovered a passion for work. I realized somehow what a critical role work plays in our lives, how it touches every aspect of our experience - economically, emotionally, and spiritually. Work permeates life. Once I adopted that perspective, I was hungry to learn more, and fortunately I stumbled on influential voices, like Peter Senge, W. Edwards Deming, and other big picture, systems thinkers, a group that includes today Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford. Such voices are more essential than ever, but less listened to.

In terms of my own voice, it's important for me to reflect what it means to be a current organizational participant. The universities where I have worked are as political as any organizations I've ever worked in. In these hyper-political environments, the rhetoric of discouragement is high. Top leaders can come off as jovial, light-hearted - and then take little if any responsibility for the blame shifting, belittling conduct, and career assassinations that routinely go on. When I talk about the courage to speak up and the dynamics of fear that surround it, I'm coming at it as real world, my world. I am writing about myself and those I work with.

Why do you think that big picture thinkers are less listened to today?

We live in a world where the snapshot dominates. Now more than ever we are struggling to grasp what's right in front of our faces. But there's less desire to step back, to understand how the snapshots got there, to learn how to change the pattern of snapshots. The information overload of the internet and social media is a symptom of this. It's awesome, but it needs to be counter-balanced by a passion to learn, and learning is so much more than being informed. How do you help people actually want to dig deeper? There's a risk our societies will be dominated by people who can describe but do not understand - in the sense of appreciating why things work the way they do. And the best you can do if you don't have understanding is to copy what has already been done. You won't be prepared to craft new process, but only to reinvent what others have created in the past. As we develop capabilities based on how's that we know but not the underlying why's that we don't, the best we can ever hope to achieve is competitive parity. Even though we have access to more information than any other time in history, I think we are living at the end of the age of understanding.

Unfortunately, I see this trend in too many of the MBA students I teach. Very few of them act will on what they learn, and most of what they want to learn are the answers to the wrong question - how.

Asking why always leads to what is risky and uncertain, and that's why we need a most basic kind of leadership courage right now. Asking why also requires the skill and discipline to think differently. That makes people in my business - education - crucial, but unfortunately I have to say my profession, too, is asleep. We should be examining ourselves and radically transforming education. But the fact is we do not have the courageous leadership needed to re-examine ourselves, to reflect and learn. Instead we are letting the politicians reinvent what it means to be educated, and that will mean less is better. Neither less nor more of the same thing is better - only different is better. Radically recreating the process of education will require deep understanding and tremendous courage.