As I was reflecting on safetyism and resilience, chapter 17 of The Greats on Leadership (John Murray Business, 2016) came to mind. It’s about courage: specifically, mustering the courage to face your personal monsters. I wasn’t thinking about mental illness when I wrote it … or was I?
Featured in the chapter is one of my favorite godawful leaders, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. If you want to know what I think about him (and many other leaders of literature, awful and wonderful), please buy the book! To learn why courage is the backbone of leadership, read on. –Jocelyn
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Courage and Cowardice
Courage, in short, is the backbone of a leader’s character, bracing each virtue, holding it straight and true (see figure: Five Character Traits of Effective Leaders). Cowardice is the opposite: the enfeebler of character, the vice that makes every virtue flabby and unreliable. Since courage and cowardice sit at the heart (or spine) of character, leaders need an especially good understanding of both.
Note that timidity, the trait at the far left side of the courage continuum, is not the same as cowardice. Timidity is a reluctance to engage; as we saw in Chapter 14, it’s a trait to which introverts, with their tendency to turn inward and away from the world, are especially prone. Timidity isn’t desirable in a leader, but it isn’t the same as cowardice, which is a much farther-reaching vice with much worse effects. Cowardice is the absolute determination to protect the self: from fear, pain, ridicule, rejection, failure, uncertainty, and any other injury, physical or emotional. Depending on the leader and the situation, cowardice can manifest as any one of the extremes on the character continuums. For example, an extraverted leader subjected to ridicule might seek to protect his ego by loudly belittling his antagonist (offensiveness). An introverted leader facing a professional failure might adopt a “don’t care” attitude (indifference). Cowardice takes many forms, not all of them timid.
Five Character Traits of Effective Leaders
Courage, on the other hand, is doing what must or should be done even at the risk of injury to the self. That’s hard enough for anyone, but leaders face a particular difficulty in that their role demands they lay themselves open to fear, pain, ridicule, and the rest. When a person goes first or stands in front, that’s what happens. The lead cyclist bears the brunt of the wind, the first soldier over the wall draws the enemy’s fire, the actor in the leading role gets splattered with rotten tomatoes, and the manager who makes the big decision is the one blamed when things go wrong. To be any kind of leader means to risk death—perhaps not actual, physical death, but the little death of the soul that comes with sneers and jeers. When we lead, we are necessarily vulnerable.
Yet, as leaders, we often feel we should be the opposite. People are depending on us, holding us accountable for the mission’s success and the team’s performance; therefore we must be invulnerable. We must put on armor and carry a sword, so that if we’re attacked, we can either hit the other guy first or deflect the blows. It would be terrible, we think, to leave our team bereft of a leader.
But here’s the paradox: courage, because it means forgoing self-protection in favor of doing the right thing, usually requires that we put down the sword and take off the armor. As former U.S. Navy Captain L. David Marquet says in his book Turn the Ship Around! (a tale of leadership on a nuclear submarine), courage in a leader is a matter of “caring and not caring”: caring about the success of your subordinates and the mission, and not caring about the consequences to yourself or your career.[i] Cowardly leaders have it the other way around: they care a lot about their own success and safety and not much about anyone else’s. They want to enjoy the perks of leadership without bearing the risks, so they keep tight hold of the sword and stay tight inside the armor.
And when something threatening presents itself—even something they had a hand in creating—they either run away or, because they know running away is not leaderly, deny responsibility. They call the threat a bad thing, an evil thing, a monster to be shunned.
English literature’s most famous horror story centers on a leader of just this sort.
The Leader Who Cried “Monster”
Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant student of natural philosophy from a well-to-do Swiss family, plans to create a living being from inanimate materials. If he succeeds …
The Most Courageous in the Room
The quiet moment of leadership courage I remember best happened in an orientation class for new hires at the company where I worked in the late 1990s. It was mid-afternoon on the first day, and the upcoming segment was a presentation by the CEO, whom I’ll call Sam. Sam was running late, and since the facilitator didn’t want to send the class on break and risk missing the CEO’s window, everyone sat waiting for about fifteen minutes. Sam eventually showed up and gave his talk about the company’s code of behavior, a code that emphasized treating others with respect.
At the end he asked if there were any questions or comments, whereupon a young man raised his hand and said a bit too loudly, “Yes, I have a comment. You’ve just told us this company values respect, but you showed up late. I don’t think that was respectful.”
Sam listened attentively to the employee’s remarks. He paused for a moment, then said: “You’re right. It wasn’t respectful to keep you all waiting. I’m sorry, and I thank you for calling me on it. You just gave us a great example of applying the code.”
The young man subsided. He faced no negative consequences for being rude to the CEO in his very first week, and he went on to spent many productive years with the company.
Who was the most courageous person in the room that day? Some would say it was the new employee, but I say it was Sam. He may have been the CEO, but he was also a sixtyish man standing before a group of smart young things, one of whom had just made him look bad. The temptation to give a self-protective response—a coward’s response—must have been great. One kind of coward would have retorted that he’d been late because he was busy running the company that provided everyone’s paychecks, so shut the hell up. Another kind of coward would have said, “Next question,” and later dropped a hint to the kid’s manager to make things difficult for him.
Sam did neither of those things. Instead, he listened, acknowledged his error, and made the snarky little monster—who was, after all, one of his monsters—look good. No Victor Frankenstein was he.
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The Greats on Leadership is available in paperback, audio, and e-book. Some enterprising reseller is offering the out-of-print hardback edition for a mere $437.99. I mean, it is a good book, but I wouldn’t pay more than $435. 😉
[i] L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around! (NY: Penguin Group, 2012), Chapter 3