At the very heart of demonstrating courage when leading is the personal strength and tenacity to be real with each other, as a leadership team and with the group of emerging leaders reporting to you. It means you have to be prepared to be challenged and to ignite challenging conversations and from this comes an acceptance of how critical conflict is to the success of your organisation.
Internal security, self worth, self belief, self mastery, self care, self actualization……..they are critically important to the demonstration of courage when leading – they are the platform you stand on (and have built) before diving into the chaos of life where such courage is needed to create successful and sustainable outcomes.
While facilitating a Senior Leadership Team workshop with the leaders of a Global organisation I courageously challenged them to stop diverting the conversations away from the heart of the issue with humour and to unleash the courage to be very REAL with each other or the day would be a waste of time.
To my delight (and relief, as I had to step into my fear that my challenge could create antagonistic behaviour) this challenge created breakthrough performance. At the end of the day one of the long standing team members stated in the 15 years he had worked within the organisation he had never experienced such “real” conversations and he was incredibly thankful for the courage I had demonstrated to challenge them. We were then able to reflect on the vulnerability each of us had felt during the day and the benefits it had created for everyone.
Are you having real conversations in your organisation?
