Character and Courage

Character and Courage

Winston Churchill
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” 

There are countless aspects to Leadership, yet none so profound, intangible or valuable as strength of character and courage.  As dealers in the trade of leadership we can teach many principles; make leaders into better communicators and presenters, give them tools and instruments to assess feedback and continual improvement.  However, we cannot teach strength of character or courage.  Today companies across the globe face huge challenges in hostile markets and an increasingly aggressive competitor base.  These factors set in an environment of economic and political uncertainty will test even the most agile and experienced of leaders.   Many leadership challenges come off the back of a period of relative calm and a period of great economic prosperity where leaders ‘had it pretty easy’ by comparison.  Consequently an entire generation of leaders has matured in the military equivalent of peacetime where leadership challenges were comparatively simple.  Now ‘war’ has broken out and leaders are being called to account.  No room for the abstract comfort of a ‘Big Society’ here or a Coalition of parties pretending to get to grips with our crisis through a plethora of meaningless soundbites and fortune cookie promises.  The job is to win – at all costs it seems, as the alternative is unthinkable.  The battlefields are local, regional, national and global and the battle is bloody.
 

So today’s leaders certainly need strength of character.  Where does that come from?  They have to return to their youth; right back to their early childhood and dust off the memories of their parents and friends grappling with the challenges of recovering from post war austerity caused by the second biggest war in our history within the space of 40 years.   Their character was the foundation of the family; the family values and what they held dear and right and proper in an evolving post war society.  Quite often these values lie dormant in normal day to day life when the general underlying social trends appear to be improving; family situations are relatively stable, education is more accessible and overall standards of life are on the up.  Only when things become difficult and the family unit or the individual becomes threatened in some way do we reach within ourselves for resolve and strength of character to pull us through the hard times.  No classroom frolic or lesson can teach us this attribute – but ‘we know it when we see it’.
 

Alongside this important factor lives ‘courage’.  Courage is really the ability to conquer fear – fear of many things.  Fear of the unknown, fear of redundancy and with it the deprivation of the ability to provide, physical fear when, like our servicemen and women, we are put in harm’s way.  Fear for the corporate leader to chart a new course, invest in an unproven innovation or carve out a layer of management or cost.   Yet this is what many leaders are facing today – fear of the unknown.  Yet they all know ‘they must do something’ – doing nothing seems not to be an option.  The speed of information is faster than it has ever been; there are more data points provided through internet applications than ever before.  Terrorist and anarchy groups are able to organise themselves in ways impossible before.  The ‘internet wars’ in the Middle East have shown us how this can happen with devastating effects.  
 

Difficult decisions are in the paths of leaders every day.  This is the currency in which they trade – they are paid to make the tough decisions and with the help of many other skills of the leader build the compelling argument that this is the right course of action in the circumstances on the one hand the with a further set of skills inspire and motivate their followers to embrace the decision with a will and a passion so galvanizing that the smell of success becomes more pungent by the day.  Sadly these leaders, the Level 5 leaders, are a rare breed.  For them leadership never takes a day off.  They are, like Napoleon, amongst their troops sounding the rallying call from the very front of the action.   For reasons that currently escape me I am seeing so-called leaders basking in the relative comfort of their offices mesmerized by their email inbox or scrolling through yet another spreadsheet of numbers looking for some secret while their people are in the front line doing what they do in the hope that something good or better will result.  I have never been so inundated with cries of ‘there is no leadership around here’ than ever before.  Leadership has become remote from people.  It resides in forums of talking heads in high rise office blocks well insulated from the skirmishes, fog and stresses of the front line.  Every excuse is well rehearsed by the over educated and articulate expertly drilled in soundbites which pass as clever responses to the obvious.   Businesses have made themselves so over-complicated in the last decade or so to the point where, at a time when leaner, faster and more agile structures, processes and behaviours are required, they find themselves hard wired to mediocrity.  They are unable to break free because they have trained themselves to do exactly what they said they would never do – empower the knowledge base to make the decisions and move the dial.  I have attended more conferences where ‘innovation’, ‘the learning organisation’, ‘the winning team’ were the mantras.  Yet the truth of the matter is that all decisions (apart from going to the restrooms) are passed up the line for some faceless Leader to cogitate and perhaps make a decision.   One client has actually commissioned a large study into ‘complexity’ with the hope of making things simpler.  They have managed to build so many business prevention processes and methods one wonders if the Gordian knot of complexity can actually be broken?  I have grave doubts as I am certain that the business prevention processes have been built by the very people who have commissioned the study!  Sadly they cannot see that they are the very core of the problem.  Yet nobody has the courage to stand up and call it.  And so it will continue relentless, inexorable and benignant – just rolling along into a rising sea of mediocrity while a trickle of good but disillusioned people will leave to join more fertile pastures where getting things done may not be ground breaking but will certainly be a lot easier and consequently more enjoyable and individually rewarding.  Any brave leader worth a pinch of salt would take a hefty sword to this incompetence and send lumps of worthless process and useless practices to the festering and seemingly growing scrapheap of mediocrity.  It would be bumpy, at the start probably unwelcome and destabilizing, but certainly brave.  
 

This takes me to the final point in this article.  One of the key reasons why people are leaving organisations today is simply because they can’t get things done.  It is all just too hard.  They fail to achieve – not because the market is difficult or because the competitors are simply better – but because it is so difficult and complex to get the simplest of things achieved within the internal processes and behaviours of their organisation.  It is mind bendingly atrocious, debilitating and totally demotivational.  And yet the ‘leaders’ are fully aware of the problem but sit idly by and watch this degenerate into a farce worthy of several episodes of ‘the Office’.    We meet representatives from these organisations on our leadership programmes and the stories they tell of the utmost insanity are so serious they could almost be amusing.  The adage, ‘you couldn’t make this stuff up’ is so often the plaintive cry.  We know that people want to exist in a rewarding environment.  This is when they do their best work.  It seems like a blinding statement of the obvious.  Yet leaders are failing to address this very important issue, and by doing so they are actively allowing their organisation to become more effective at things that are useless or don’t matter.  Now just how crazy is that?   If your family was not enjoying a rewarding environment you would very soon address the issues and agree on a way forward to make things better for all.  So why shouldn’t we do this within organisations where we spend more hours of our waking lives than we do at home?    We would draw on our strength of character to address what really matters to us and we would have the courage to do something about it.  So why do we allow these viruses to develop within our businesses?  Why do we have to appoint consultants to spend time and money studying them?  Why do we not have the strength of character and courage to take the sword to it and chop the cancer out?  These are not hidden secrets which require huge resources to unearth.  There are examples jumping around every surface of every desk in every company on the planet.   So while expensive bosses on the top floor are having mindless debates about the meaning of life, the people on the ground floor, in the Sales teams, Marketing teams and Customer service departments can’t find the fairway on a good day.
 

I have not even addressed the mighty issues of competitive strategy or some capital intensive investments which could project the organisation on a new and exciting period of renewal.  One of the key jobs of any leader is to have the courage to ‘do the basics well’ and conquer the internal enemy of complexity and inertia.  Now that would be brave indeed.  It might not excite the ‘smarts’ who avidly read the Harvard Business Review, but it would make their organisation significantly more competitive. Who said that wasn’t smart?

David Ankerson
MANAGING DIRECTOR
INCITE® MANAGEMENT CONSULTING 

Copyright © 2012 Incite Management Consulting. All rights reserved 

back...