Designing Courage Into the Workplace
As a history student, I always loved L.P. Hartley’s phrase, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Lately I’ve been thinking about workplaces the same way. Each workplace is its own country, and people do things differently there.
While regular countries arise over centuries and envelop millions of people, the amazing opportunity in a workplace is for a relatively small number of people to design a culture deliberately—to craft the microcosm where they live with co-workers for a third of their waking hours.
Is your workplace culture deliberately designed?
In the rush and tumble of earning a living, we may not notice this opportunity. It’s worth pausing and paying attention. I took a pause this weekend to read Brené Brown’s book on leadership in the workplace, Dare to Lead.
The book is the culmination of two decades of research. Brown’s team coded, sorted and interpreted 400,000 pieces of data, and turned the learning into actionable practices, which they then tested in over fifty organizations and with ten thousand individuals. I love the thoroughness of her research, especially because her data collection process is based on interviews. It’s not merely numbers, but real human stories.
The number one cultural issue that she found holding back organizations across the world was that people avoid tough conversations, including ones that require honest, constructive feedback. Avoiding these conversations, often in the name of being “nice and polite,” corrodes clarity and trust, and leads to disengagement, resentment, shame, anxiety, and problematic behavior such as gossip and passive aggression. This downward spiral eventually unravels connection and diminishes empathy.
Do you recognize this pattern in your workplace?
Thankfully, Brown’s research also turned up antidotes to this problem. Since the central problem is fear, the main solution is courage, and not just on the part of people with leadership titles, but on the part of all participants.
Even more helpfully, it turns out that courage is not an innate personality trait; it’s a learned and learnable skill. People who practice courage may assume they were born that way, but upon reflection, they can often remember exactly when and how they learned the skills of courage.
The skill of courage in a tough conversation is not simply to blurt out a potentially hurtful comment, or send it in a letter, but to show up with complete presence and “rumble with vulnerability.”
To rumble (it’s both a verb and a noun) essentially means to really get into it, and vulnerability is the emotion you feel when you take the risk to show up in a situation fully, even though you can’t control the outcome.
The pairing of courage and vulnerability is key here. Courage is the action, and vulnerability is the feeling you have while taking the action.
Courage can even be defined as the ability and willingness to tolerate the feeling of vulnerability.
Brown breaks down the courageous actions in a rumble:
“A rumble is a discussion, conversation, or meeting defined by a commitment to lean into vulnerability, to stay curious and generous, to stick with the messy middle of problem identification and solving, to take a break and circle back when necessary, to be fearless in owning our parts, and… to listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard.”
How can you design these skills into your workplace? Through deliberate, explicit practice and modeling.
For a team to build the courage and skilll for rumbling, they need to trust each other. And conversely, in order to trust each other, they need to have the experience of rumbling and emerging safely on the other side. Trust is built slowly over time, often through many small interactions. Brown likens this process to adding marbles to a jar, one by one.
After you’ve had several conversations where you took risks, asked questions, admitted mistakes, or shared your fears, and no one shamed you or punished you, you start to gain trust in the team and build courage. Trust, courage and rumbling with vulnerability build on each other slowly, over time.
How can you start building this kind of trust in your workplace?
In addition to being a university professor and researcher, Brown now heads up her own organization as CEO, and puts her theories into practice there. For her team, rumbling is a thing. It’s clearly named, delineated, and evoked. People say: we need to rumble on this. And then they schedule the meeting for it.
Brown advises investing twenty minutes to create safety before a rumble by explicitly asking the team what they need to make a safe container.
She says to remind participants of the behaviors needed to make the rumble safe: active listening, staying curious, keeping confidences, and being honest and clear.
She also reminds us of the tried and true listening tool: “Tell more.” Another great way to ask an open question is, “Walk me through your experience and thought process.”
A courageous way to reach out in a rumble is to ask, “What does support from me look like?”
Practices that promote honesty, clarity and mutual respect include the “turn and learn”—having everyone write down their answer to a question privately on a piece of paper, and then turning the papers over at the same time, so that no answer gains support and momentum before the others can be introduced.
Brown also talks about normalizing the practice of apologizing and taking responsibility to make amends as a way to design courage into the conversation.
Is all this focus on emotion too much?
Being vulnerable does not imply weakness, over-sharing, or violating professional boundaries. To the contrary, it’s simply the willingness to be up front, clear and honest, and completely present for the whole conversation, open for learning and collaborative problem-solving.
Think of a time you were hurt in the workplace and imagine if the situation had been handled in a safe container, with courage and vulnerability, honesty, clarity and openness. Would it have been worth the time to focus on getting the process right?
Humans are emotional beings. It’s worth pausing and paying attention to emotional issues in the workplace, considering that it’s the country you live in for one third of your waking hours. It’s also your livelihood, and if it runs on fear, it won’t function well. Try designing it for courage, for “rumbling with vulnerability,” and see what unfolds.
Subscribe to our newsletter and blog here.
If you would like to bring greater self-awareness, creativity, authentic commitment and belonging to your workplace, we’d love to have a conversation with you. Read about the Wise Humanity Leadership Bootcamp, and send us an email or book a call with us.
