Courage is not a character trait that is limited to a select few but rather a skill that can be cultivated through deliberate practice.

Unless we repetitively practice the high-stress, emotion-laden situations in which we aspire to be courageous, we will never magically become skillful in those moments.

Jim Detert is a Professor in the Leadership and Organizational Behavior area at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration and a Professor of Public Policy at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. In his book “Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work” he explores how to be 'competently courageous' so that our courage pays off for us and for our organizations.

Jim and Greg talk about how to instill a habit of courage, how to overcome the fear of potential negative consequences work-wise or socially, and how to create accurate risk assessments when it comes to choosing the right battles. They also discuss the prevalent inconsistency within organizations that profess to value individuals with courage while, in actuality, demonstrating a reluctance to embrace them and how to change the structural policy and behavioral conditions to truly facilitate courage in the workplace.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How do you power-through emotion-laden situations?

35:25: If you're going to act skillfully in high-stress, emotion-laden situations, you have to practice in high-stress, emotion-laden situations. Practicing in a cognitively cool manner is what a lot of us do, and it's why most of us walk out of a room after and go 30 seconds later. Oh sh*t, I should have said this during the because what happens is your amygdala hijacks your executive functioning, and unless we practice repetitively trying to stay in the moment during that hijacking and tamp it down and act, we'll never just magically be skillful in those moments.

In a true learning culture, nobody has to pretend they’re perfect

19:27: In a true learning culture, nobody has to pretend they're perfect, and nobody has to pretend that they can't be corrected in public.

The key to sorting out a troublemaker

23:42: If you were going to help a recruiter sort out the difference between a chronic troublemaker versus a legitimate truth-teller who simply wanted to draw its right and improve the organization, I think to me it's a matter of patterning. So if a person has had a pattern of successful jobs they've been in for some time and then has a single situation where they are able to explain why it didn't work out, that to me is different than a person who's had seven jobs in the last six years. And for whom every single organization has somehow been toxic and had a terrible boss. At some point, when you are the only consistent thing in a pattern of different situations, you're the problem.

The role of leaders

30:02: The role of leaders, particularly senior leaders, is to change the structural policy and behavioral conditions so that they get the learning behaviors they need without people thinking it's courageous.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:

Faculty Profile at University of Virginia, Darden School of Business
Professional Profile on Psychology Today
Jim Detert's Website
Jim Detert on LinkedIn

His Work:

294. The Habit of Courage feat. Jim Detert

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc