Leaders frequently call on their team members to be bold. Those in leadership positions are often overstretched and, more than ever, need their employees to go the extra mile, to step up to the plate and “to boldly go where employees feared to go before”.
This adaptation of the famous Star Trek quote is not intended to undermine these appeals, which are often genuine and grounded in real needs. But simply calling on people to be bold without an understanding of their working contexts and requirements is likely to appear disingenuous and lead to disengagement rather than commitment.
Understanding the blockers
Let’s take a moment to think more deeply about what might block people from demonstrating courage at work. If we better understand the factors that reduce boldness, we are better placed to inspire its growth. Our search for “blockers” should begin with the psychological aspects. First, we need to acknowledge the ever-present fear of failure, which makes people step away from the bold alternative and stick with safer options.
Fear of failure can have many sources. Some people seem hardwired to fear risks and so tend to play it safe. Others are perfectionists who want to deliver the ultimate quality. They develop narrow areas of expertise, which make bold moves into unchartered territory seem almost unprofessional to them.
Other people would love to behave boldly but work in restrictive environments in which failure quickly leads to censure, despite the platitudes typically voiced by management.
Sometimes, we’re afraid of failing with other people. The lack of an open feedback culture in many organizations is a testament to the unease that many leaders feel about confronting team members with their failing behaviours, fearing that this might unleash destructive emotions.
Roles and tools
Sometimes, our focus on our own role can limit our potential to be bold. Those working in sales, for example, may fall into the trap of overpleasing customers, causing problems for the internal project managers who have to deliver the solutions. In such situations, a little more courage in challenging the demands of customers could save everybody from future disappointment.
Often, people would exercise more boldness if they were given the right tools. This could involve more training to develop the necessary expertise, more time to complete the “extra-mile” tasks or the required levels of support from other parts of their organization to fulfil cross-functional roles.
Such reactions are wholly rational. It makes little sense to expect people to be bold with tasks they simply don’t know how to perform, when they have insufficient time to perform them and when they don’t have the guarantee of collaboration from others. This is simply setting people up to fail, hardly a formula for bold success.
If, as a leader, you demand that your team members be courageous, you have to provide the necessary inspirational role model. You need to be the first to be bold and to communicate success stories relating to your courage that will help to give credibility to your appeals for others to be bold.
Taking away the fear
Most importantly, fear of failure has to be removed. As in sport, lack of confidence and fear of being blamed inhibit performance. Leaders need to coach psychological resilience (“You can do this…”). They must offer training that develops an individual’s mastery and autonomy (“Yes, you can really do this…”). And they have to provide a security net, which means that failure is not the end of the world (“Don’t worry if you don’t succeed because…”).
In addition to their extrinsic motivational appeals, leaders need to tap into the intrinsic motivations of their team members. If leaders can appeal to an individual’s values, they will go not only the extra mile but many extra miles. This means that leaders must exercise both empathy and “deep listening”. You must understand other people’s values before you can connect to them. As in many other areas of life, listening should come before talking.
Offering support
Pragmatic leadership support is also essential. Leaders have to support team members in reprioritizing their tasks. Team members need to be able to give up some tasks, and reduce the time invested in — and quality expected from — other tasks. In this way, they can open up windows of time to be bold in new areas.
And remember: before leaders demand that their team members be bold, leaders should explore with them exactly what
they mean by being bold. How can your team members meet your demands if you have not defined and communicated them clearly?
In the end, boldness is a behaviour, an ability to communicate assertively, clearly and engagingly with other human beings. And it’s an ability that you as a leader may not yet have fully mastered.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. Are leaders really ready to invest their organization’s time and money to develop the necessary skills? Once again, simply asking people to act and communicate more boldly without supporting them in their efforts risks setting people up to fail.
A shared responsibility
Most people I meet in leadership positions want to support their teams so that they can achieve their full potential. And most team members I meet want the same thing. Yet curiously and disappointingly, appeals from leaders to be bold more often inspire cynicism than engagement.
Those in leadership roles often underestimate the complexity of their appeals to be bold. Likewise, team members often underestimate their responsibility to translate these appeals into action.
As so often in life, the responsibility for achieving success in something — in this case, being bold — is a shared responsibility. This may not sound like a very bold conclusion, but, in reality, I believe that it is.