Courageous Conversations

In my blog post of last week entitled ‘Pay someone a compliment – and watch performance improve’ I gave an example of how a team I led in the past tried to get past the superficiality of some conversations with work colleagues by telling others what they respected and admired about them. I explained that some found this difficult to do – that they had to have courage to do so.

The theme of today’s post builds on this and focuses on Courageous Conversations. First I’ll clarify what the phrase means to me. One dictionary definition of courage is: “the power of
quality of dealing with or facing danger, fear, pain etc. It comes from the old French word ‘corage’, which is derived from ‘cuer’ or heart. Possessing courage is having the ability to overcome the fear you have about something and because fear is a feeling it’s about being able to subdue the feeling such that it doesn’t prevent you from taking action. It isn’t a word that’s used often nowadays and tends to be thought of as being more relevant to past times, when standing
up and fighting for your rights usually meant physically facing your foes. Nevertheless, I believe it’s a quality that is vital for the success of any business in the present day.

The word ‘conversation’ is one most people will use more often. It’s a communication between
people, an exchange of thoughts and information. Some definitions suggest a conversation is
informal but for the purposes of this post I’m taking it to mean both formal and informal.

So how’s it relevant to business right now? In less challenging economic times it perhaps wasn’t so critical. Mistakes were ok, poor decisions weren’t usually fatal – the bottom line
could absorb some failures. Sayings even emerged suggesting that the most successful people were the ones who’d made the most mistakes. In the current economic climate, the cost of mistakes could indeed be fatal*, the difference between success and failure. It’s become much more important to prevent them. By the way, I don’t intend to suggest that making mistakes is a bad thing. It’s a sign of being human and I think John Wooden was absolutely correct when he said “If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.” My point is that it’s not a good thing to make mistakes when they could have been prevented.

And the best people to do that are the people who work in the organisation. In the aftermath of a big mistake, when the analysis of what went wrong is taking place, it’s common to hear that someone disagreed with the decision, they ‘knew’ it wasn’t right – but said nothing. They chose to stay silent because of fear – they were worried they’d look silly, they didn’t want to be the only one disagreeing, or they didn’t want to ‘rock the boat’ because it might damage their career. And at the moment they chose to say nothing, the chance to prevent the problem was lost.

Going back to the current economic environment, ‘fear’ amongst employees is growing. It’s not
surprising, in Europe and North America we’re seeing bad news stories about the economy almost daily, and reading about more people losing their job. Many people know someone who’s lost their job, it’s getting closer to home. And in such an environment people are unlikely to take a risk and disagree with something. I don’t think it’s likely for example that an employee at RBS is going to rock the boat right now and risk upsetting the boss.

But paradoxically, now is the time when it’s even more important. Every organisation should be
cultivating an environment in which people feel comfortable to have courageous conversations. They should be encouraging conversations when the stakes are high and topics might be
controversial, welcoming the fact that different opinions are healthy and constructive. And they just might be crucial to the success, or maybe even the continued existence of the business
in the future.

More tomorrow on how to create an environment which supports them.....

Footnote:
*It could actually lead to fatalities. In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell investigated why Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost every other airline in the world at the end of the 1990’s. His conclusion was that it was because Korean culture was very hierarchical. This meant that Korean people were very deferential towards superiors – and meant that a co-pilot wouldn’t challenge a pilot even if they thought there was a problem. Courageous Conversations weren’t happening because the culture of Korean Air didn’t support them. In contrast, the culture in other airlines was such that co-pilots were encouraged to challenge as a kind of safety mechanism on the flight deck. When Korean Air realised the issue they trained co-pilots to be more challenging – and the number of crashes fell.