“Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.”
–Samuel Johnson
This morning’s Wall Street Journalcarried an interview with Toshiba Corp. CEO, Atsutoshi Nishida, who recently announced his firm’s withdrawal from the high-definition DVD business. This will likely rank as one of the major competitive defeats of the decade, such as happened in the battle between VHS and Betamax formats some 30 years ago. In part of the interview, Nishida said, “I’m practical, but I also have enthusiasm…If you have that in addition to a strong will to achieve your goals, then you can overcome any adversity…my enthusiasm allows me to move forward.”
We see other organizational adversities in the daily headlines: the Sprint-Nextel merger; Hillary Clinton’s campaign struggles in Texas and Ohio (the voting is tomorrow); the waning newspaper industry; and countless financial companies holding subprime debt. At Darden we see teams hit with adversity every week. A team of student entrepreneurs fails to raise some Angel money. Will they persist? Five colleagues labored hard to totally redesign their team-taught course and then get disappointed with student evaluations. Will they recover? Preliminary research findings by a group of faculty are scooped by a team at another university. Will they carry on? All of these cases are spirals of decline that have in common a theme of discouragement.
What can you, the leader, do to build courage among the colleagues around you? One of the hardest parts of leadership is bracing others— encouraging them; helping an entire enterprise find the right stuff ((“Right stuff” = courage, or “the ineffable pilot’s grace,” in the words of Tom Wolfe’s website. Wolfe’s book by the same name, and the movie based on it, popularized the phrase. Another movie with a strong depiction of courage is Apollo XIII. )) to get through a tough challenge. Your colleagues need courage to get on with what needs to be done. Indeed, failure of courage is the showstopper, the without-which-there-is-nothing, as Samuel Johnson suggests.
Over 300,000 books listed in Amazon.com refer in some way to courage. A few ((See, for instance, Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, and Michael Beschloss, Presidential Courage.)) of these are very good in their ability to illustrate and inspire. Much of the writing is about building your own courage—a very interesting subject, but one that leaves the leader to translate and scale up the lessons to the level of a team or enterprise. At Darden, several of our courses consider issues of courage. But in general, B-schools seem to have relatively little to say on the subject; the student might as well go over to the departments of philosophy and psychology, or the divinity school. I think that the reticence of B-schools is a real pity.
However, a new paper written by my colleague, Ryan Quinn, is a step in the right direction . He asked, “What enables courageous collective action?” To explore the drivers of organizational courage, he studied the conversations and activities of passengers on United Airlines flight 93 on September 11, 2001. This was one of the flights hijacked by terrorists. Unlike the other three hijacked flights that day, the passengers fought back, deflecting the aircraft from its target, but ultimately driving the plane into a field in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Quinn reveals three kinds of stories told in real time by the passengers: “personal narratives that restore identities that have meaning outside of the current situation (“Who am I?”); narratives of duress that explain the situation (“What’s going on here?”); and a narrative of collective action that creates a collective identity and a collective plot (“What do people like us do in a situation like this?”). These narratives… mobilize resources, provide answers to these three questions that emerge under duress, guide subsequent action, and can become resources themselves when creating subsequent narratives. Re-establishing personal narratives creates meaningful identities that help people manage negative emotions and guide their interpretation of adversity.”
What can a leader do with this? Quinn’s focus on narratives implies a number of action-items where teams are struck by some adversity:
- Get the facts. Collective action starts with clarity about the situation. The enterprise must get a grip on reality. In the absence of information, people will concoct their own reality. The leader needs to help people face the facts.
- Voice who we are. A strong identity binds the collective. Winston Churchill famously rebuffed the Nazi blitz on London during the Second World War with the words, “What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to preserve against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?” He asserted that the Brits were strong enough to withstand the bombing.
- Assert choice. The collective has some choice about interpreting adversity and shaping a response. All leadership begins with articulating that choice. Victimhood denies the existence of that choice. Viktor E. Frankl, a concentration camp survivor, wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” ((Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.)) One of the defining attributes of a leader is to take that sense of choice into conversations with colleagues. It is as if the leaders say, “The situation isn’t hopeless; we can do something about this.”
- Talk. Courage doesn’t emanate from the leader, it grows from the group. This requires a process of conversation. The point is to motivate collective action in response to adversity. The classic example of the leader engaging the team is Ernest Shackleton, who saved his ill-fated expedition to try to reach the South Pole between 1914 and 1916. He refused to give up and conveyed optimism to his crew through endless adversities.
Points like these make the work of leadership in adversity seem easy. But it’s not. Without steady investment, the courage of teams evaporates. Building courage within teams is challenged particularly by skepticism, perfectionism, individualism, and devotion to a profession rather than an enterprise—these traits are prevalent among knowledge workers in universities, professional service firms, and government. But the costs of discouragement are too high. Samuel Johnson had it right: courage is the cardinal virtue because it makes possible all other virtues. Atsutoshi Nishida seems to have it right as well: he said, “If you don’t take risks, you make no progress. Situations change constantly, so if we can’t change with them, then there’s no future for us.” High performance starts with the courage of the team.