Speak Out Successfully

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Curt Nickisch. Valentine's Day, 2002. A congressional subcommittee was investigating a corporate scandal.

Today I look forward to hearing from an extraordinarily courageous woman who has been a bright spot in an otherwise sorry and outrageous saga.

The sorry and outrageous saga was the collapse of Enron, the largest corporate corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time. The extraordinarily courageous woman was former executive Sharon Watkins. She had dared to question the company's accounting practices.

And I was shocked that people could explain this to me with no concern in their voice, like there was some magic structure that Enron and Andersen had come up with to make this work.

Watkins had written memos warning of an impending company disaster.

I was highly concerned that not only had the Titanic hit the iceberg, but we were already tilting.

Watkins had spoken up when others did not, and it took real courage to do so. But our guest today says acts of workplace courage can be much smaller and less dramatic than this and still be quite effective and important. Jim Dietert is a professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, and he's the author of the article "Cultivating Everyday Courage." It's in the November-December 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review. Jim, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

It's good to be here. What got you interested in this idea of everyday courage? It seems almost anticlimactic. I don't know.

No, I think certainly it's right that when I began studying workplace courage, I also had the image of the whistleblower that makes the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the Times, or the organizational martyr who gets fired for some kind of action. What I found, though, is when I started to ask hundreds of people, give me an instance of courageous behavior at work, what you and I and many other people would say are, relatively mundane in-role required behaviors of a manager. Things like giving difficult feedback to a subordinate, speaking against the grain of shared opinion just among colleagues and peers at the same level. We have lots and lots of workplaces where things far short of the physical risk or the career-ending confrontation are labeled as courageous or seen as requiring courage. That really was quite a surprise to me. Call it what you might, but maybe the low threshold for some of the things that are seen as requiring courage.

It seems like a lot of the things that you talk about is taking everyday courage, just giving negative feedback, speaking up when you think that your group or your organization is on the wrong path shouldn't be behaviors that are frightened out of organizations in the first place?

[Speaker:GHION_AI] Yeah, I think in your and mine and a lot of people's ideal world, that's true. One reason I think is we have some probably hardwired evolutionary bases for fear. I mean, if you think about challenging those with more power than us, the reality is the vast, vast majority of people around the world, including in America are wage-dependent. We need our jobs. We need them not just for income, we need them for healthcare, we need them for retirement accounts, we need them for child college accounts. Despite sort of what we think about American freedom and individual orientation, the US system has tethered many of the most important benefits and basic social safety net factors to employment. That makes people just have pretty fundamental fears of challenging authority.

You also spend a lot of time there, so you're going to live with however you feel for some time too.

That's right. Some have argued that humans fear social isolation as much or more than physical. There are actually a lot of very real reasons that people feel afraid at work, and then there are sets of reasons that we probably overestimate based on a survival instinct the level of threat that actually exists.

Yeah. It sounds like you're saying this is also a problem for organizations because they're basically hamstringing themselves by not letting people speak up.

Yeah, what's at stake when people who are closest to customers or who know most about the underlying technologies, what's at stake actually when they don't tell you why customers aren't going to like something or why a product isn't going to work? You actually don't have to work that hard to estimate why it really does matter in a dollars and cents way and not just the costs of the Wells Fargo-type, multi-billion-dollar settlements. There are lots and lots of other costs.

What, for you, is just a good example of everyday courage that you came across in your research that you marveled at a little bit just because of its ordinariness and that made you want to figure out how people did that well?

All of us have sat in meetings where somebody speaks up and everybody knows that the basic issue being pointed out is very legitimate. Most of us have witnessed the difference between somebody doing that and being absolutely right about the issue itself and getting absolutely nowhere because of the way they went about the issue. Whether that's they did not have what we might call idiosyncrasy credits. They didn't have the goodwill built up about sort of their competence and their intentions, or they're seen as the boy or girl who cries wolf all the time, and therefore, people start to roll their eyes when they do it, versus the person who is pointing out something just as problematic, egregious, and somehow manages to get people to not only listen in the moment without being defensive, but is able to sort of spearhead subsequent commitment of resources and action.

And often even elevate themselves by doing so. That's what's sometimes surprising.

Yeah, that's right. And I think that's also something I've learned is that, sure, people say they want courageous naysayers or courageous folks at the senior level, but then look at the senior team, it's a bunch of sheep, it's a bunch of followers or yes men or women. But I think if you look more closely, you can often find examples of the opposite too. You can find examples of the people who are in important senior roles actually are very vocal. They're very outspoken. They're very willing to take a difficult stance and give difficult feedback. So clearly, while it can be the kiss of death for a career, it's not always. And really what I— found myself more and more drawn to is this idea that simply relying on external social activism or martyrs who blow the whistle on the way out is probably not a very effective way to get consistent organizational improvement. Then we better start figuring out how it is that people can manage to stay inside the organization and be effective change agents.

In your research, you were able to identify habits, practices that successful, commonly courageous people had that helped them sort of reach that success. So let's go through those things. What did you find are the habits or practices of these successful, commonly courageous people?

Really, the first set of steps are about establishing one's, I guess, right to act or to speak and to be heard. That's things like developing trust with the actual people who you're going to need to listen or garner support from. It's about being seen as highly competent, so people can't just dismiss you as the dissatisfied low performer. It's about things like being seen as fair and even-handed. One of the profiles I've written there was a woman championing gender equity and inclusiveness issues. And some of the women I talked to about her said, as much as she is absolutely our champion, she's also the person who will carefully look at and study the data, let's say about somebody's pay or title in a given region of the country. She's the person who would study it and say, that dog doesn't bark. There's no there there. You're not actually underpaid relative to your male colleagues when we look at it closely. And so there's sort of a fairness and even-handedness, having an ability to not be easily dismissed and for people to be willing to sort of trust that you have not just, let's say, a given person or set of individuals' interests at heart, but you have the organization's wellbeing at heart.

And it sounds like she was very strategic and knew which case to bring forward. How much does patience and timing have to do with success at everyday courage?

Timing is against you if you're too new or inexperienced in the organization because you haven't yet built up that source of credibility and reputation for fairness, et cetera. Timing, conversely, if you're on the way out the door, is not your friend anymore because people no longer believe you have the right motive, nor do they believe you're going to stay around and help carry the water for the change itself. So one part of the timing is just, are you at the right level of, let's say, credibility and potential influence? But timing also is affected by things occurring elsewhere in the organization and elsewhere beyond the organization. You may have the best idea or an absolutely valid critique of something happening, let's say, with a global expansion strategy or a new product idea. But if that issue is not currently on the agenda or radar or priority list of senior people, you're simply less likely to get action or traction around the issue.

Gotcha.

So I talk in the article about, Tachi Yamada, who has been R&D chairman at a couple of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. And he was incredibly skillful at using key opportunities, like the merger of two major pharma companies, as the window of opportunity to be bold about a structural reorganization of the entire R&D function. I think people who tend to be successful over time behaving courageously and actually seeing an effect, are pretty skilled at knowing which issues are both most fundamental to their own value system and critical to act on versus, let's say, just things that emotionally trigger them in a given moment, and pretty skillful about estimating, is this a battle or is this the war? If I fight this one, if I take this one on, even if I win, do I undermine my broader my broader objective. So these adages like standing for everything ultimately means you stand or achieve nothing, these I think turn out to be true.

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So a lot of this sounds like being opportunistic. I hate to— you know, that sounds bad, but opportunistic or strategic about when to be courageous. You've talked about laying the groundwork and then choosing your battles, but then what happens when you do it? Do you notice patterns of success for people who've been able to lower the risk of acting when it's in the moment? What do they do differently?

[Speaker:GHION_AI] There's really two sort of key kinds of behaviors. One is, I think, really we could summarize as saying it's about framing how you go about presenting the issue. It's very common for us to present it from our perspective. What we get wrong in that moment is keeping in our mind that if we had power or control over changing or doing what we wanted, we wouldn't be acting or speaking up in the first place. The reason we're doing that is we need somebody else to get on board. We need somebody else to change. And so what's really crucial is having the skill of knowing What is the target or targets' likely reaction and what are they most compelled by? You might prefer to present an issue or be most compelled by an issue when it's presented as a threat. If we don't do this, X will happen. The targets might be much more compelled by, this is an opportunity, look at the exciting upsides.

We can do an experiment.

That's right. And there's a whole range of those kinds of considerations.

There's a lot of material in here that's about emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, getting buy-in. There's classic competencies that you should have in organizations all at play here. But following up, I'm really interested because I wouldn't have thought about that on my own. This is another key step that your research shows is important if you want to be successful in doing courageous things competently in the office.

Yeah, I agree with you that if you look at that sort of persuading in the moment set of activities, that's actually the step that in a lot of ways has been the most articulated by others who have studied influence or issue selling. What for me also was a much more novel finding was this idea that very few things that are worthy of being called courageous end in the moment. When things go well, even in those instances, often there are these important next steps of how do you thank those who offered their support? How do you thank those and give credit to those who stood with you? How do you make sure you actually go and secure the follow-up steps, the actual resources that were discussed in the moment? How do you basically take the success you had and lock it in?

And manage the emotions of the people who maybe lost or spoke out against you and were decided against.

That's right. And that's true whether it goes well or poorly for you is that when you're talking about change, whether it's you for whom it doesn't go that well or the target who you need to change, who might be feeling bruised, angry, hurt, How do you skillfully go about either repairing those relationships, helping people see past their current anger or hurt or fear and move forward? There are people who are really skillful at emotion management after these difficult moments. And one part of that emotion management is within the self. There's a real difference between people who see setbacks as reasons to quit, reasons to conclude they knew it was risky and futile in the first place, to throw up their hands and actually just sort of further seal that loop that says this is a terrible thing to do.

My career is over.

Yeah, my career's over. That was stupid.

I am such an idiot.

Amen. That's right. Who really just view all of that as data. This is a long journey, and I learned yesterday what's not going to work and why. There are lots of issues I'm going to do this about in the future, and I just learned something really important about how I'm not going to behave the next time.

So you've outlined these ways that people can do this more successfully in their— as individuals. But if you are a manager, how can you encourage this and sort of reduce the reduce the friction for people to say things that they think aren't popular, or they can suggest things that would mean big changes but good changes for the organization?

I think there's a symbolic and a structural answer to that. So symbolically, you have to really publicly celebrate instances where people were bold and innovative, where they went beyond what they were authorized to do on behalf of the organization, where they where they pushed or challenged you or somebody else. You have to celebrate that because you have to change the urban legends. I mean, if you ask most people about, oh, what happens when people courageously do XYZ, the answer you get is people got their head chopped off. And so you have to really take actions to symbolically show that it's different. Then I think structurally, you have to do what Steve Kerr talked about 40 years ago, now, which is you have to sort of address the organizational follies. You have to change the actual reality that you say you want innovative behavior, but your reward system is geared entirely around staying within the lanes. You have to change the reality that you say you're gonna pay and promote people who are out-of-the-box thinkers or challenge, but everybody looks around and knows that the way to promotion is is through being quiet. So, you know, what I would say is you have to change both the symbolism around courageous acts and you have to change the reality. People have to actually see that these behaviors get rewarded rather than punished.

Jim, thanks again so much. This was really insightful.

Yeah, my pleasure.

That's Jim Diedert. He's a professor at Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. And he wrote the article, "Cultivating Everyday Courage." It's in the November-December 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review. And you can also find it at hbr.org. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I'm Curt Nickisch.