Let’s Take This Offline
You know how much I loathe business buzzwords. I spent a good portion of my career learning one workplace or another’s cultural language, and then balancing saying real things with enough of the jargon sprinkled in to signal “I belong here and I’m one of you.” Non-profits are different than government, which is different than tech, which is different than the arts, which is different than consulting, and they all have their own grab-bag of terms and phrases. If I really think about it, this is probably one of the reasons I didn’t join a sorority in college: I didn’t want to have to speak differently to demonstrate that I fit in…
But I digress.
Several years ago, my work friend Heather and I were talking about a situation in which a colleague needed to have a conversation with their team about a project that wasn’t going well, and that colleague was trying to find 1) someone else to lead that discussion (he asked both of us if we would do it) and if that failed, then 2) a way to passively indicate that they needed to figure out how to make things better without actually acknowledging there was a problem and that failure may be on the horizon. Heather dropped a buzzword that rocked my tiny little leadership world:
“He lacks managerial courage,” she said.
Without knowing a formal definition, I knew exactly what she meant. She meant that he lacked the confidence in his leadership and relationships to have an honest, candid conversation with his team. He lacked the bravery to provide constructive feedback to empower and inspire a change-of-course; the willingness to address challenges directly. He lacked managerial courage.
Those two words repositioned my opinions about so many leaders I had worked for and would work with throughout my career. And they are now a challenge I extend to my clients:
When you come across people, processes, and situations that you need to deal with head-on, where is your managerial courage?
Leadership can be very lonely. At a certain point, there’s no new type of training or development to prepare you for the nuances of identifying and carrying out a vision. As a leader (and by this I mean anyone in charge of other people, anyone running a big/small/solo business; anyone driving their own lives), you will discover too many moments when you have to dig deep within yourself to find the bravery to do the right thing. And don’t you doubt it for a moment: the right thing and the easy thing are so often not the same thing.
It’s these moments of managerial courage– of honesty, vulnerability, confidence, and empathy– that make you a luminary leader.
In this next month, where can you dig in to find your managerial courage and shine brighter? And even more foundationally: what kind of leader do you want to be?
