Everyone has multiple constituencies. You have to understand how they will or won't support that courageous act. Is the board supporting what you're going to do? What about the people to whom you report and the people who report to you? It's rare that people take actions without understanding what the potential network of support is. That's the calculus of courage.
Marian Krauskopf
You have to have a gang of believers, folks who can take on the resistance and share in some of the courageous acts with you. Otherwise, it's too lonely and you can't make it. I think Jacques Nasser was a courageous leader at Ford. The tragedy was that he didn't build a close enough coalition around him.
Noel Tichy
You have to grab them at some level and kind of suck them into feeling a little more at ease with the notion that if they stick their neck out, they're not going to be shot. Everybody talks about what a great leader Lincoln was, but no one wants to die. But you can use Lincoln's story in the right way to get people to do what seems illogical, to stick their necks out as much as he did.
John Kotter
When you have to make a fast decision with significant stakes, you better know what you stand for, because the temptation to violate your basic commitments in life can be large because of the stress of the moment.
The example that's most powerfully affected my thinking on this is that of the current vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace, a Marine four-star general. During the Vietnam War, he's a 22-year old officer in charge of a field reconnaissance run. He stands up with his lance corporal after having been crouched down while studying a map. As the two of them stand, the lance corporal is fatally hit by a sniper in a village about 500 yards away. Pace's first battlefield casualty lies a foot from him.
Pace turns to the radioman to order an artillery barrage on the town. Just then, a 20-year noncommissioned officer, a sergeant, gives him a killer look. Pace got the message. Who knows who is in that village? He calls off the barrage. They cautiously enter the village, populated with only women and children. The sniper was long gone.
That look from his sergeant forced Pace to get in touch with himself so anger didn't overwhelm his thinking, so he could be courageous under trying circumstances. Pace got to that realization through a pretty tough moment in life. But you can do it through meditation, through reading history, and most important, through repeatedly putting yourself to the test and learning from it.
Michael Useem
Absolutely. My Army captain in World War II, Captain Bessinger, had the courage to be patient. I was a kid, grumbling about inadequate air cover and tank support and so on. One day I blurted out, "I for one don't know how the hell we're going to win this f---ing war unless . . ." And Bessinger said to me, "S--t, kid, we've got an army, too." That was the truth I needed. If you have a true belief in where you're going, and then the endurance to wait, that's courageous.
Courage is the capacity to wait until you've learned as much as you can and then take action. You're never sure of the results until you do it. You're still not going to know everything. You have to take gambles and learn more. Queen Elizabeth I wanted to put off most decisions as long as she could. She didn't make a decision until she had to.
Warren Bennis
That's what whistle-blowers do. Andrew Jackson once said that it takes a lot of courage to be in a duel, but the harder kind of courage is telling a good friend no. Cultures of fear abound. Abu Ghraib. The USA Today plagiarism scandal. The two NASA space shuttle disasters. People put their heads down. How do you create cultures as a leader? Create enough psychological safety [for people] to speak up. Reward it, and ingrain it into the culture. Then we'll make whistle-blowers irrelevant.
Warren Bennis
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