This is the second of three leadership skills for the 21st century, which come from three different leadership mindsets. The first skill I wrote about is truth. The second is courage.
Courage is a skill.
Courage is not a character trait that brave people are born with. Courage is not something that heroes have that ordinary people like you and me wish we had (although that can be an easy excuse for you and me, can't it?). Courage is a skill that you develop, and it is not about the absence of fear, it is about taking the action you need to take, even though you are afraid.
Courage relates directly to the leadership mindset of "clarity over control." If you want to make a shift in your organization towards clarity and away from control, you'll need courage, because the controls we put in place in organizations are essentially synthetic courage. When you carve up your organization into its silos and give everyone control over their little piece, you enable people to act without worrying that the wrong person will make the wrong decision. Through the wisdom of our structure and expertise, fear is eliminated so we can act.
Unfortunately, that command and control thinking is the high-fructose corn syrup of organizational life. It is efficient and is easy on the palate, but it's killing us in the long run. The synthetic courage of structure and command/control authority weakens us and prevents us from adapting as quickly as we now need to, so what we need is some good old-fashioned actual courage throughout our system. We need to figure out ways for everyone to take more risks (and for bosses to support people in taking risks). We need to build our capacity to experiment, which means being clear about intended results and measuring actual results. Individually, we need to manage our own reactivity better. Fear is a given. How we manage it will contribute to building more courage into our system.
The individual mantra for building courage is "small safe tests." Find ways to to change things, experiment with things, and risk things that don't require you to put the whole business on the line (at least, not at first). Find one part of your department where you can provide a clear guide and then get out of the way and let people solve the problem on their own. There are lots of places where you could operate outside of the traditional chain–pick some small ones to start.
Organizationally there are training programs in emotional intelligence. This is NOT about enabling everyone to share their emotional state all the time. It's not about whether crying is okay or not okay. Emotional intelligence is primarily about building your skill to manage your own emotional reactivity and be supportive other other people's reactions in ways that enable people to be whole and effective in the organization at the same time.
As a boss, taking a new look at courage will require you to understand your own ideas about what it means to be "responsible." This is the burden of people at the top–it's their butts on the line, and they respond to that burden by trying to control. So how do you manage that burden of responsibility with clarity instead? What clear strategic guides could you provide people in your system that would make it more likely that they would be all working together in the same direction?