On Courage as a Learned Behaviour

When you listen to today’s Superhero you can tell why he is being featured - his calm and assured demeanour only serves to further underline the passion he carries. For the work and for the people. Most importantly, the fearlessness. It is his lack of fear that I need us to focus on today.

We can all use models of fearlessness. Perhaps we need them even more so at the top because we can’t witness the fear and lack of teaming and do the opposite.

We’re very fortunate at PeopleNotTech to be around oodles of courage. We meet tens of people every month who are as passionate and perhaps as heroic with the only difference being they can’t be featured anywhere, the beast in the belly of which they reside wouldn’t allow it, but they are fighting as hard and being as brave.

It’s an interesting thing this bravery topic. We measure Courage in our software and we did agonise on the measurement and the title of it as well back in the day when we poured over the extensive peer review we did that identified the behavioural dimensions we ought to be measuring in our software for people.

“Courage”’ - a slightly melodramatic word. One that encompasses everything. The very core of Psychological Safety - is the need to not be led by fear. To us, the task wasn’t to measure how much absence of fear we would find but how many instances there would have been when people had the willingness to act despite the fear. That’s brave. And that’s what’s worth encouraging as a behaviour and celebrating.