Chapter 3

BRAVE

You can choose comfort or you can choose courage, but you cannot have both.

Brené Brown

In this chapter you will learn to:

• ■scale your bravest self
• ■build psychological safety
• ■launch quantum teamwork
• ■reimagine the art of feedback.

Here’s a question. Can you think of a time at work when you had some bad news to share or a concern to raise but held back from speaking because of fear? Fear doesn’t make bad news go away, fear makes bad news go into hiding. When I recently asked this question at a conference of over a thousand managers, around 85% put their hands up. Perhaps the other 15% had bad memories. Multiply that by 10,000 or 100,000 people and you can understand why there’s a chronic ‘speak up’ gap in most organisations. It’s a powerful question to ask the team you lead, too. I find that if the person asking the question raises their own hand as well, it shows more empathy. The sad truth is holding back and a general reluctance to speak up is the norm in most organisations. Without safety, great ideas are lost, different perspectives are lost, knowledge is lost and great talent is lost. One of the saddest moments for any organisation is wasted talent – the moment when somebody mentally quits the job but continues to work. Now, more than ever, you must create a culture of fearless inquiry and encourage people to overcome the self-imposter syndrome: a common mind-trap in most organisations in which individuals doubt themselves and have a fear of speaking up.

Brave is the second dimension of the 3D Leader and is defined as a leader who ‘brings their bravest selves to work, speaks up, ask questions, alerts others to concerns and challenges openly’.

Choosing courage over comfort is mission critical for the 3D Leader because there’s no crystal ball and it’s the best way to reduce the forces of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) and help people find pride and meaning in their work. But as any organisation grows, openness and candour are sometimes the first casualties. It becomes easier to leave things unsaid and, typically, there is a failure to act until a situation has reached a crisis point. Silence goes unnoticed, but the costs of fear shouldn’t – they are massive. Psychological safety, which is defined as ‘a shared belief that a diverse group of people can collaborate and feel comfortable sharing risky new ideas’ is vital for building for a high-performing team and is the best way to ensure people are trusted and valued.

Zappos is no stranger to harnessing the brave dimension because it understands that a winning culture means two things:

1. 1.Exceptional customer experiences on the outside.
2. 2.Exceptional employee experience on the inside.

One of its core values is ‘to embrace brave’. Headed up by CEO Tony Hsieh, it has won credit around the world for its 3-Day Culture Camps and School of WOW. Employees appreciate that ‘to embrace brave’ means to be comfortable in your own skin every day and know that the only way to thrive is to be able to speak up about anything on your mind. Does this hold true for you and your organisation?

It’s not uncommon for managers to filter bad news to protect the CEO from bad news. The tragedy of two Amnesty International employees committing suicide and the subsequent offering by the board of directors to resign over a toxic work culture is an extreme example of what can go wrong when a culture of silence is the default. Silence is always less risky than voice.

We lack courage rather than answers in most organisations, courage to:

• ■make a difference
• ■get behind a great cause
• ■say no and eliminate the unnecessary
• ■speak up.

Now is not the time to play it safe. Uncertainty, ambiguity and external forces are creating an operating environment where safety always looks like the right option, although it rarely is. So how do you scale the brave dimension, and how do you build a culture of courage where it’s safe to speak up, raise concerns, debate issues and take risks?

SPEAK UP

Psychological safety is a prerequisite for 3D leadership. There is a growing body of research led by thinkers such as Harvard Professor Amy Edmonson and Wharton School Professor Adam Grant that shows that building psychological safety is critical for helping your team feel alive at work. How alive are you at work?

As conventional hierarchies break down, we are more interdependent on each other now than ever before. Teams who report high levels of psychological safety are at least three times more likely to speak up, share ideas and call out issues. Margaret Heffernan, TED speaker and author of Beyond Measure, says: ‘In any company, you can have a brilliant bunch of individuals – but what prompts them to share ideas and concerns, contribute to one another’s thinking, and warn the group early about potential risks is their connection to one another.’ You can’t build psychological safety overnight; it’s earned on a daily basis. For example, companies such as Danish toy maker Lego build psychological safety through the principle of hygge (pronounced ‘heu-gah’): teams come together for meals and show up with open minds and a willingness to connect and collaborate.

Psychological safety is not:

• ■giving unconditional praise
• ■taking it easy
• ■a culture of nice, at all expense
• ■relaxing standards.

Psychological safety is:

• ■trust between employees
• ■open-mindedness to change
• ■curiosity to ask questions and think big
• ■courage in confronting and overcoming conflict.

Psychological safety is built by leaders who understand that teams can’t flourish without mutual respect, safety and trust. To assess whether you have psychological safety in your own team, use the 4C Psychological Safety Tool to identify strengths, manage gaps and flag blind spots.

4C PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY TOOL

Nike and Serena Williams recently announced a design challenge for young creatives that will bring new designers to Nike, where they’ll work directly with Williams. How is your organisation attracting and amplifying wide, diverse and fresh perspectives? Leaders who embrace diversity of experience, diversity of attitudes and diversity of thinking will have an advantage in adapting to external shocks, which increasingly threaten the survival of their organisations. The 4C psychological safety tool looks at four essential builders of high psychological safety: curiosity safety, challenger safety, collaboration safety and culture safety.

1. 1.Curiosity safety: how safe is it to follow your curiosity at work? To learn, experiment and fail in your organisation? When you’re exploring ideas to improve the business or the customer experience, fear is at its highest and can sabotage your best efforts to try something new. Stop worrying about the rate of failure because, as long as those failures are cheap, you can afford a lot of them. As the saying goes, ‘fail fast, fail cheap and move on’. Curiosity safety means it’s safe to adopt an experimental attitude, test out the riskiest assumptions and use failure as a tool to learn from your own and others’ mistakes. Without curiosity safety, the gap between what you know and what you want to know is likely to freeze.
2. 2.Challenger safety: how safe is it to have tough conversations and challenge others about issues that matter? Perceptions of power, status and trust affect how much teams speak, listen and respect each other. To defeat groupthink, individuals must be rewarded for straight talking at all levels. Challenger safety means it’s safe for individuals to speak up about their concerns, disagree openly and challenge each other, no matter what the person’s hierarchical status is. The opportunity to have a voice and be heard, even when there is a dissenting viewpoint, is mandatory for challenger safety. Everyone in your organisation should feel safe to take a stand on something that is important and be able to raise it well without fear of criticism or judgement.
3. 3.Collaboration safety: how safe is it to openly share information and work with others across the whole organisation? Collaboration safety is confident vulnerability – the glue that holds people together from chance encounters to more formal work relationships. It’s the foundation of every human action, relationship and interaction and helps us to get the best from each other. The foundation of collaboration safety is trust, which lies not in grand gestures but in everyday actions, words and interactions: speaking openly and honestly versus tiptoeing around half-truth or doing what is right versus what is easy, in order to avoid discomfort. We all have the power to act in more trustworthy ways. Without mutual trust, it’s more difficult to collaborate and more difficult to get things done.
4. 4.Culture safety: if I asked you what’s the one thing you could do differently tomorrow to make your organisation a better place to work, where would you start? The answer is probably culture. Corporate culture can seem like a fuzzy word but I define it as the values, beliefs and behaviours practised in your organisation, especially when you’re not in the room. Culture is like pouring concrete. It can take a while to set but then is much more difficult to change afterwards. I took the pulse of over 1,200 business leaders globally. An overwhelming 84% agreed that culture is critical for business success and 60% agreed it was more important than strategy or the business model. The bad news was that more than half the group reported that culture was not effectively managed and was not even on the leadership agenda. The bottom line is that culture is seen as incredibly important but mismanaged and undervalued in most organisations.

QUANTUM TEAMWORK

Most teams are not teams. They are just groups of individuals without a single collective purpose. The new science of teamwork requires a team mindset known as quantum teamwork. As the name implies, quantum teamwork is defined as ‘a quantum-leap improvement in performance while transforming the mindsets of employees and thus the culture of the organisation’:

• ■High diversity and high psychological safety.
• ■We beats me.
• ■Co-creation beats control.
• ■Teams beat groups.
• ■Culture beats strategy.
• ■Engagement beats communication.
• ■Shared values beat no values.

Quantum teamwork arises when groups work together to be smarter and perform better; it’s the team capacity for high performance. Thomas W. Malone is a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. The Center’s mission is to unlock the science behind the deep phenomenon of humans working together or humans and computers working together in ways that will help us understand how to create new kinds of human or human and computer cooperatives or collective intelligences.

Faculty members are drawn from many different parts of MIT, including the Media Lab, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Their aim is to identify what makes some teams faster, smarter and better than others. What does it take to tap the collective intelligence of your own team, and how can leaders do that? Malone and a team of MIT researchers studied a raft of factors, such as psychological safety, personality types, teamwork and gender that turn a group into a smart, high-performing team. In two studies, published in the journal Science, researchers grouped 697 volunteers into teams of two to five members. Each team was required to work together to complete a range of cognitive tasks, from brainstorming to teamwork and problem solving. What they found was that individual intelligence (as measured by IQ) was not as important as they had assumed. Nor did teams with more extroverted people or individual stars make a noticeable difference to the group’s overall success. What did matter was empathy, the ability to read others’ emotions, trust and frequent communication with equal respect for each team member’s opinion.

Quantum teams were distinguished by three characteristics: first, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussion, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with high diversity and high psychological safety outperformed teams with low diversity and low psychological safety.

To increase quantum teamwork in your own organisation, do this:

1. 1.Crowdsource ideas. Harness the wisdom of the team at all levels of your organisation and build a culture of learning where it’s safe to test, explore and experiment. For example, at Amazon, Jeff Bezos asks three questions: How original is the idea and what problem is it solving? How scaleable is the idea because it’s important to think big? And what is the project return on investment of this idea? Innovations such as Amazon Prime and 1-Click purchasing are a direct result of building a culture where employees understand that they now compete on imagination. What platforms do you have in place to crowdsource ideas from both employees and customers?
2. 2.Idea recognition. Great ideas can come from anywhere in your organisation. The problem is most organisations are made up of Chief Idea Killers, Directors of Bureaucracy and Vice-Presidents of ‘No’. Build interactive channels that make it easy for ideas to be validated quickly and where good mistakes are never wasted. At the music platform SoundCloud, there are monthly Hackathons for people to find solutions to pain points that cause friction for customers on the outside and employees on the inside. What steps could you take to recognise and reward employees to think and act like innovators?
3. 3.Build social capital. Most leaders communicate but don’t engage. Using different channels builds up the all-important social capital, which binds a team together emotionally and psychologically. This strengthens mutual trust and sharpens emotion-reading skills for the whole team. Imagine social capital as a bank where you make regular credits and debits. Without it, you don’t get the tough debates that problems demand and the fresh ideas and new perspectives that will propel a company forward. Not speaking up speaks volumes. I have adopted the Japanese principle of ba – to get involved and transcend one’s own limited perspective or boundary. Put another way, ba refers to a physical, virtual or mental space shared by two or more individuals. You can unlock the collective intelligence embedded in ba by providing diverse meeting spaces and the creative freedom to unshackle from boring routines. Do you have physical spaces that enable the Japanese principle of ba to occur?
4. 4.Increase high diversity and high psychological safety. The opportunity to have a voice and be heard, even when there is a dissenting view, is unlocking the power of quantum teams. Job titles, hierarchy and self-imposter syndrome are just some of the barriers that erode success and can be overcome only with high diversity and high psychological safety. In a recent talk at New York University, I emphasised the power of diverse teams and psychological safety. Successful leaders pull together people with different perspectives and ways of seeing the world. What tools can you use to scale both high diversity and high psychological safety?

FEEDBACK REIMAGINED

Leaders give feedback, feedback drives behaviour and behaviour produces results. But are you unlocking the huge benefits of feedback? It’s impossible to thrive unless you can deliver relevant, timely feedback. Feedback about performance, feedback about job purpose, feedback about direction and feedback about motivation or behaviours.

EVERYDAY PERFORMANCE AND DEVELOPMENT FEEDBACK AT A GLANCE

1. 1.Constructive feedback on performance, standards or behaviours.
2. 2.Progress against objectives.
3. 3.Difficult situations, e.g. conflict.
4. 4.Well-being and ways of working.
5. 5.Career development.

Feedback is an important tool for shaping behaviours and fostering learning but it’s also a sign of high psychological safety. When it feels safe to ask for and give feedback, people report higher levels of well-being and trust. Feedback shows you care about learning and growth. It’s a trust multiplier and, yet, in most organisations, there is a feedback famine. And is your organisations exceeding, meeting or falling behind on expectations of feedback? My research of 1,000 leaders showed that only 37% report that feedback is delivered consistently and 63% agreed with the statement ‘we’re falling behind on how we deliver feedback’.

WHY FEEDBACK MATTERS

1. 1.Gives me purpose and direction: 49%.
2. 2.Helps me perform better: 73%.
3. 3.Makes me feel valued: 93%.

The human and organisational implications of this are significant. Poorly delivered feedback or simply a lack of feedback erodes trust, respect and psychological safety, which are the building blocks of a high-performing team.

How do you deliver feedback effectively on the issues that really matter? From what you say to how you say it, to dealing with tricky conversations and difficult messages, it’s clear that the gap is too high for feedback.

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF FEEDBACK

How many of the feedback sins have you committed in your career? The best way to avoid feedback sins is through self-awareness, empathy and listening. The seven deadly sins of feedback are:

1. 1.No feedback.
2. 2.Too general.
3. 3.Too personal.
4. 4.Too long.
5. 5.Too directive.
6. 6.No empathy.
7. 7.No follow-up.

A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO FEEDBACK

Feedback is a skillset and a mindset. You can use the AID practical feedback tool below to deliver timely, relevant and outcome-led feedback that shows you care personally about individuals’ learning, growth and well-being.

A Align on outcomes

Align: care personally and agree on outcomes

Examples:

• ■I’d like to help you develop XYZ.
• ■I’d like to have a conversation with you about XYZ.
• ■Let’s catch up about X.
• ■I think there’s an opportunity to grow/develop A.

I Improve performance

Improve: move towards solutions

Examples:

• ■What could you do differently?
• ■How can I help you make a bigger impact?
• ■How about trying XYZ?
• ■What options do you have?
• ■What could you change?
• ■What else could you do?

D Decide

Decide: gain commitment to next steps

Examples:

• ■What will you do to move forward?
• ■What are the next steps?
• ■Who can support you?
• ■Is there anything else you need?
• ■What does success look like?

FEEDBACK SCENARIOS

Use the five feedback scenarios below with your team to increase your confidence at everyday feedback. It can be a very powerful learning experience to conduct two 90-second ‘acts’. It relaxes the group and they learn that it’s all too easy to commit the seven deadly sins without realising it, so they learn not to do them in real life.

Feedback scenarios example

• ■Act 1: demonstrate how not to give feedback using examples from the seven deadly sins.
• ■Act 2: demonstrate best practice using the AID tool.

  Scenario 1: one of your new team members spoke too fast in a presentation. You want to help her improve. What happens next?

  Scenario 2: one of your co-workers has written a sloppy email to a new client into which you were cc’d. The spelling and punctuation need improving. What happens next?

  Scenario 3: one of your team is always arriving late to work. Some colleagues have expressed a concern about the person’s well-being. What happens next?

  Scenario 4: one of your team has not been contributing at meetings. Some colleagues have commented he has lost his motivation. You wish to resolve the situation. What happens next?

  Scenario 5: your boss hasn’t given you any feedback on your performance for more than six months. You’d like to ask for some specific feedback on how you’re doing and what could be better. What happens next?

EMPATHY

I believe an important part of the brave dimension is the art of human connection. How well do you connect with your team personally? When I asked 1,000 leaders this question, only 44% agreed their manager knew them well and 63% cited a lack of emotional intelligence as the reason they did not connect well. Jack Ma of Alibaba says that, in the past, work was about muscles, now it’s about brains and, in the future, it will be about the heart. Empathy is the language of leadership and is a proven way to build high psychological safety, no matter what the situation or challenge. Empathy increases understanding, collaboration and conflict resolution. Top empathetic companies generate more earnings than the rest. Their secret: they treat people as human beings, not human resources.

The problem is in a world where battles for our attention are at record levels and, when 1/5 leaders report burnout, it’s all too easy for empathy to take a back seat. The elevator test is a simple and fun way to test your current levels of empathy. Next time you walk into an elevator, check to see whether you: 1. Keep the doors open for somebody else who is approaching; or 2. Press the button frantically to close the door in the face of the person just before they get there.

My research of 1,000 leaders showed that 90% agree empathy is important – one of the best ways to thrive – and, yet, only 33% said it was a current strength. For me, empathy is about ‘we, not me’. Empathy begins with attention, which is one of the rarest and purest forms of generosity a leader can give today in our ‘always on’ workplaces. It’s about putting yourself in the shoes of those around you and seeing the world from their perspective. I recently saw Richard Branson do exactly this at a conference when he took his shoes off and said it’s impossible to understand your team and your customers without walking in their shoes. When’s the last time you walked in somebody else’s shoes?

EMPATHY BUILDERS

• ■Listening
• ■Attention
• ■Interest
• ■Perspective taking
• ■Appreciation
• ■Patience
• ■Compassion.

Leaders scale empathy in different ways. At Starbucks, when making decisions about the future, CEO Kevin Johnson uses the empty chair technique when making high stakes decisions about the future direction of the business. The empty chair represents the customer. Howard Schultz, the former Chairman and CEO of Starbucks, always ensured there were two empty chairs at every board meeting. The first chair represents the customers, their thoughts, needs and feelings. The second chair is a bit more surprising. This chair is for Starbucks employees. Schultz deeply understood that employees are partners in the success of the company and, without factoring them into the equation, the company has no chance of succeeding. Whether empty chairs are a nice idea or a useful practice, focusing on employees’ needs is one of the more crucial keys to success.

At JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon believes that empathy can’t be created artificially and begins with relationships. One in seven banking customers around the world has a visual or hearing disability, which affects their ability to shop online. The leaders at JPMorgan wanted their teams to step into the shoes of the 1/7 clients who are visually or hearing impaired. Using VR equipment dubbed the ‘empathy enhancer’, individuals can step into the shoes of their clients and see the world from their perspective.

THE SISU LAB

How do you transform barriers to frontiers? The 3D Leader has what the Finnish call sisu, a flair for ‘extraordinary determination and resoluteness in the face of extreme adversity’. It takes sisu to stand at the door when a big angry bear is on the other side. That bear could be your competition or even a deep-seated inner fear holding you back from a better future. Emilia Lahti heads up The Sisu Lab and is a distinguished researcher of the Finnish construct of sisu. She holds an Applied Positive Psychology Masters Degree from the University of Pennsylvania and has been mentored in the fields of grit, self-control and positive psychology by world-renowned thought leaders Dr Martin Seligman and Dr Angela Duckworth.

Lahti is the embodiment of sisu. Her work stems from a traumatic experience that made her rethink her whole life and, ultimately, find her true calling: helping others. In the long term, she wants to identify practical ways for the cultivation of sisu within various contexts, from being a leader to recovering from traumatic experiences. She writes: ‘Evolution comes before survival only in the dictionary. We are creatures of reason, programmed to preserve energy and maintain equilibrium. However, in order to not merely survive but to thrive, we must occasionally crank our comfort-o-meter to the red zone. Having an “action mindset” will help you bear the initial discomfort and reap the ultimate rewards.’

You can unlock your inner sisu by doing more of the following:

• ■Leaders are only as strong as the adversity they overcome.
• ■Make a choice to take action. Decide comes from the Latin word decidere which means ‘to let go’.
• ■Remember FAIL stands for from action I learn. Failure is always learning in disguise.
• ■Stay in the present moment – don’t create extra problems that don’t yet exist or get trapped in the past by over-analysing what can’t be changed.
• ■Explore the edges of your comfort zone. Sometimes, the obstacle becomes the path and within every obstacle is an opportunity to learn and grow.

To scale the brave dimension and bring your best and bravest self to work, follow these actions:

1. Reimagine feedback

Today’s best performance is tomorrow’s baseline. Be ready to innovate all your internal processes including your annual performance review. Many forward-thinking companies, such as Accenture, Deloitte and HubSpot have already eschewed this much over-hyped process in favour of more frequent real-time feedback based on individual assignments. Allocating so much effort and resources on a once-a-year process runs the risk of it simply becoming a bureaucratic tick-box exercise or worse, delaying vital performance-related conversations that should happen daily. As a leader, you have to mesh an individual’s sense of purpose with that of the organisation. Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup, in a Harvard Business Review article, writes: ‘Your employees are not mind-readers.’ Make sure you declare what really matters and why and then ensure you deliver on those expectations. At Pixar, the animation company, leaders adopt daily reviews or ‘dailies’, a process for giving and getting immediate feedback in a positive way. Individuals want to know how they’re doing. One of the most useful actions you can take today is to give your team regular progress updates. Frequency really does matter. A once-a-year review in an age where most look at their mobile phone more than 50 times per day no longer works.

2. Stop bad meetings

Most leaders are really bad at running meetings. In my own experience of attending hundreds of meetings, I quickly evolved from FOMO (fear of missing out) to JOMO (joy of missing out). I observed that a lot were good at top-down style communication, the kind the military invented, but very rarely were good at extracting questions, concerns and ideas from employees who knew the company and its customers best. Many leaders are still trapped in bad meetings syndrome which means ‘having meetings about meetings’. Opportunities are missed, conversations are wasted, and teams become invisible. The 3D Leader is different. It places a huge amount of value on talent and ideas, always looking for better ways to extract the best thinking and creativity from others.

Intermittent meetings work well for meetings of up to 10 people and increase personal contributions by giving everyone equal participation and a voice to fully express oneself. One of the most frustrating parts of anyone’s career is trying to cut through all the barriers to communicate ideas and problems to the actual decision maker. For many people, there are an unconscionable number of obstacles to overcome in order to have a voice and be heard. Silence is always the safer option. With intermittent meetings, there are three simple steps to follow:

1. 1.Frame a question or problem to the group first.
2. 2.Allocate five minutes of ‘deep thinking’ time to allow the participants to write down their own point of view. This step is important to give everybody the time and respect to think.
3. 3.Invite a participant to share their ideas and then ask them to nominate somebody else. This boosts trust, psychological safety and reduces groupthink and self-similarity bias where we, unwittingly, speak more to those who are more similar to us.

3. Diversify everything

Diversity is not only an ethical priority – it can also make teams more resilient in the face of adversity. When diversity is high, leaders report higher levels of innovation and engagement because they increase the capacity for original ideas by expanding the range of viewpoints and options available. We have a long way to go, though. Even as diversity initiatives and the #MeToo movement work to balance power dynamics across a range of industries and workplaces, the statistics on women in leadership roles tell a woeful story. In the UK, there are just 6 women CEOs – and 16 CEOs called John – in the FTSE 100 and only 25 out of 500 women CEOs in the USA.

The situation is not good for startups, either. According to data from PitchBook, female founders received 2.2% of $130 billion in VC funding. A McKinsey Global Institute report finds that $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality. As the speed of change accelerates, it’s becoming increasingly clear that having diverse and inclusive teams isn’t just a moral imperative, it’s increasingly necessary to stay on top and you can’t do that if half the planet are ignored.

My research on diverse and inclusive decision making to understand just how much improvement is possible shows that inclusive teams report making better decisions up to 87% of the time and decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivering 60% better results. Diversity is not a nice to have. It’s a must have.

4. Scale trust

Without trust, there’s no collaboration and without collaboration there’s no value. I spend a lot of time helping leaders build, manage or recover trust. In the last year, 10 out of 15 industries have reported a material decline in trust with their customers due to data breaches and cyber crime. The writer George Orwell would have relished these times. Fake news, false facts, alternative facts, meme warfare and internet trolls, to name just a few.

Trust builders: ■expertise ■integrity ■reliability ■empathy ■respect.

Trust destroyers: ■ego ■complacency ■inaction ■inconsistency ■dishonesty.

Leaders can earn peoples’ trust by prioritising it alongside growth and profitability and leading by the credo that trust is won and lost on a daily basis by matching what you say with what you do and engaging everybody in the direction of the business. Relationships equal results. As a leader, you must be ready to leverage each trust builder with all your stakeholders by following three steps:

Step 1. Measure the current levels of trust with your employees and customers and know where you stand as a leader.

Step 2. Bake trust into the culture by leading with context more than control.

Step 3. Elevate the importance of trust across the whole stakeholder mix from employees to suppliers and customers.

5. Hire originals

The French have an expression called ‘déformation professionnelle’, which means the way your profession can subtly warp your judgement so that you can see things from only one perspective. Don’t hire for culture fit. Hire for culture contribution. Seek out people who look at the world differently, see around corners or bring surprising new perspectives.

Some of the biggest companies are making autism a hiring priority and organisations such as JPMorgan Chase and McKinsey are stepping up efforts to grow these untapped talent pools. Have the courage to put hiring originals centre stage in your organisation because it’s when different mindsets collide that new connections and breakthroughs are made. Hiring for diversity and building a team of originals is one of the fastest routes to faster innovation and a heathier human-first culture.

6. Build a strong mind

Leadership is a decision. The brave dimension is a decision: you choose to learn from the challenges or let them defeat you. To achieve greatness, you have to fail greatly. Hollywood producer and director Jerry Zucker says: ‘Nobody else is paying as much attention to your failures as you are . . . To everyone else, it’s just a blip on the radar screen, so just move on.’ Most overnight successes take about 10 to 15 years, and the journey is not a linear path but rather a series of ups and downs with a major dip along the way known as the ‘test’. A test could take the form of bad PR or one of your top performers walking out of the door. Try building risk and resilience into your daily routine. Focus on resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure. At times, you might privately think you can’t go on. You must persist. Arianna Huffington, cofounder of The Huffington Post, says it best: ‘I failed, many times in my life. One failure that I always remember was when my second book was rejected by 36 publishers. Many years later, I watched HuffPost come alive to mixed reviews, including some very negative ones, like the reviewer who called the site “the equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar, and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one”. But my mother used to tell me, “Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s a stepping stone to success.”’

Brave is the second dimension of the 3D Leader and is essential to feeling alive at work. It ensures ROI – return on intelligence – from your teams and helps everybody to bring their best and most daring selves to work.

KEY MESSAGES

• ■The brave dimension inspires everybody to feel more alive at work and be their bravest self. How will you enable your employees to bring their best and boldest self to work?
• ■Psychological safety (curiosity safety, challenger safety, collaboration safety and culture safety) is the biggest driver of the brave dimension. How will you accelerate this across your whole organisation?
• ■It’s impossible to speak up, share ideas and make a difference if psychological safety is low. What will you do to launch, scale and sustain a culture of high psychological safety and high diversity?
• ■Most teams are not teams. They are just groups of individuals with their own idea of what success looks like. How will you tap the power of quantum teamwork?
• ■Your team are not mind readers. How will you declare expectations and then inspire and empower the team to deliver against them?
• ■The language of leadership is the language of empathy. The problem is those who are seen as powerful are often least likely to show empathy. How will you lead with empathy and help your team cultivate it?
• ■We are blind to our own blindness. How will you flag blind spots and build strengths for your team and self?
• ■Trust is the foundation of every action, relationship and interaction. How will you prioritise trust alongside growth, learning and talent?

ACTION

If you do only one thing now, ask your team to evaluate the current levels of psychological safety (curiosity safety, challenger safety, collaboration safety and culture safety) and use the findings to flag blind spots, increase team strengths and close gaps.

Websites

www.angeladuckworth.com

www.sisulab.com

https://rework.withgoogle.com

www.instituteofcoaching.org

www.gallup.com

Podcasts

CultureLab with Aga Bajer

Be Afraid and Do It Anyway with Brené Brown

Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman

The Tony Robbins Podcast

The Mindvalley Podcast

TED Talks

The Power of Vulnerability – Brené Brown

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverence – Angela Duckworth

Sisu: Transforming Barriers To Frontiers – Emilia Lahti

The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage – Susan David

Courage is Contagious – Damon Davis