Consider the role courageous leaders play in our society—from the firefighter who runs into a burning building to the feminist who challenges conventional thinking to the athlete who pushes physical boundaries. We are inspired by them, we learn from them, and we are protected by them. Now, imagine a world without them.

During the Revolutionary War, two sailors named Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven witnessed their leader, the commander of the Continental Navy, participating in the torture of captured British sailors. The sailors knew what they were up against with Commodore Esek Hopkins. He came from a powerful family and was in a position of power in a newly formed government. It was risky to say or do anything to stop Hopkins, but both Shaw and Marven believed that it was their duty to report their superior’s misconduct. In 1777, their worst fears were realized when they were arrested after Hopkins retaliated by filing a libel suit against them. However, later that same month, Congress enacted the first whistle-blower act and not only released the two men but also agreed to pay their attorneys’ fees.¹

Imagine a world without Shaw and Marven.

Fast-forward to more than a century later when an outbreak of the Ebola virus in western Africa killed more than 11,000 people and became the most deadly and feared virus on the planet. The doctors, nurses, and caregivers working with the Ebola virus became our saviors. While many medical staff, understandably, resigned on the spot, others went into hospitals and makeshift treatment facilities armed with their medical training, and more important, their concern for human life and their indisputable courage.²

Just out of school, completing his medical internship, Dr. Jerry Brown was hardly prepared for leading the fight against Ebola, but he faced his patients anyway, looking them in the eye as he diagnosed them and cared for them. In Liberia, his hospital filled quickly with infected patients but with a limited number of staff willing to take their chances. Brown told a group of students at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, “The first thought that I had was, ‘If we do nothing, this disease is going to overrun us, and before you get to know it, there won’t be any country called Liberia.’” Brown said, “We had to do something. We couldn’t run away.”³

Imagine a world without Dr. Jerry Brown and the caretakers of Ebola patients.

Halfway across the world on a train to Paris in late August of 2015, five men—a British businessman, two American military men, one American tourist, and a Frenchman—were about to become heroes. The hum of their otherwise average day was interrupted by the sound of a gunshot and shattered glass. An unknown man entered their train car with an AK-47 assault rifle.

The five men jumped into action, tackling the attacker, then hog-tying him and holding him down until the train could stop and the French police could take him into custody. All the while, other passengers stood in shock, horror, and disbelief, considering the incredible tragedy that was averted by the swift and selfless acts of these five men.

Later, French president François Hollande said the men showed us “that faced with terror, we have the power to resist. They also gave us a lesson in courage, in will, and thus, in hope.”⁴

Imagine a world without five heroes on a train.

Courage is what moves us to action in the face of tough times. Without it, we suffer from our humanity instead of rising above it. The good news is that courage is accessible to everyone. It is not in short supply or limited to the elite, powerful, rich, or heavily trained. It is something we all have the capacity to obtain once we understand the origin of it and how to overcome the obstacles to leveraging it.

Courage Is the Way

Although the demographic makeup of leaders varies dramatically, their challenges largely remain the same. Leaders of all shapes and sizes are asked to make tough decisions, have tough conversations, take on tough workloads, inspire tough people, and achieve tough goals. These challenges are not unique. But not all leaders are capable of doing the tough stuff. What separates a good manager from an exceptional leader is the willingness to face any challenge rather than avoid it, delegate it, or run from it. Simply put, when the time comes, does the leader have the courage to move to action?

Best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert found her resolve to continue writing after six years of being rejected because, as she explained, “I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing.”⁵ Maybe one of the key questions you have to answer for yourself to be a courageous leader is this: Do you love leading more than you hate failing at it?

Let me be the first to provide you some leadership absolutes if you haven’t already figured them out for yourself. You will fail. You will fall down and scrape your knees, break a bone, and maybe even end up in a body cast (metaphorically speaking, of course). There will be pain. Courage is the willingness to do something in the face of fear, discomfort, and pain. As a result, courage is what separates those of us who want something from those of us who actually achieve it.

Individuals enter into leadership for their own reasons. Some find themselves there by accident, and others have simply been anointed leader without any real understanding of what it means, often emulating behaviors of old bosses, both good and bad. Some decide to become leaders because of the paycheck or because of the image their ego conjures up about the status and power leadership brings. In these cases, the ego is the leader’s oxygen, and like a diver without a tank, he or she eventually suffocates. Rarely do individuals enter into leadership with the intention to serve others or something bigger than themselves—even though it’s what gets results long term. The kind of selflessness that goes along with this kind of leadership, as you will learn, is challenging and requires courage.

Courageous leadership is a choice. In each of us, a seed of possibility exists as our potential state. Standing at the crossroads of reality and dreams, it is those who are courageous who ultimately find their way to achieving their goals. There are no hidden roadblocks intentionally set out to derail success or make leaders struggle unnecessarily. The path to courageous leadership is as different as our DNA, but it is equally accessible to everyone.

The Three Components of Courage: Diversity, Pain, and Choice

So where do we start? If courage is equally accessible, then why don’t we all leverage courage equally? What gets in the way?

Often what limits us from leveraging courage is our own preconceived notions about it. We see courage as a muscle that we either have or don’t. Those of us lucky enough to have it can use it while the rest of us have to resort to lesser, more available tools. Yet every human is equipped with approximately 300 unique muscles to stretch, strengthen, and leverage. When we underestimate the diversity of courage, we also underestimate the possibility it brings. There are many ways to see courage and to access it. For a firefighter, courage is stepping into a burning building, but for a schoolteacher, courage may be addressing with a parent unproductive behaviors at home that lead to class dysfunction.

Embracing the diversity of courage is just one part. Pain and choice are equally as important. Just like in our bodies, when we first start using our muscles, we feel pain. Anyone who’s joined a gym for the first time as a New Year’s resolution knows this well. Your first day is full of promise and excitement. Dressed in your workout gear pulled from a box in your closet, you enter the gym with your favorite music blaring on your iPhone only to find that after just 20 minutes of exercise, your chest hurts, you can barely breathe, and you’re ready to pass out. And that’s not the best part. Two days later, the lactic acid in your muscles has built up, and you can’t seem to remember how to walk or move without excruciating pain. It’s no surprise, then, that there is a high attrition rate of people who give up their gym memberships by March.

Pain will follow the act of building courage just as it does building a muscle. We can accept that pain either as our body’s white flag of surrender or as feedback that we are making necessary progress. It’s up to us to decide. Make no mistake—it is a choice.

Therefore, to build a complete courage toolbox, we’ll need to explore the diversity of courage, embrace pain as part of the process, and make the choice to engage courage fully. To do this, in The Courageous Leader, we’ll look at courage in a multifaceted way:

• The Courage to Get Unstuck. “The Courage to Get Unstuck” challenges you to consider that discomfort or pain may be an indication you are stuck. Oftentimes, we find ourselves stuck when we are unwilling to move past the fear of making a needed change that would otherwise propel us forward professionally.
• The Courage to Take a Stand. “The Courage to Take a Stand” is about identifying what is important to you. In this chapter, you’ll evaluate your own values and priorities so that your courageous decisions and actions are aligned with who you are and what you believe is right for you and your organization.
• The Courage to Be Humble. “The Courage to Be Humble” introduces the power of humility as a tool for leadership growth. Specifically, we’ll introduce The Humbling Experience and the importance of courage to get back up after you have been brought to your knees.
• The Courage to Be Confident. “The Courage to Be Confident” looks at the opposite of arrogance and encourages the development of self-confidence and self-trust in leadership, while identifying the consequences when you don’t exemplify this courage.
• The Courage to Delegate. “The Courage to Delegate” is a window into the struggles leaders face when delegating, and more important, the struggles they face when they don’t delegate. In some ways, delegation is one of the most vulnerable things a leader can do, and in that vulnerability, there are risk, fear, and pain that require courage.
• The Courage to Give and Receive Feedback. “The Courage to Give and Receive Feedback” illuminates the importance of having tough conversations in the midst of tough times for clarifying meaning, as well as obtaining healthy results long term.
• The Courage to Be in the Middle. “The Courage to Be in the Middle” takes a deep dive into the world of systems thinking, specifically the work of Barry Oshry and the courage it takes to live in the middle space of organizational life.
• Grow, Recover, Repeat. In the first eight chapters, you’ll explore ways in which you need to push past the pain and do the right thing for your team’s and organization’s success as part of their growth. That kind of courage is exhausting and requires appropriate recovery to continue to maintain a courageous approach to leadership. In this chapter, you will explore methods of recovery after growth.
• Big Dreams, Big Moves. In all of us is the ability to soar beyond our wildest imaginations, but we mostly don’t. It’s not that it is out of our control to live up to our potential but that we haven’t challenged ourselves enough to live our Big Dreams by making Big Moves toward those dreams. This chapter serves as the conduit to begin moving from possibility to planned success and measurable outcomes.

The Intention of the Author and This Book

Over the course of 20 years, I have worked with leaders all over the world, from varying backgrounds, levels of expertise, and industries. I’ve worked as their peer, their coach, their facilitator, their teacher, and their guide. I’ve had the great privilege of observing their courageous stories unfold, one leader at a time. They may not have considered themselves courageous, but I do. Even those who failed, or at least failed in the moment I was with them on their journey, demonstrated great courage in their willingness to suit up and play the game. I am the keeper of their stories. I have an endless bookshelf built in my mind that holds their triumphs and their misfortunes. I hope that, as I share these stories with you, you will also gain a significant appreciation for the role courage plays in leadership. Although there is no magic formula to being courageous, I’ll share with you my formula for courage, concocted from the study of experiences.

Because learning can be vulnerable, it is important to me, as I assimilate the experiences of the leaders I’ve worked with into telling the story of The Courageous Leader, that I reflect as much of their real experiences as possible, while maintaining their confidentiality. In most cases, I’ve changed the leaders’ names. In others, where the details of a story point more clearly to a person and situation, I’ve altered the details while honoring the intent of the stories as much as possible. Some stories I tell represent a collective story of many leaders told as one to convey the purpose of their learning; these stories are not factually based on any one person or situation.

It is also important to communicate that, at times, I share leaders’ stories as they conveyed them to me during an interview. At other times, I tell the stories from my own perspective, observations, and point of view. I am an expert in leadership development, but to say that the assessment and conclusions I draw from their experiences is the definitive way to view the situation is contrary to the goal of this book. Instead, I hope that as I share my perspective, it not only illuminates possibilities but also provides space for readers to filter the insight through their own lens and absorb it as they see fit.

In addition to telling the stories of leaders, I also share my personal stories as an everyday leader struggling to grow a business, raise a family, and give back to my community. Just wait until you read some of my humbling experiences! I find I’m often just one fall and rise up ahead of many of the leaders I lead. The warning signs and strategies are almost obvious in hindsight but often feel invisible when you need them most. As a result, I’m always eager—after brushing myself off and regaining my composure—to share what I learn from personal experiences. Those who have agreed to share their real stories feel the same.

Regardless of my methodology in storytelling, my intent is to create empathy and understanding, to normalize the fact that leadership is hard stuff, and to provide the reader with insight and tools for how to be a leader who is courageous in tough times.

It is my hope that sharing stories of courageous leadership will inspire you to think about what else is possible for you. You are not alone. Your struggles are synonymous with leadership, regardless of your title. CEO does not stand for superhero. Despite your trail of rich successes or mountain of intense failures, this book was written to be a guide.

Each chapter will outline stories and strategies for living courageously as a leader. At the end of each chapter, you’ll see a section called “Chapter Application,” where you’ll be provided questions to consider that will help you apply what you’ve learned in the book to your real-world experiences. If the chapter doesn’t already provide strategies for developing the specific skills introduced in the chapter, you’ll also see a section for strategies to practice.

I ask that, as you begin this book, you give yourself permission to be a learner and stay open to the possibility that you will take away exactly what you need from the time you invest in it.