Opinion: Courageous leadership means facing fears

Don Harkey

Many people work very hard to achieve increasing levels of authority, not only at work but within civic, religious or nonprofit organizations. The politician works hard to get elected. The employee works hard to get promoted to become a supervisor. The manager works hard to become an executive. A business owner works hard to get the business up and running.

There is a natural and very real fear of losing what you worked so hard to achieve. This can make leaders act more cautious and sometimes make decisions out of fear. It can also make leaders freeze and refuse to take decisive action on key decisions.

A great example regarding penalty kicks in soccer is outlined in the Freakonomics Radio podcast. A penalty kick involves a single player and the opposing goalie. The player making the kick selects where they will aim the ball and the goalie will attempt to block the kick. However, the goalie does not have enough time to react to where the ball is going. he goalie picks what direction they will move before the ball is kicked to have a chance to stop the ball. The kicker is successful 75% of the time.

When you look at the numbers, 98% of goalies choose to dive either left or right when blocking a goal. This means that the kicker’s best option for the penalty kick is to kick it right down the middle as the goalie dives to one side or the other. However, kickers only choose this option 17% of the time even though they are very aware that kicking down the middle is the best option.

The reason kickers don’t use this option more often is simple. If the kicker kicks down the middle and the goalie doesn’t move and stops the shot, the kicker looks bad. The kicker, who worked hard for the position, will get blasted by the public and by coaches for an apparent lack of effort risking their position on the team. Thus 83% of the time, kickers choose a less successful, but less risky option.

I see this phenomenon happen a lot in business and in our community. A leader is given a choice to make, and they don’t make the obvious choice because of fear.

A common example is a middle manager who has a toxic employee who is causing a lot of issues inside the team. The middle manager knows they should probably fire the toxic employee, but the toxic employee has indicated they are likely to sue the company. The middle manager doesn’t fire the employee because they are afraid of the headaches it will cause to upper management if the employee sues the company, even if there is no basis for a lawsuit. Having one of your employees sue your own company doesn’t look good and threatens the manager’s job and their ability to get promoted.

Another common example occurs commonly in community leadership. Top leaders don’t challenge each other within a community to do better work because they don’t want to rock the boat. If they are looked at as a team player, they protect their position. If they challenge the status quo, they risk being looked at as a troublemaker and losing their position and their influence.

The problem with all of this is that higher levels of authority have higher levels of responsibility to other people. If people in key positions won’t take a stand on an issue or make courageous decisions, then who will? There are many communities and many organizations who have slowly declined due to leaders who make decisions out of selfish fear instead of making courageous decisions that help the great good.

For leaders who hold key seats of authority, I encourage you to be courageous or I encourage you to get out of the way. For everyone else, I encourage you to have a little grace for those who do make difficult decisions and reward leaders who are willing to be wrong from time to time.

Don Harkey is the owner and CEO of People Centric Consulting Group LLC. He can be reached at donharkey@peopleccg.com.