Positive Change In The Workplace Competent Courage That Creates The Right Conditions For Action

The purpose of management is to be able to make change possible. Change should come at any level and those who are not in executive or managerial positions are more concerned than managers. Management Guru, Peter Drucker, is famously quoted as “whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision”. Drucker’s experience of courage can be applied to entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and innovators who find new solutions for problems or apply applied solutions to increase productivity and improve businesses. Success stories in the workplace often go beyond business successes to highlight courageous acts sometimes by whistleblowers, organizational martyrs, and most of the time by respected insiders at all organization levels who are capable of initiating change, especially when faced with upper opposition. Courage is needed whether you are opposing an unjust decision, a wrong policy, an ungrounded strategy, or any ethical issue or practice. However, courage alone does not guarantee you will get a positive result and reach the change you hope for. As a matter of fact, many courageous whistleblowers end up ruining their careers.

After more than a decade studying why people speak up at work, John Detert, John L. Colley Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and author of Choosing Courage, started investigating workplace courage and why some people succeed in making change without having their career ruined. His research in this field revealed that four principles can help people at all levels in getting more chances to succeed in making a posttive change. People who were able to make a positive change relied on those four principles more than merely relying on courage: laying the groundwork, choosing your battles, persuading in the moment, and following up.

Competent Courageous, as Detert calls them, are people who know when to chose the right timing, they prepare for months if not years to seek the right moment with the right strategy, select the right opportunity to excerpt courageousness, use their persuasion skills to bring in adequate people and partners who can help, and follow up on their actions overseeing things that go as planned and engaging when things go in an undesirable way to strengthen connections and relationships as well as repair ties with people who might get hurt by the taken actions.