Is there a Connection between Courage & Leadership ?

I have recently been thinking about the meaning of Leadership and the role that courage plays in Leadership. All this has come from my strive to look for a new assignment in Shell and invariably you come across questions which make you ponder about what you want to do in future, where do you want to get to and what does it take to get there. Invariably the answer is Leadership position but then what kind of Leader ?

The whole Leadership musings reminds me of something that used to happen in fifth grade. At recess, we kids used to play football or Hand Cricket (don’t bother yourself if you don’t know what hand cricket is – its just an innovative way of playing cricket where you use your hand as a bat instead of a proper bat and a rubber ball instead of the normal cricket ball !!!). Somehow I became the person who decided what we played, and who played what position. I don’t know how this evolved. The fact that I was the worst guy in Studies might have had something to do with it. My memory of this is that all these guys would stand around me in a circle, jumping up and down and waving their hands and asking, “Can I be on your team?” “Can I bat first?” “Can I be the goalkeeper?” And I thought, Why are they asking me?

Nevertheless I tried to be fair and inclusive. I tried to make sure everyone had a good time. This was my first lesson in leadership: You never know exactly who’s looking up to you, or why. I concluded from this that I might as well become the kind of kid who was worth looking up to(infront of those kids), just in case anyone’s looking.

Many years later when I thought about it, I realised that some people led by virtue of their institutional authority (as teachers or coaches, for example), and some people lead by virtue of their voice or vision: their passion or conviction or courage. And other people led because they were not good in studies. :-)

One of the things that we often hear about Asian culture and from a lot of senior as well as middle management is that most Asians tend to sit back and are not very authoritative. The Asian style is not to question authority as opposed to Western people who can be a lot more challenging and are thus more conducive to be natural leader. And of course this has often been given as an excuse and a reason for why we don’t have more Asians in senior and middle management positions.

Plus, Asians aren’t comfortable with leadership, or so they say.

So I decided to pen my two-pence about leadership from an Asian context nad what I quickly found was that leadership has nothing to do with nationality or any other boxes that we create to categorise people. The key attribute boxes as far as I am concerned are 'Courageous' or 'not Couragesous'.

Thinking further about it from an Asian context - even if some of us might have been born leaders, we were not born into a society that welcomed leadership as a natural trait. Possibly because parents and family play much larger part in our upbringing and therefore play a big part in our decisions during our growing up years. So we have to give ourselves permission to go ahead and lead.

I was talking to a group of new joiners in Shell about work-flow etc, and I told them that the current structure gives them authority to demand work, to ask for clarity of vision, to take risks, to define their own career. During the discussion, one of the guys stood asked, “Why should we need someone else to provide clarity and give us authority? Shouldn’t we just go ahead and do it or just take what we need?”

Ah, I thought, these guys are COURAGEOUS.

But a lot of OLDER Asian people - and I can put myself in that group now because I just turned 30 - compared to the 23 year olds joining the Shell organization - still need permission to be different from the “sugar and spice, everything nice” kind of attitude that we were raised to be. We need to give this permission to ourselves. We can’t wait for our parents or our senios to give it to us.

It occurred to me that this in itself is a definition of a leader: a person who defines himself or herself and his (her) world. To define is to make clear. The courage to have ihs own definition

How YOU define leadership will be different from how I define it, and that’s good: we need an ASSORTMENT of leaders.

So What is Courage ? - Courage is Courage of conviction. Courage to disagree and courage to stand on your own legs. Every theory in the world has a flaw – hell they even challenge Einstein’s theories these days and he was a smart guy no doubt – So why worry about other people challenging your theory. Showing conviction and courage to stand by your thoughts is also a means to testing yourself whether you have the ability to get to where you want to take the project based on your conviction.

I think if we give ourselves permission to lead; and the habit of being courageous – we can define the rules of the game for ourselves. It takes courage to deal with opponents, frankly - though no more, really, than it takes to be a good son or daughter in the face of extenuating circumstances. The word courage has its roots in the French word, coeur, for heart. And courage always involves fear - if it's not scary, it doesn't require courage. So courage is when you're afraid, and you act from the heart anyway. Courage is cumulative, I’ve noticed: the more courageous you are, the more courageous you become.

All of us have little boys & girls in your lives - or women and men - who stand around us in a circle, jumping up and down, waving their hands, waiting for our instruction and inspiration and advice. “Can I play?” they ask. Or, “Can I be on your team?” You might know their names; or you might not even be able to see these people. But they're there, looking to you for permission, for a sense of what’s possible. They’re looking to you to learn how to grow up, how to be men and women, how to be leaders themselves, how to define the world in ways that make sense to them.

Its up to us to standup and have the courage to become the Leaders.