Courage Goes to Work: How to Build Backbones, Boost Performance, and Get Results - Softcover

Treasurer, Bill

 
9781523098569: Courage Goes to Work: How to Build Backbones, Boost Performance, and Get Results
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1523098562 ISBN 13: 9781523098569
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

"Fear and doubt are the two greatest enemies of high performance in the workplace. This powerful book shows you how to instill more and more courage and confidence in every person, releasing personal potential you didn't know you had available." --Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog!

The hardest part of a manager's job isn't staying organized, meeting deliverable dates, or staying on budget. It's dealing with people who are too comfortable doing things the way they've always been done and too afraid to do things differently--workers who are, as Bill Treasurer puts it, too "comfeartable." They fail to exert themselves any more than they have to and make their businesses dangerously safe.  

Treasurer, a courage-building pioneer, proposes a bold antidote: courage. He lays out a step-by-step process that treats courage as a skill that can be developed and strengthened. Treasurer differentiates what he calls the Three Buckets of Courage: TRY Courage, having the guts to take initiative; TRUST Courage, being willing to follow the lead of others; and TELL Courage, being honest and assertive with coworkers and bosses. 

Aristotle said that courage is the first virtue because it makes all other virtues possible. It's as true in business as it is in life. With more courage, workers gain the confidence to take on harder projects, embrace company changes with more enthusiasm, and extend themselves in ways that will benefit their careers and their company.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bill Treasurer is founder and chief encouragement officer at Giant Leap Consulting (www.giantleapconsulting.com), a courage-building company that helps people and organizations be more courageous. Among his clients are Accenture, CNN, EarthLink, SPANX, the Centers for Disease Control, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He is the author of Right Risk and the chief editor of Positively M.A.D. Prior to founding Giant Leap, Treasurer was the captain of the U.S. High Diving Team and performed over 1,500 dives from heights that scaled to over 100 feet (sometimes on fire!).

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Too Much Comfort, Too Much Fear

Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes.

Joseph Addison

We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.

Winston Churchill

“Management sucks. And I’m a manager, so I guess I suck too. Or the people I’m managing suck. Either way, this ain’t fun and I want out.”

It was discouraging to see that Brian’s situation had deteriorated to this point. Only two years earlier, Brian had been fast-tracked into a front-line manager position. His upbeat attitude and make-it-happen work ethic had caught the attention of the company executives, who decided that he’d make a fine addition to their ranks. Yet here he was, ready to jump ship. And he hated himself for it.

“For the first time in my life, I feel like a failure. I couldn’t wait to be made a manager. But now I’m convinced that I’m not cut out for it. I think the only reason I haven’t quit already is because I’m too ashamed, or too competitive, to admit defeat. I hate being a manager.”2

I had been coaching Brian for a few months as part of a multiyear leadership program my company had developed for Brian’s employer. The program had been developed for the company’s high-potential leaders, and Brian had been handpicked by his boss to participate. Brian was highly regarded by the senior executives, so it was a bit surprising for me to hear that things had gotten so bad for him. Somehow this “hi-po” manager had been able to conceal his true feelings about the job from his boss and coworkers.

“It surprises me that you don’t think you’re cut out to be a manager, Brian. Is it the work? The pressure? What?” I asked.

“The pressure I can deal with. I was a college athlete and I kind of like pressure. It makes things seem more important and urgent, which gets me going. And the tactical part of the work, for the most part, isn’t hard. You make a plan; you break it down into a set of goals, milestones, and delivery dates; you keep it all organized on a spreadsheet; and then you work the plan.”

“So what’s the crux of it, buddy?” I asked. “From what you just told me, you don’t find management all that hard. What I didn’t hear about was the stuff you hate about managing. What about that?”

Like lava inching its way up through the earth, the frustrations that had gotten Brian to this point began bubbling to the surface. “To me, the hard part about managing, the stuff I hate, is all the people stuff. I hate the fact that no one shows the initiative to take on work outside their own scope. I hate 3 the small way people think, and how the only thing they seem to care about is the itty-bitty task right in front of them. I hate having to continuously remind people about impending deadlines and that no one works with the same urgency or intensity as I do. I hate having to force people to accept changes that the company requires us to make and that are mostly in everyone’s best interests. I hate all the psychoanalyzing that goes into figuring out how to get people to trust me. I also hate not being able to trust that people won’t screw up and make me look bad when I assign important tasks to them. I hate having to confront people about their performance, especially when they think they’re performing way better than they really are. I hate having to pry the truth out of people so that I know about problems before it’s too late to solve them. And I especially hate all the crybaby excuses, finger-pointing, and shitty attitudes that get in the way of doing actual work.”

The little venting moment helped Brian to purge all the surface stuff so that he could get closer to the core of the issue. After a moment his eyes got smaller, as if he’d found a shiny golden nugget while prospecting at the center of hell. He continued, “When it comes right down to it, I hate that people are either too comfortable doing things the way they’ve always done them or too afraid to do things differently.”

Mixing Comfort and Fear

Over the years, I’ve coached a lot of people like Brian. Talented workers who get promoted because of their strong leadership potential, but who quickly grow frustrated with managing people who are slow to change, slow to trust, and slow getting things done. Brian’s golden nugget insight is 4 spot-on: The problem has to do with comfort and fear. Workers who are too comfortable don’t exert themselves any more than they have to. They become satisfied meeting a minimum standard of performance, equating “just enough” with good enough. Like a sofa loaded down with overstuffed relatives after a holiday dinner, teams with workers who are too comfortable become lethargic and heavy with the weight of mediocrity. At the same time, workers who are too fearful play it too safe. Fearful workers set safe goals, say safe things, and make safe choices. Because fearful workers spend far too much energy preserving what is instead of pursuing what could be, their preoccupation with safety ultimately becomes dangerous for the business.

Comfort and fear in smaller doses can be good things. Striving to gain comfort with new skills, for example, is a worthwhile goal. At the same time, fear helps workers to focus on preventing and mitigating risks by keeping them vigilant about small issues that could grow into big problems. But in higher doses, and especially when mixed together, comfort and fear become toxic, creating a situation where workers become what I call “comfeartable.”

Comfeartable workers are those who grow comfortable working in a perpetual state of fear, which only serves to magnify the ill effects of both concepts. Comfeartable workers develop a high tolerance for misery, often staying in jobs they don’t find gratifying or, worse yet, secretly despise. Some comfeartable workers are like impassive zombies, sleepwalking through their jobs with no sense of urgency or commitment. Others include excuse makers, people who choose apathy over action by cooking up all sorts of reasons why they can’t do something instead of just doing it. Comfeartable 5 workers also include people who dump problems in your lap but offer no solutions for solving them. For these workers, going the extra mile just takes too much effort. Instead, comfeartable workers give their deepest fidelity to safety and sameness, even if those things come at the expense of progress. When fused together, comfort and fear adhere to the same law: Stay safe at all costs! No initiative. No risk taking. No candor. No making waves. No more than what is asked. No innovating or extending or leading. And no support for those who do.

This book is for all the managers like Brian out there. Maybe you’re one of them. If you’ve grown frustrated trying to get workers to stretch beyond their comfort zones, if you’re at your wits’ end trying to get workers to step up to their potential, or if you’re tired of having to treat adults like frightened children, this book is for you.

Activating Comfeartable Workers

As a manager, you may be tempted to adopt a scorched-earth campaign and just fire all the Comfeartable workers. But a wholesale firing of such workers would do more harm than good. Comfeartable workers are so prevalent in the workplace that such a strategy would be the managerial equivalent of carpet bombing, potentially eviscerating the organization. A more constructive and practical approach would be to help workers face and overcome their comfeartable ways. The reality is,...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1523098562
ISBN 13 
9781523098569
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
232
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
eucomply OÜ
hello@eucompliancepartner.com

Pärnu mnt. 139b - 14
Tallinn
11317
Estland

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