The First Virtue of COURAGE: Bravery
Bravery: To face or endure opposition or danger with firmness of moral strength, mind, and will.
There is no question we are living in a time when bravery is essential to survival and may become even more essential in the years to come as we solve the problems of the future. Yet, as the last ten years have attested, this trait is sadly underdeveloped in some of the leaders running huge corporations with untold consequences to the thousands who entrusted their life savings into the hands of that leadership. We ask ourselves, how these leaders got there and how the flaws in their character were not uncovered sooner, before they reached the higher echelons of responsibility?
What is possible is that they were indeed brave, but had let this strength get out of control to become a perversion of a strength that is good in the right measure, but in an overused state becomes buffoonery. Bravery in the overused state is more about ego and manifests as bravado and excessive risk taking. This kind of leadership can often be more clearly described as a certain brand of leadership charisma that can fool us rather easily. People who have been blessed with charisma are undoubtedly exciting, moving and full of forward momentum and many of them are the best leaders we have. But charisma, without character is what I call danger. In effort to be wise, we should all learn how to discern the fine distinctions between charisma and character as we think about who we commit to follow and how we want to lead. The leader with charisma coupled with underdeveloped character, will bravely take us to places none of the morally conscious would want to find ourselves in at the end.
The next time you are sitting in front of a leader who is powerfully influential and tempting to follow, look beneath the surface and be sure the character is also there.
A Split Second to Decide
Recently, I was on a family vacation to the Outer Banks, where we had rented virtually the entire island for a multi-family week in wildlife splendor at the coast. My daughter and her boyfriend came along and brought her four pound Maltipoo, Ebenezer. One of the cabins at the far end of the island had been rented by a group of volunteer counselors who brought a group of special kids for a weekend outing and they had a huge fish fry on their last evening there. One of the volunteers had come over to invite all of us to come join the dinner and enjoy the feast with the kids. Our custom was to walk by foot to the other cabins for dinner and our family headed over, with Ebenezer in tow and unleashed since there appeared to be no other dogs on the island. As we ventured to the other end of the dunes over to the unfamiliar row of cabins, we rounded a large truck and in an instant were faced with a ferocious large black lab, who went into a frightening frenzy when he saw Ebenezer. Though the dog was tied to the truck, we were so close that there was literally no possibility that the dog would not reach Ebenezer and kill him in one movement. My daughter’s boyfriend Chris, reacted in a split second act of bravery and threw his entire body on top of the attacking Labrador, pinning the body of the wildly thrashing dog down to the sand while my daughter scooped up her tiny little dog back to safety. This was without a doubt the most up close and personal experience of sheer bravery that I have ever witnessed. You had to be there to be aware of the ferocious teeth and forward motion of attack to experience the fear we all felt in that moment. But Chris is a person I am coming to know as a man of courage and is grounded with the quiet and unassuming confidence of a leader with character. In that moment, we all felt the comfort of his strength of presence and my mind registered a new belief that our daughter would be safe with a man like this.
The Two Sides of Instinct
Stories like this are a little bit about instinct, but much more clearly about learned character and a commitment to doing what is right. If you don’t have solid character, the ability to do the brave act in that split second will not exist. I am reminded of two more stories that illustrate both sides of this point. I was recently reading an article about sailing in one of our cruising magazines and read a story written by a man who had NOT done the brave thing in the moment of crisis. While sailing in the dark at night, he had gone below decks to fix a cup of coffee and when he came up saw that a huge carrier was passing directly in front of them and a crash into the the huge vessel was imminent. He screamed below to his son who quickly dashed up top, but the son’s girlfriend was asleep in her bunk tucked behind a lee cloth and did not come up in time for the sidelong crash into the carrier. The captain, in a moment of fear, dove off of the sailboat before it crashed into the carrier without a second thought to what would happen to the other two aboard. Thankfully, his story ended well, and all of them survived, but as he swam back to the broken sailboat, he described the agony of guilt swarming his soul and I doubt he will ever be the same again.
The other story you will all remember was the story of the brave man who dove on top of the young man who tumbled into the subway tracks from an attack of convulsions. In a split second he made a decision to risk his own life to save the young man who would have surely lost his life if not for the bravery of this heroism. In a final testament to his solid character, the hero would not accept credit for his decision as anything other than a decision to do the right thing. I found myself wondering if I would have made that choice and I am not sure that I could. These stories make a person think.
We’re Not Saving Lives
Fortunately, most corporate leaders are not saving lives, so the brand of bravery required by most of us average bears is not of the most extreme variety unless we are running airlines or hospitals. As I talk with my clients every day, the decision points most of them have to make are about bravery to make decisions based on what they believe to be morally the right thing to so. As leaders, the greater good of the many, must outweigh the good of the few, or the one. This is the bottom line that defines leadership. We have to be brave to make the hard decisions that require us to make decisions in favor of a greater good. Most of the time, the greater good we are protecting is the survival of the entity itself, so the greater good of the organization must come first in the pecking order. Yet, not at the expense of a moral issue that turns the organization into a living example of something that can no longer be characterized by good. It has to produce something or serve something of value to this world in order to be something people can have pride in or the entity becomes a sick version of opportunistic endeavors and will not be able to retain good people to do its work. So, it is a balance. And it requires a powerful ability by leaders to make value judgments and decisions that are the right thing to do. Very often, putting their own needs aside.
Think about the last time you were faced with a high risk decision. Did you do what is right, or did you do what protected your own selfish needs? We all need to keep thinking about that one so we are prepared for the split second moment when our character will be required to call the shot.