Leadership Takes Courage
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
If I asked you what the traits of a good leader were, there would likely be a long list of responses. There would be the obvious: a good communicator, for example. The potentially contentious: charisma is one that I have seen hotly debated. And a few less common and perhaps more personal suggestions. But one trait that wouldn’t come up as often as I think it should? The need for a leader to be courageous.
In some contexts, it is definitely recognized as important—the military is the most obvious one. But in a business context, it doesn’t appear in many “top x qualities of exceptional leader” lists. And that’s a mistake.
Courage is an essential characteristic for virtually every leader if they are going to reach their full potential.
Courageous where…and how?
The reason why courage isn’t mentioned commonly as a leadership quality is obvious—it isn’t something that is typically associated with the type of projects that most of us manage, or the teams that we lead. It doesn’t take a lot of courage to develop a new piece of software, launch a new product, or streamline an operational process.
Or does it?
Think about the pressures on some of those projects:
- Business leaders press for the launch of a product by a certain date to gain a competitive advantage.
- Those same leaders stress the need…
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"There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more." - Woody Allen |
