We recently had the chance to sit down with author and expert on courage, Bill Treasurer. Bill’s latest book, Courage Goes to Work, focuses on building workplace courage. Bill’s own expertise in courage comes from his background as a high diver:

“I learned at a young age that I had a debilitating fear of heights. When I was a kid, my dad took me and my younger brother to the top of the Empire State Building. As the two of them were looking down at the metropolis below, I was pressed up against the building, petrified that I was going to fall. I remember being upset because my younger brother could do something that I couldn’t. It was the first time that I realized what a paralyzing effect that fear can have over a person.

“A few years later I discovered the sport of springboard diving. The sport took hold and I became quite skilled on the 1 meter springboard (i.e., the “low board”). I won the Westchester County diving championships three times. However, when colleges started to make scholarship offers, they would always ask what dives I could do on the high board. Because of my fear of heights, I had avoided the high board altogether. I knew that there would be no way for me to get a scholarship without confronting my fear of heights. So, through the patience of a coach, I started attempting dives at incrementally higher heights. My coach helped me move outside my comfort zone, but in an absorbable way. Eventually I got a full scholarship to West Virginia University.

“After college, I continued attempting higher dives, eventually from heights that scaled to over 100 feet. I became a member of the U.S. High Diving Team and traveled around the world performing in high diving shows at entertainment parks. The genesis of that experience is my fear of heights. You can think of me as the high diver who is afraid of heights!

“The experience was so meaningful to me, that years later when I started my business, I decided that the focus of the business would be to help people take whatever “high dives” they are facing at work. My company, Giant Leap Consulting, is a courage-building company.”

We asked Bill to elaborate a little bit more on courage and how it relates to both organizations and leadership in those organizations.

How do you define courage for leaders and organizations?

“Acting on what is right, despite being afraid or uncomfortable, when facing situations involving pain, risk, uncertainty, opportunity, or intimidation. NOTE: Courage is NOT fearLESSness. It is the opposite. When you are being courageous you are fearFUL, but you carry on despite being afraid.”

How important is courage in organizations to create real, lasting innovation and growth?

“It’s supremely important. It’s courage that fuels a worker’s ability to pursue stretch goals, step up to challenges, and assert ideas. It’s courage that gives innovation the backbone that is needed when new ideas have to be fought for. It’s courage that allows you to withstand the turbulence and naysaying that inevitably accompany new ideas in the early stages. And it’s courage that allows you to ditch a product that’s on its last leg but sentimentality is causing people to hold on too tightly to the past.

“Given the chance, where would you rather work, in a company where everyone’s behavior is directed by fear and anxiety, or where people were confident and courageous?”

What are the best ways to encourage more worthwhile risk-taking when it comes to innovation and growth?

“The single most influential determinant of a culture is the leader of its behaviors. So if a company wants its workers to take some innovative high dives, metaphorically speaking, then the leaders have to be the first ones up and off the platform. Leaders have to Jump First.

“Bertrand Russell once said, “All great ideas start out first as blasphemy.” So, if you really want to create ground-breaking ideas, you have to be willing to defy tradition. You have to encourage pushback, a collision of ideas, and spirited disagreement. All, of course, directed toward an outcome of a fetching and marketable idea. That means leaders have to explicitly encourage back-talk. Especially back-talk that is directed at challenging conventions, cutting through bureaucracy, and neutralizing organizational politics that hinder the implementation, or at least piloting, of good ideas.”

What organizations are good examples of fostering courage and focusing it into innovation and growth?

“Organizationally, it is easier to share specific instances of decisions that were courageous, versus labeling an organization a fully “courageous company”. I think Patagonia displayed courage when it decided to use only pesticide-free cotton in the production of its cotton clothes. It cost them a bundle to do that, but ultimately resulted in more sales. Likewise, the decision of Domino’s Pizza to advertise that their internal research confirmed that their pizza’s tasted lousy, was courageous. In a sense, they were inviting the public into the process of reinventing Domino’s image (and pizza), and it’s working. Dove’s decision to use real women in its commercials, instead of waif-like fairy princesses, took courage. Gore-Tex, of course, is widely admired for fostering a client of smart risk-taking and mistake-making. In terms of consistent, sustainable innovation, they’re the gold-standard.”