A book my daughter gave me that I’ve started to read time and again to my mother is Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls. It came out earlier this year and it’s brilliant. The mini-bios, a hundred of them with lovely illustrations, are all of brave women. Each one, in her own way, defying convention, stereotyping, social expectations, and her own boundaries to demonstrate where bravery, combined with learning, and persistence can take you.
The two (women) book authors themselves show those qualities. They ‘were told they’d never get the book off the ground, but managed to launch one of the most successful literary crowdfunding appeals ever.’
The fun thing is that the carers in my mother’s care home (90% of them women) enjoy the stories too. Yet, when we talk about the stories they laugh, disbelievingly, when I suggest they too are brave. But I think they have brave stories to tell – most of them are from other countries leaving behind families and cultural ties – to work for low pay, cheerfully, lovingly and hard in an underfunded care home with very difficult people to care for.
Are they right to laugh when I say they are brave? Is bravery, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder: a subjective attribute? In calling the rebel girls or the carers ‘brave’ am I making the wrong call? I’m asking myself this because, in a couple of months, I’m facilitating a conference session ‘Exploring workplace bravery’. This means I have to design and develop something thought-provoking, engaging, and creative.
This means exploring my own views in order to present an opinion for people to challenge, critique, and work with. My exploration has taken me, among other places, to definitions – of boldness, bravery, courage, to asking a philosopher and an ethicist, to a Brene Brown book , and Robert Biswas-Diener’s book on courage .
Then from the exploration comes wrestling my point of view. I’ve got a lot more terrain to go, but now I have some work-in-progress pointers to work up, each offering good discussion possibilities:
- Although it’s interesting to learn that courage and bravery are rooted in different languages – courage in Old French, and bravery, not Old French but no real agreement on where. For my purpose, I don’t think it’s worth quibbling on the difference. Many writers use the two words synonymously – although others see big differences between them.
- There isn’t much written on brave organizations. There’s a lot more on brave individuals who may or may not act with social and community support. But I wonder if there are brave organizations: perhaps some of the activist or humanist organizations speaking out in their differing ways and countries against various contraventions of the Declaration of Human Rights might be brave organizations: Doctors without Borders comes to mind as one or Human Rights Watch. But maybe they simply employ some brave people and are not collectively organizationally brave?
- Some roles and professions require obvious and continuous either physical or mental bravery: fire-fighters, lifeboat crew, tiger tamers risk their lives. Doctors, judges, care workers, make life and death decisions risking the lives of others. You can look at a list of jobs that will give you the typical adrenaline rush that accompanies bravery here.
- Bravery in the roles just mentioned implies both being willing to take risks and/or doing so within a humanitarian moral framework that the risk taker is seeking to uphold. I mentioned the Declaration of Human Rights, but there are many similar moral codes for example six medical virtues (one of which is courage), or The Ethos of the Royal Marines.
- There’s a lot about brave leadership – but much of this seems to be looking at the senior levels of organizational hierarchies. Look, for example, at the Kellogg School of Management Brave Leader Series. Or the speech ‘Leadership and Bravery’ given by Dame Louise Casey at the UK’s Local Government Association conference 2016. She ends it saying ‘You are the civic leaders that can help deliver what the country now needs. None of what lies ahead is or indeed need be beyond us. But it will require us to be leaders and to be brave.’ There are many lists of the characteristics of brave leaders. One I like tells us that a brave leader embraces change, stands up for what is right – no matter the cost, backs herself and her team, even when the going gets tough, takes calculated risks, tries new things, and charts new territory.
- Bravery is not just for leaders or heroes, though. ‘It’s also needed for everyday life, for those times when we stretch to express a strength and a courage we didn’t know we had. It’s a resource we draw on whenever we stand up to deal with a crisis, take action to better our lives or to stand up for our opinions and for others.’ And in this aspect organizational protocols and policies too often fail, or choose not, to support people doing just that. You can see that in some of the experiences and analysis of the #MeToo community.
Where I’ve got to now, is that bravery is expected in some designated occupations, that brave leaders have certain characteristics – of the type shown by the rebel girls I opened with – that bravery is not only for designated occupations, leaders and heroes, but for ordinary people in day-to-day work, and there are many more stories of individual bravery than organizational bravery.
This leads me to ask whether we could design a brave organization and if so, would we want to? What’s your view? Let me know.
Image: Be Brave, Create, Repeat
Naomi Stanford 
Thanks as ever, Naomi. For me one example is self managed working. This takes some bravery on everyone’s part to embrace. I think it requires brave design – counter to normal use of hierarchy for example, and ‘those in charge’ can struggle with it, as can ‘followers’. I also think it requires brave thought and action. There is a big place for leadership in it I believe – generally I think it demands more leadership from every person involved. For example, in some ways there is relative comfort in a static hierarchy, where it is generally accepted (albeit perhaps in part unconsciously) that we defer to those above and in doing so let some of our power and responsibility drift away from us. Doing so is probably not a brave act, even though we might consider it selfless or the act of a good corporate citizen at some level. Fully occupying our convictions and playing our part in collective purpose is harder, braver perhaps. There’s nowhere to hide. No one else to blame or project our fears, doubts or inadequacies onto. Whilst structures that seek to support these more distributed, empowered forms of work now abound, it seems to me that none are a simple prescription for success isolated from context. Whilst other authors have attempted this, perhaps what these newer approaches to work would benefit from next is your brilliant (and brave!) mind to help illuminate more clearly the brave design principles that lie beneath these different designs for work? That’d be an interesting conversation I’d enjoy!
Thanks Tom. there are some examples of self managed teams that appear to work. W W Gore is often quoted. There’s an analysis of 3 alternative forms of self-managing structures here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319550780_Self-managing_organizations_Exploring_the_limits_of_less-hierarchical_organizing . You can download the paper.