The Use and Abuse of Courage as a Company Value

It's about fear.

I have wanted to write a post about Courage as a company value for several weeks now. It is one of my favorites because it has served me so well in my career and because the practice of courage is what I see, time and time again, set high achievers apart from their peers. Courage makes big scary things manageable and that is good. I was struggling to put thought to digital paper, though, because the origins of my thinking here are unsettling.

I first encountered Courage as a company value during my time at Big Bank. Like many outfits Big Bank regularly communicated its short list of company values across its immense employee base. I remember being introduced to the five (or was it three?) C’s in an enormous auditorium. I can’t remember the rest of the presentation or even the other C’s but Courage stuck with me. Big Bank actually went on to refactor their company values to the three (or was it five?) Pillars during my first year but they should have stuck with Courage.

We need courage when we are afraid. Courage was a good pick at Big Bank because Big Bank was a scary place to work.

All thoughtful applications of courage are beneficial but there are fortunate applications of courage and there are unfortunate applications. This is because there is good fear and there is bad fear. Big Bank had hefty doses of both but my corner of the behemoth was steeped in the latter.

Today I will explore the difference between good and bad fear, where each type of fear comes from and how they shape the organizations in which they occur. Along the way I will spend some time talking about the benefits of Courage, which was my original goal, regardless of its setting. Finally I will dig into the concept of a humane workplace, which has elements in common with Etsy’s Just Culture and Kent Beck’s Forest, and our moral imperative as leaders to make it happen.

Good fear and bad fear

What do I mean by “good fear”? Good fear is the fear that keeps you from doing real harm. Maybe your platform handles money and you are afraid of accidentally causing major financial damage of some kind or running afoul of regulators. Maybe you work at a health tech company and you are afraid of doing something that could hurt a patient. Being afraid of these things is good and it means that you are trying to deliver value inside of a tricky and perhaps dangerous space. In this context the special combination of fear and courage pushes you to identify risks and mitigate them so that you can move forward. Good fear plus courage is the rocket ship that takes you to new places.

Bad fear is basically the rest of it. Fear that you will be publicly chewed out for making a mistake is bad fear. Fear of retribution for requesting a raise is bad fear. Fear that you won’t get headcount if you choose to invest in system stability vs the product roadmap is bad fear. Fear of what will happen to you or your team if you say “no” is bad fear. Fear of responding honestly to one of those massive employee sentiment surveys because your manager’s manager will figure out it was you and then shoot you and/or your manager out of a cannon is bad fear. It takes a lot of courage just to stay afloat in these scenarios. Bad fear plus courage is the duct tape that keeps your poorly maintained org together for just one more day.

I practiced courage in both settings at several key points in my career and it was like rocket fuel for my growth. It made me stand out in a good way when it counted most. It was good both for me and for the organization in which I worked. I wish I could say that this happened because I’m brave but I’m not. If anything I’m more risk averse than the average person, not less.

The first and most actionable reason I felt safe exercising courage at Big Bank was that I had two very good managers during my time there. I knew they had my back when I did decide to take a risk. They created a pocket of safety for me within our scary org. They also taught me the value of diplomacy so that, when I did say “no”, I survived the event.

The second and third reasons feel less actionable: DINKs (Double Income, No Kids) and US citizenship. When I was most afraid and about to take a big risk I would remind myself that, worst case, I could be out of work for awhile and still be ok. My spouse was also employed, we were in good financial shape, we didn’t have major obligations or health needs, and I could work just about anywhere in the vicinity of NYC. A lot of folks did just this: most of the people who could leave did. Our part of Big Bank didn’t have the means to retain unhappy folks with golden handcuffs and we had a policy against counteroffers. Turnover was sky high, especially in my last year or two.

What about the folks who stayed behind? A small portion took smart risks and they got ahead but the rest? When I think of how many of my former Big Bank coworkers kept their heads down and just did their best to get through I remember how many of them were here on visas; how many of them had kids and debt; how many of them had lousy managers; how many of them were, for this that or the other reason, stuck with the bank scene which, we were told, was the same everywhere you went. Why would any of these folks have felt safe doing something risky like stand up to an angry trader or tell their boss “no” when they were pushed to cut corners?

And what do you think happens when the majority of your savvy risk takers leave within their first year?

What a miserable waste every which way.

Where does bad fear come from?

Good fear comes from working in tricky spaces where you could do real harm. Bad fear comes from a variety of sources. Some of them are more obvious than others. Most of these look like leaders and managers biting people’s heads off or making them feel small. This happens at every level from line manager up through Big Boss. I remember the head of our org getting walloped by his manager in front of an auditorium filled with us and his peers’ organizations as we went through the big heat map illustrating which orgs were meeting expectations and which weren’t. Guess how we were doing.

There are sneaky structural sources of bad fear, too. One of the things that stuck with me from Big Bank was the degree of siloing that happened in my org. My team easily had two or more projects per person. Each person’s performance was then evaluated on the basis of their own projects. So not only were we all overworked, there was next to no incentive to help your teammates. As a result, collaboration between teammates was very much the exception, not the rule. We had big teams (nine for me when I left) and yet each of us may as well have been a team of one¹.

This siloing was related to another structural misstep - individual engineers’ hours were allocated to different budgets based on the part of the business they were actively serving. If you spent a significant amount of time helping a teammate with their project from a different business line then you were essentially stealing from your own business line. This was a no-no come timecard day.

Another baddie was forced stack ranking for performance review. This is the practice where managers are required to rank their people and put them into numerical buckets. The org must then force everyone’s rating to fit a normal distribution. Why? The argument we typically heard was that this made compensation and promotion decisions more fair but it was really, as far as we could tell, a way to make layoffs easier.

What do you think it looks like when a group of managers get together to debate rankings come performance review time? Do you think anyone is going to stick their neck out to help someone else’s direct report when they know they may lose one of their own as a result? Or when their high performer won’t get put into the tippy top ranking bucket so there’s no chance they’ll be compensated well enough to stay? No.

Humane workplaces

I finally got up the Courage to leave Big Bank four and a half years in. This wasn’t the first time I’d looked around but it was the first time I’d taken it seriously. I was massively burned out and used up all my vacation days to secure a job at a new company.

I interviewed at a bunch of places but I had a clear favorite. When I walked the floor of Exciting Scaleup for the first time I remember hearing happy, goofy laughter from multiple parts of the room. People were smiling and sitting or standing side by side to work on problems together. There were plants and windows. My floor at Big Bank looked and sounded nothing like this.

Kent Beck has a series of essays going right now on the Desert and the Forest. The Desert is a place with lousy engineering culture while the Forest is lush with collaboration and experimentation. Joining Exciting Scaleup was a lot like entering the Forest after a long trek through the Desert, only we weren’t just talking about engineering culture and best practices. The entire workplace was different, light, happy. Fear exists in all organizations but it was nowhere near the driver’s seat here.

I remember, several months in, leading my first high stakes postmortem at Exciting Scaleup. The postmortem template linked out to Etsy’s Blameless Postmortems and a Just Culture. I was so taken by the fact that my employer had incorporated these ideas into their postmortem process that I had everyone take a minute at the beginning just to read the little intro paragraph in the template. Nothing I had experienced at Big Bank looked anything like this. I remember having my and my coworkers’ feet held to the fire for past failures during our massively centralized release approval process. I remember, as a twenty-something, being sent to the trading desk to deliver bad news about a delayed feature rollout because the person who sent me felt I would make a less likely target for trader rage (they were right.). I remember hearing a manager of another team in my org scream at his direct report behind a closed door from the other end of the floor resulting in that person fleeing his office in tears on at least one occasion. I could go on. Not once, though, do I remember seeing anything like what we find in that canonical essay from Etsy. If someone had sent me that essay during my time at Big Bank I would have laughed or, more likely, growled at them.

Interestingly, like Big Bank, Exciting Scaleup operated within an inherently frightening space. Because bad fear had been minimized, though, we were able to appropriately prioritize good fear. The combination of good fear plus courage (risk mitigation plus forward motion) allowed us to innovate through tricky terrain.

When Exciting Scaleup decided to minimize bad fear they enabled their people to make better decisions. It’s just way easier to roll back an unstable release when you aren’t worried about getting your head bitten off. Time that would have otherwise been spent on CYA² endeavors was rerouted to GSD³. People stayed despite the startup pay because of the culture. We didn’t need golden handcuffs because we were home.

A moral imperative for leaders

There are lots of arguments out there tying psychological safety and just cultures to better business outcomes. There are counter examples, too. I’m solidly in the camp of healthier cultures → better longterm business outcomes when paired with other best practices. That being said, the #1 reason for building and maintaining humane workplaces is not related to business outcomes; the #1 reason to do it is that it’s the right thing to do.

You may need to lay people off. You may need to let them go for poor performance. You may need to deliver bad news after bad news around compensation. You may need to deny promotion to someone who is ambitious but is not capable of executing at the next level. You do these things as a leader that you would not do to people in your personal life because this is work; they are not your family. At the end of the day, though, you will always come back to the universal obligation of all leaders no matter the context and that is to uphold the principles of a humane environment. Your people’s time with you may be limited but that time, no matter its duration, must not be characterized by fear.

Getting from here to there

Maintaining a humane workplace does not make you a stellar leader. Stellar leaders do this in addition to inspiring their people, defining vision, scoping out the path ahead and building talent, just to get started. No, maintaining a humane workplace is the bare minimum. Yet humane workplaces, like Kent Beck’s Forest, require significant upkeep. This is one of those places where the bare minimum is very hard to achieve and so it isn’t surprising that organizations above a certain size frequently turn into fear swamps.

If building a humane workplace from scratch feels hard, rebuilding one from a fearful workplace feels impossible. Put one foot in front of the other. Start with regular skip level one-on-ones and be patient; it will take awhile for your folks to feel safe with you.

Managers are key. Be intentional in how you hire/promote, train, grow and support them. Select people who are aligned with the principles set forth in the Etsy essay. Rout out bad managers.

Teach everyone, ICs, yourself and everyone in between, to give and receive kind and effective feedback. Crack open your copy of Radical Candor and roll out the practices outlined there.

Think critically about how your organization and its budget are structured. Do they promote collaboration or competition? How about your performance review process?

If nothing else, know what a fearful floor or team meeting sounds like and then concentrate your time there.

Closing thoughts

Courage belongs in your company values. It allows your people and your company to accomplish great things. Pay close attention, though, to how you are using it. Are you preparing to launch a rocket ship or are you applying yet another strip of tape to a fearful organization?

Humane workplaces are everyone’s responsibility. There was more I could and should have done as an IC and manager at Big Bank and I regret those lost opportunities. If you are the leader, though, the buck stops with you. It may be tempting these days, with the job market in your favor and layoffs in full swing, to invest less in your culture. If anything, though, your moral obligation to maintain a humane workplace is that much greater when your employees have nowhere to go. Work hard to make it happen.

1. This point probably would benefit from a writeup. It’s not that any one engineer was the only person on a project. It’s that they were the only person on the project from their team. Each of us worked with at least two other people from other team. These cross collaborators felt more like team than one’s actual team did.

2. Cover Your Ass

3. Get Stuff Done