Our business leadership book, MAKE COURAGE CONTAGIOUS, is a how-to manual on Powering Up potential – so teammates with diverse conflicting perspectives come together, challenge each other, and take pride in raising the bar on innovation, impact and value-creation. It contains some how-to guides on diversity and inclusion – because, in a global multi-racial multi-cultural multi-functional business world, you can’t have really good innovation without diversity and you can’t get the best of the minds you bring together without inclusion. Even when people don’t see things the same way or rub each other the wrong way.

So what does that have to do with our favorite team, the Philadelphia Eagles, and the latest controversy about DeSean Jackson, their star player, and his hateful wrong-headed anti-Semitic Instagram posts last week? Because there are leadership lessons to learn from the way DeSean responded to being called out for hate-speech – and leadership lessons to learn from the way the Eagles handled the scandal.

Reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Detroit Free Press and Washington Post have piled on – and been unanimous chiding the Eagles for a tepid, low-key, slow, measured response to DeSean. They said the fines were too little too late – and they’ve mused whether a white player would have gotten off so lightly in 2020, if the hate-speech had been anti-Black, rather than anti-Jewish. They raised the question about whether the Eagles’ Jewish owner and management downplayed the very real threat of anti-Semitism. They were advocates for cancel-culture – either cancel DeSean or cancel your Eagles’ tickets in protest.

We ask different questions – as we’d ask you if you came to us for leadership advice. Like…

  • Did the Eagles use or waste the crisis?
  • Did they PowerUP the courage to have a real dialogue and make the most of diverse perspectives?
  • Did they draw a sharp line – what we call “constructive intolerance” – and say, “Never Again” (which was the rallying cry of our people, rising out of the ashes of the Holocaust)?
  • Did they Make Courage Contagious – to rally the Philadelphia community and shake them out of the indifference and comfort of watching from the sofa, to fix the problems that BLM has spotlighted, erase the red-lines that keep some Philadelphians down and create the City of opportunity and prosperity we want to be? Did they ignite our imaginations?
  • Did they channel and use inflamed emotions, outrage, pain and indignation for good – or tamp it down, so we’d settle back into easy safe inactive complacency?
  • Did they educate people about the very real threats that BLM is addressing and the very real threat of anti-Semitism, and make it clear that hate is not a zero-sum game?
  • Did they make us proud of wearing Midnight Green and singing, “Fly?”
  • Did they live up to the leadership responsibility of being THE most prominent private business in the Philadelphia ecosystem, with THE most reverence and support?
  • Did they lower activation barriers and make it easier for wise people with diverse ideas and perspectives to be part of a solution, rather than walking away in “cancel” outrage and perpetuating the problem?

These are the questions we’d ask you – if a diversity and inclusion crisis suddenly emerged in your enterprise and required Courage as an antidote to risk-averse traps that keep you from using the crisis as a call to initiative, imagination and productive action. And they’re the questions we’ll leave for you to answer about the Eagles, as Philly fans inevitably will. DeSean, we wish you well in your journey and look forward to you sharing what you learn, in a way that Makes Courage Contagious.

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Merom Klein PhD and Louise Yochee Klein PsyD invite you to read Make Courage Contagious – and see how you can build a culture of courage so Diversity and Inclusion PowerUP imagination, initiative, critical thinking and equip you to profit from innovation. They invite you to assess your EnQ-readiness as a business leader, to see if you’re ready to build the Encourage Quotient it takes to ennoble, uplift and ignite creative tension when strong-willed high-potential passionate leaders come together and sharpen each other’s best thinking. And they challenge you to see who can sing the loudest rendition of “Fly Eagles Fly.”