“If you build it, they will come” is a great movie line. But real life isn’t a field of dreams. Real-life customers, investors and channel partners need Courage to invest time going off the beaten path to consider a compelling business case, solid science and engineering. With courage, they’ll consider buying, subscribing, investing, adopting – putting their well-being, their livelihood, enterprise or reputation in the hands of your bold innovation. Without courage, they’ll surrender to fear, uncertainty, doubt – and may not even hear what you have to say.
Even if your buyers ask for something new, breakthrough, innovative – that doesn’t mean they’ve got the courage to adopt what you propose. Or that they’ll automatically break out of risk-averse traps like regression to comfort, tunnel vision and bias against outliers when you actually bring them something that’s game-changing and new.
Take the high-potential leaders who were commissioned by their ELT to improve their food company’s nutritional value. Everyone knew the company was behind the curve and needed to do something. Health-conscious customers and customers’ customers were threatening to defect. New regulatory standards looked nearly impossible to meet. But when the high-potential leaders and came forward and proposed next-generation products and supply-chain upgrades, the CMO and CRO balked. “Who’s going to pay us extra for some green new deal?” the Chief Revenue Officer asked rhetorically. “I can’t think of a single high-volume customer who will pay one penny more for food products that cannibalize our legacy products’ market dominance, just because it feels good to offer healthy alternatives.”
When this health and wellness task force came to our next Zoom coaching session, they were dejected, disheartened. Their first instinct was to retreat to the comfort of risk-averse traps – victim thinking, hierarchy deference, compromising rather than optimizing. They knew their inventive thinking was sound and they were confident they’d identified market segments that would balk, but ante up and pay extra to offer something more healthy to their customers and their customers’ customers. But they were scared that being right wasn’t enough to please their bosses and that doing good work could red-line their careers.
The CMO and CRO said they wanted better health and wellness metrics, along with the rest of their ELT. But having the courage to act and take that leap was a whole different story. Unless the task force could PowerUP their courage, the enterprise would stay stuck doing what they’d always done – and earning the poor nutrition scores they’d always earned.
Fortunately for this corporation task force and their ELT, the high-potential leaders in this task force had the EnQ (Encourage Quotient) to ennoble, uplift and Make Courage Contagious. Yes, they knew how to build a compelling business case, as well as finding inventive engineers to work the bugs out of the technology, science and supply chain. But they also knew – there’s more to building courage than having the facts and logic down. They knew they’d have to invest time creating demand for their solutions, not just fulfilling demand. And smoking out the fears and worries that could get in the way of creating demand and driving adoption.
If the innovations you bring forward take risk-averse or conflict-averse partners beyond the comfort zone of their risk-averse traps – and if you need a dialogue that will learn from addressing the worries and fears they raise, rather than Puffing Up and pushing them away – we encourage you to raise your EnQ and Make Courage Contagious. If this task force can do it – so can you.
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Merom Klein PhD + Louise Yochee Klein PsyD are business psychologists who coach high-potential innovation leaders in life sciences, packaging, food, energy and tech companies – to Make Courage Contagious and create demand, not merely fulfill demand for breakthrough value-optimising solutions. They invite you to learn more with their new book, Make Courage Contagious.
