What kind of courage do you show – when your side faces off against another side, who has a history of pushing back or profiting at your expense? Do you Puff Up, defend your interests and push to work around your antagonists or get the better of them?
Or do you PowerUP both your antagonists and your supporters – so sharp differences and abrasion lift everyone’s creativity and deliver more than either party imagined was possible?
If you’re a leader with a high EnQ, you’ll appeal to common purpose and shared destiny. You’ll acknowledge the very real differences that separate you from your antagonists – and will look at ways that the differences enrich your collaboration You’ll replace victim thinking with can-do ingenuity. You’ll lift debates out of “either/or” zero-sums deadlocks and into “both/and” value-multiplying solutions.
Newly-inducted Parliament (Knesset) Member Tehila Friedman admonished her colleagues to rise above bickering and jockeying for power, to come together and find better solutions to create a better future. She warned, “There are those who try to turn us against each other and who want to see us open every wound, every social scar, and make it bleed again while we scorn the pain of others.”
In an enterprise, there are always competing interests. Vying for dominance – or retribution – never produces as much as coming together to enlarge the pie and enrich each other fortunes. Investors and portfolio companies profit more when they work together than when they line up on opposite adversarial sides, each vying to profit at the other party’s expense. So do corporate innovators and the production, distribution and commercial partners who bring those innovations to life to profit together. Ethical companies who embrace regulations and push themselves to comply with quality, safety and environmental standards do better than those who skirt the law. And colleagues of different races, genders, generations, lifestyles and nationalities do better when they respect and honor their differences than when they denigrate each other because of them.
Courage is glad to help – if you’re bringing diverse factions together rather than turning them against each other; if you’re depoliticizing decisions that should be taken rationally with forward-looking projections rather than litigating past mistakes or grievances; and if you’re bridging differences that are real, not fleeting, or imaginary. We can coach you through one courageous conversation, one pitch or one negotiation – or can build the skills a team of innovators needs to PowerUP, rather than Puff Up or Coast Along, and Make Courage Contagious.
