Our newest courage leadership book, The Courage to Champion, shows innovators, citation-writers and expert advisors how to get traction by building a network of champions. It shows you how to create a culture in your adoption network to optimize, not compromise and ennoble and accelerate, not enable. The courage you PowerUP is key to drive adoption of the recommendations and innovations you know are the right things to do.
Here’s an example, from this week’s news in Philadelphia, where good advice didn’t get adopted and the dangers that skilled engineers foretold and forewarned unfolded as they foresaw – when the facade of a small apartment building collapsed in a fashionable Philadelphia neighborhood.
It wasn’t a shock to the building inspectors who gave warnings and issued violations. But the building owners didn’t heed the warnings and decided to litigate rather than mitigate the risk, arguing that “they should be exempt from the rules.” Thank G-d no one was hurt when the bricks and stones finally gave way and fell to the street below.
If you’re an inspector, advisor or caregiver who can see accidents or debilitating illnesses waiting to happen, what does success mean for you? Is it productivity, turning out reports and citing violators? Is it technical brilliance to analyze risks properly? Or getting traction, so your recommendations are taken to heart, and your advice calls the right people to action?
If you want your expertise to be used, you’ve got to know how to convert warnings into uplifting ennobling influence-wielding dialogues. Even when the receiver of your best advice says, “I don’t see it the way you do. This shouldn’t apply to me.” You’ve got to know how to make, “No” or stonewalling into the start of a dialogue, not the end.
If you’re a startup with an innovation to prevent problems that customers don’t want to acknowledge, you’ve got to know how to get someone on the inside to be open to your value analysis, rather than pretend they don’t know what you’re talking about. So you earn the opportunity to put your innovation to work.
The key to success is how you find and mobilize champions. You need allies who will echo, amplify and operationalize your recommendations. Staging an intervention or show-down alone rarely works. No matter how eloquent you are. And you’ve got to get under the wings of your champions and Make Courage Contagious. So they PowerUP good decisions, rather than settling for risk-averse compromise that aren’t enough to make a difference. The Courage to Champion shows you how to mobilize that support.
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Louise Yochee Klein and Merom Klein originally published this post in their LinkedIn newsletter. are authors of the new book, The Courage to Champion, which is scheduled for release in November 2024. It showcases the leadership know-how that Courage-Building Leadership Quests equip your experts to develop, to expand their impact, so their recommendations get traction and make a difference.
