Personal Development Hack 142: How to show more courage at work?

The 21st century is seeing courage at workplaces as becoming one of the crucial factors for enhanced organizational performance by building effective leadership with employees making bold decisions as well as by boosting innovation thereby enabling employees to come up with tradition-defying ideas. In this context, we can say that courage is the ability of the members of the organization to manage challenging work situations despite experiencing fear.   

So, how to build more courage at work? A simple and effective hack is the 3-T Method, it focuses on the following three components of courage namely trust, try and tell which help to build overall courage in an employee. 

1. Try courage: Try courage is the courage used to make first attempts, or reattempts after failure for any situation or goal. One effective way an employee can boost this courage is by identifying their strengths related to the situation and/or goal and use that strength to make the jump towards the situation. Furthermore, to combat the fear developed by the previous failures, employees can highlight the danger in playing safe, and understand the need of taking action. 

2. Trust courage: Trust courage is the courage used to help employees trust themselves and each other. An effective way to build this between employees is by knowing your coworkers values, interests, dreams, fears and motivation, hence instead of waiting for your coworkers to take a step, try to learn about them first and begin to build trust. You can work on trusting your own judgements and work, begin by learning to reevaluate and improve your work, the more you polish your work, the more you will build confidence and courage about it. 

3. Tell courage: Tell courage is the courage needed to tell coworkers and higher management honest opinions and feedback, irrespective of how uncomfortable the truth could be for others. No surprise that this kind of courage is least used in organizations and if not used diplomatically, it may lead to negative effects for the speaker. Hence, to develop this courage diplomatically, make sure your timing is good, as you need to know what time and space are better to convey your courage, and also make sure you always ask others in advance if you can be candid with them. 

Challenge: Identify a few simple tells, trust, and try courage that you can use in your workplace and write them in the comments.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” 

– Mark Twain

Try Joyup Genie’s 50+ personal development and career growth challenges!