The Courage Problem at Work

It shouldn't take courage to do (most) jobs.

It should not take courage to do most jobs. I want to be precise about this. There are roles where courage is legitimately required: firefighters entering burning buildings, trauma surgeons delivering devastating news to families, police officers responding to violent incidents, soldiers in combat. These are occupationally hazardous environments where courage is an inherent part of the work.

But why does a competent middle manager in a Big Four firm need courage to speak to their own manager? Why does an enthusiastic intern at a software company need courage to admit they are lost in a fog of specialist acronyms? Why does an HR director need courage to challenge the CEO on a policy that is clearly failing? Why does a senior partner need courage to tell their team they made a mistake?

These are not operationally hazardous roles. The work itself presents no danger, yet we have normalised the idea that performing routine professional tasks requires bravery. We train people in “courageous conversations.” We celebrate those who “speak truth to power.” We praise colleagues for their “bravery” in raising concerns.

This framing is seductive. It sounds moral, and it feels aspirational. It also fundamentally misdiagnoses the problem. When courage becomes a prerequisite for doing your job, the hazard is not in the work but in the workplace. The question we should be asking is not “How do we find more courageous employees?” but “What have we built that makes courage necessary?”

The Manufactured Hazard

I know what it is to walk into an environment where simply existing requires effort. I have been in offices where entering felt like running a gauntlet. Scrutinised from the front desk to the meeting room. Every glance asking the same unspoken question: What are YOU doing here? I know the experience of speaking up when a boss has clearly “moved on” from a topic, knowing that scorn will follow regardless of the insight’s quality. These and similar scenarios are depleting; they consume energy before you have even opened your mouth to contribute.

This is an environmental, logistical, and people challenge dressed as an individual pathology. We do the same thing with resilience: we treat the ability to withstand a toxic environment as a personal virtue rather than recognising the toxicity as the problem. When we demand courage as a “value” or include it as a line in job descriptions for roles that should not require it, we are asking people to bring armour to what should be a conversation.

Body Armour for a Meeting

Consider firefighters. Their protective equipment is essential: fire-retardant suits, oxygen tanks, and facemasks. This gear keeps them alive, but it also encumbers them. Their movement is restricted: agile responses become impossible, navigating smaller spaces becomes increasingly difficult, and visibility is always compromised. What makes firefighters remarkable is that they save lives while being so encumbered. We acknowledge the burden and admire the performance despite it.

Now consider your organisation. If your colleagues are constructing emotional and psychological PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) around themselves just to get through the day, the same encumbrance applies. They are slower, less creative, more cautious and less likely to take necessary risks or share ideas. The difference is that firefighters signed up for the hazard. Your scientists, bankers, lawyers, and assorted professional services workers did not. They were not trained for this, and even if you provide the PPE, they will be miserable wearing it and hesitant to respond to scenarios they never anticipated they’d need to tackle while providing, for example, software-as-a-service in an open-plan office.

And here is yet another uncomfortable truth: in many organisations, senior people with power and status are setting the fires. They create the conditions that make courage necessary, and then wonder why people are encumbered and slow. They rage at the symptom instead of considering the cause.

The Organisational Cost

The costs of being the kind of organisation where courage is a daily requirement are substantial and measurable:

People will leave. Research from MIT Sloan Management Review found that toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting colleague turnover. People will leave a well-paid job to escape a culture that requires constant vigilance. Replacing them costs between 50 and 200 per cent of their salary, according to SHRM. This is before you account for the knowledge that leaves with them.

The talent pool shrinks. Just as the military, police, and fire services attract people with distinct profiles who understand the hazards and are drawn to them anyway, hazardous workplaces attract a narrower range of candidates. Some people thrive in combative environments. Many excellent professionals simply will not apply. Research from Unispace found that organisations with rigid mandates struggled significantly more to recruit than those offering flexibility.

Discretionary effort evaporates. When people expend energy on self-protection, that energy is not available for innovation, problem-solving, or going beyond the minimum. Instead, you get compliance, not fulsome contribution. Ideas go unshared, concerns go unraised, and mistakes are often hidden until they escalate into crises. As Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety has consistently shown, teams where people feel safe to speak up without fear of punishment outperform those where courage is required to state the obvious.

The Courage Tax

The courage tax is not evenly distributed. Catalyst research on the “emotional tax” faced by employees of colour found that 61 per cent of employees from marginalised racial and ethnic groups report being constantly “on guard” against bias and discrimination on their teams. This vigilance becomes, in the researchers’ words, “a job within a job” or “an energy-draining distraction.”

The same professional behaviour that builds credibility for one person can damage another. A senior white male partner who acknowledges uncertainty may be seen as refreshingly honest. A junior woman from an underrepresented background who does the same may have her competence questioned. Research on workplace risk-taking reveals that women report more negative consequences for taking risks at work than men, resulting in a greater aversion to risk. This is not an innate difference; it is a learned response to differential treatment. The courage required for identical actions in identical workplaces is not the same for everyone.

This creates a compounding problem. Those who pay the highest courage tax are often those whose perspectives the organisation most needs to hear. When speaking up costs more for some than others, organisations systematically filter out the insights that could challenge your blind spots.

The Victorian Assumption

There is something seductive about the concept of courage framing because it aligns with a Victorian assumption that persists in modern work: if work is not somehow injurious, whether through long hours, unnecessarily complex bureaucracy, or poor management, it is not considered real work. Suffering becomes a badge of authenticity. Consider the “I’m SOOOO busy” conversation that begins every chance encounter with someone we want to impress.

This narrative rides roughshod through the return-to-office movement, where research from the University of Pittsburgh found that mandates show no significant improvement in financial performance or firm values. The mandates are associated with a managerial desire for control and scapegoating employees for poor performance, rather than productivity.

The courage narrative serves those in power. It individualises what is, in fact, a systemic failure. It places the burden of adaptation on the colleague rather than the environment, and it allows leaders to congratulate themselves for fostering a “high-performance culture” when, in fact, they have created a hostile one.

What to Do Instead

The Courage Audit. When someone is praised for courage, or when you are tempted to train it, ask two questions: What made courage necessary here? Is it the task itself or the anticipated negative response that’s the issue?

If the answer is the latter, you have diagnosed an environmental problem, not a development need.

The Mirror Test. When did someone last need courage to tell you something? What does that reveal about the environment you are creating? If the answer is “recently” or “often,” you have work to do. And you should then consider:

“What types of interactions with me require courage?” This is uncomfortable work, which is precisely why it matters.

Exit the Arsonists. Name the specific behaviours that make courage necessary in your workplace: public humiliation, score-settling, shooting messengers, punishing honesty. Then treat them as performance issues. Not cultural quirks. Not “just how they are,” but performance issues with consequences. The tolerance of these behaviours sets the real standard for your organisation, not your stated values.

This is fixable.

Decades before Amy Edmondson popularised psychological safety, researchers like Edgar H. Schein and Warren G. Bennis in their 1965 book Personal and Organizational Change Through Group Methods: The Laboratory Approach, and even Carl Rogers from my own humanistic school of psychology, demonstrated that psychological safety can be built deliberately through leadership behaviour. Google’s Project Aristotle identified it as the single most important factor in team effectiveness. The evidence is not in question. What is in question is whether leaders have the will to examine their own contribution to the problem.

If you want to win, and I mean really win, sustainably and over the longer term, stop demanding courage from colleagues and start evicting every person who makes courage mandatory.

If your people need body armour to attend a meeting, you do not have a courage deficit. You have a leadership one.

Stop training firefighters. Remove the arsonists.

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References

Brassel, S., Shaffer, E. and Travis, D.J. (2022). “Emotional Tax and Work Teams: A View from Five Countries.” Catalyst. Available at: https://www.catalyst.org/insights/2022/emotional-tax-teams

Ding, Y. and Ma, M. (2024). “Return-to-Office Mandates.” SSRN. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4675401

Duhigg, C. (2016). “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” The New York Times Magazine, 25 February. Google re:Work guide available at: https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness

Edmondson, A.C. (1999). “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), pp. 350–383.

Edmondson, A.C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Morgenroth, T., Ryan, M.K. and Fine, C. (2022). “The Gendered Consequences of Risk-Taking at Work: Are Women Averse to Risk or to Poor Consequences?” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 46(3), pp. 257–277.

Schein, E.H. and Bennis, W.G. (1965). Personal and Organizational Change Through Group Methods: The Laboratory Approach. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

SHRM (2024). “Improving Employee Retention Through Real-Time Organic Feedback.” SHRM Labs. Available at: https://www.shrm.org/labs/resources/improving-employee-retention-through-real-time-organic-feedback

Sull, D. and Sull, C. (2022). “Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation.” MIT Sloan Management Review. Available at: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation/

Unispace (2023). Returning for Good. Available at: https://www.unispace.com/news/workplace-insights-report-global-press