CHAPTER 2

Truth to Power

As adults, we know what we’d like to do when it matters most at work: we hope we’d tell the truth, stand up for ourselves or others, and say “no” when going along would be wrong.

For example, if you were Rebecca, who works at a New York investment firm, and realized you were making only a fraction of what your male colleagues were making despite significantly outperforming them, you’d like to think you’d confront the male founders on behalf of yourself and other women facing this systemic inequity. Or that if you (like too many accountants, sales managers, and safety experts) got told to “make the numbers look better” or “downplay the severity of the risks,” you’d push back and refuse to do something that’s misleading and possibly illegal or dangerous.

Sadly, people face similar choices every day and often don’t speak up or push back. Feeling scared, unclear how to voice their concerns effectively, and trapped, they instead carry on silently and hope for the best. They lose respect for those above them and perhaps for themselves for their complicity. Over time, they’re likely to start giving less and less of their best selves to their work and struggle to feel committed or engaged. They “quit before leaving.”¹

Why We Fear Power

The fact that we’re highly attuned to, and hesitant to offend, those above us in any hierarchy—those with power over us—isn’t news to anybody. We depend on powerful people for all sorts of resources, and we need to stay on their good side to avoid negative consequences.

Our fear of power is deep-seated. We’ve been socialized since childhood to listen to those above us, whether that means our parents, teachers, religious figures, or other group leaders. Whether it’s “Eat your peas,” “Be quiet in class,” or “Listen to the minister,” we’re surrounded by instructions to conform to the wishes of those in authority if we want to have our social and material needs met and avoid rejection or expulsion.² Indeed, as Professors Herbert Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton remind us, “the duty to obey is inherent in the very concept of authority.”³

Evolution has most likely played a role in our tendency to organize ourselves into hierarchies and be deferential to those above us. Our nearest relatives (as a species) are the great apes, and they are . . . not egalitarian. The alpha males abuse rivals, while the beta males bully everyone besides the alpha (to whom they are deferential).⁴ Likewise, signs of rank ordering in humans goes back thousands of years.⁵ Higher-rank individuals slept in the safest part of the house (the rear), while those of lowest rank (slaves) slept inside the front door in case of a raid. Humans too have evolved all sorts of dominance and submission signals and behaviors that tend to keep the hierarchy intact. Fortunately, these days we tend to stop short (in the United States, anyway) of physical altercations, imprisonment, or murder as hierarchy enforcement mechanisms.⁶ But we still make it clear who’s in charge, whether that’s reflected by the size or location of an office, how people dress, where they sit in meetings, and lots of rules that make it more likely that the challenger of authority, not the challenged, faces formal or informal sanctions in the case of disagreement.⁷

The truth is, when we fear challenging authority, we don’t know with certainty how likely or severe any negative consequences might be. If your job is to jump out of airplanes, there’s objective risk. But when we’re talking about disagreeing with a boss, taking a problem to a higher-up, or admitting a mistake, we almost never know for sure what’s going to happen. The person you confront might be 100 percent OK with what you say or do, and 0 percent likely to retaliate. Or the odds might be 50/50. Even if you’d argue with me that you do know with some certainty, I’d simply reply: “That doesn’t really matter. It’s your belief that doing something is risky that affects your decision to do it.” Similarly, others’ belief that you did something worthwhile despite it being risky is what leads them to label it courageous. They don’t know how risky it was, objectively or from your perspective—they are calling you courageous based only on their perception of the situation.

One last thing about our perception of workplace risks: if we had a perfect way of measuring actual risk levels (that is, determining after the fact exactly what happened across a huge range of situations), it’s quite likely we’d find that most people overestimate them. It’s only natural, literally. If you think you see a poisonous snake ten times and automatically jump back and run away, your flight instinct has kept you alive even if, all ten times, the “snake” was actually a stick. But if you fail to perceive the snake that is actually there even a single time, you might be in serious trouble. In short, evolution favors self-protection.⁸ We have primitive brain components that help us start to protect ourselves before we even consciously perceive danger (or use more recently evolved parts of our brain to process whether it’s real) and memory and behavior activation systems that favor “bad” over “good” and “false positives” (you think there’s a snake when there’s not) over “false negatives” (you fail to perceive an actual snake).⁹ False positives lead us to waste some energy (e.g., jumping back, starting to run), but we’re still alive; false negatives could mean death (that stick actually was a poisonous snake that bit you when you got too close).¹⁰

In short, courage is often in short supply not just because the world of work is filled with objective risk, but also because we’re hardwired to overestimate it. We’re also not very good at testing those estimates or updating them over time.

One manufacturing operator I interviewed told me he no longer speaks up because he’s sure there will be trouble. This seemed unusual, since the reason I was visiting his plant was that it had been identified in a recent all-employee survey as one of the safest environments for speaking up in the whole company. And he acknowledged that the current plant manager and his direct boss were very open and approachable. I pressed him—why was he nonetheless sure it wasn’t safe? Because he “got threatened with retaliation after speaking up twelve years ago” by the plant manager who was “three plant managers ago.” So was it really professionally risky for him to speak up at the time I was talking to him? Probably not. But he was still using the incident to justify his silence, even though he recognized in telling me that this wasn’t a very rational basis for his current fear or behavior.

So we’ve got lots of real reasons to be afraid of challenging those above us, and a natural tendency to automatically overestimate that risk on top of it.¹¹ Put that all together, and it’s no surprise that we often see silence and inaction. Whether in my own or others’ research, the data is clear: people routinely forgo opportunities to speak truth to power.¹²

What Truth to Power Looks Like

Despite the risks of challenging or otherwise upsetting those with the power to harm us, not everyone stays silent or chooses inaction. Some people do defy expectations for conformity and deference to authority, becoming what author Ira Chaleff calls “courageous followers.”¹³ In fact, if authority structures can lead to what Kelman and Hamilton called “crimes of obedience,” my research has revealed that they also set the stage for what I call the courage of disobedience.

When I started studying workplace courage, I interviewed people in all kinds of jobs and simply asked them to tell me about a specific example where they or someone around them did (or didn’t do) something they considered courageous. As these examples accumulated into the hundreds, and my research assistants and I started to categorize them by type of behavior, one thing immediately stood out: acts involving, and usually directed at, those higher up the organizational chain of command were by far the most common. While only about one-third of the questions on the Workplace Courage Acts Index (WCAI) Evan Bruno and I created directly involve “truth to power” behaviors, about half of all the workplace courage stories I’ve been told (well over a thousand at this point) are of this type. In many ways, challenging, confronting, defying, or in other ways making oneself vulnerable to those with more formal power is the prototype of a courageous work act in a world where most of us need the pay, benefits, and various forms of social and psychological identity afforded by jobs in structured hierarchies. Put simply, angering those above us in an economy where so much is tied to our ongoing employment and most of us can be easily fired involves real risk, even when we’re acting for quite legitimate purposes.

The Workplace Courage Acts Index

Below is a list of eleven behaviors that collectively represent a fairly comprehensive set of ways that people with less power can do worthy things that are risky (primarily because they might incur the anger or disappointment of those with more power at work). These are, in short, behaviors that are often considered courageous by the actors themselves or by others who observe the behavior. Remember: I consider workplace courage to be an act done for a worthy cause despite significant potential risks. Thus, the WCAI assesses specific behaviors that people engage in on identifiable occasions, not some kind of personality disposition or stable character assessment of a person.

On the WCAI, respondents first rate how courageous the behavior would be in the environment directly around them, from “not at all” to “extremely.” They then estimate how often that kind of behavior actually happens around them when opportunities for it exist, from 0 percent to 100 percent. Jarrod, for example, might report that challenging a direct boss about strategic or operating policies or practices is “extremely” courageous in his environment, and therefore happens only about 20 percent of the time it could. Quinetta, who works in a different environment, might report that the same behavior is only “moderately” courageous and happens about 50 percent of the time it could.

Across all respondents to date—and this represents people in all kinds of work environments—the behaviors shown above are seen on the whole as requiring significant courage and not happening nearly as frequently as we’d like. For example, about 75 percent of all WCAI respondents say it’s at least moderately courageous to challenge a direct boss about strategic or operating policies or practices in their proximal environment; more than a quarter say it’s “very much” or “extremely” courageous to do this. As a result, this type of honest upward input happens only about 40 percent of the time when it could. When the challenge becomes more personal or about more intense matters—as captured by some of the other questions—the percentages become even more discouraging. For example, when it comes to confronting their boss about his or her disrespectful, hurtful, unprofessional, or inappropriate interpersonal behavior, 84 percent of all respondents say it’s at least moderately courageous to do so; 45 percent say very much or extremely so. The percentage of time this behavior is said to happen when it could drops to less than one-third of the time.

So we know that these kinds of behaviors are often seen as quite courageous and that they don’t happen as much as we need them to. But clearly some people are doing them. Who are these people? What kind of people accept the potential risks involved in doing the kinds of things described above? The short answer: All kinds of people.

If you look for patterns in the WCAI or in other courage data I and others have collected, there are no strong “those kind of people” results to share.¹⁴ Risking the wrath of higher-ups isn’t easier or more likely to happen based on any obvious individual differences. On the WCAI, for example, there are no consistent differences in how these behaviors are rated across demographic categories like respondents’ gender or place in their organization’s hierarchy. Being in a formal managerial position doesn’t systematically change views, nor does being closer to the top or bottom of one’s organizational hierarchy. Nor are there stark differences in responses from people in different industries.

In short, if you’re looking for a reason to conclude that these behaviors are important, but should come from other kinds of people, I can’t help you out with that rationalization. These courageous acts toward those with more power come from men and women, from people with PhDs and people who have not completed a high school education, from people in higher- and lower-level jobs, from people in huge bureaucracies and smaller, newer organizations. People of all types take on power, whether or not they’ve got strong job security.

For sure, sometimes things don’t turn out well for those who undertake these actions. Sometimes, though, they absolutely do. People who speak truth to power can—and often do—survive and thrive, and things can and do get better for others and organizations as a result. Let’s take a closer look.

Challenging Authority Figures

Authority figures are by far the most common targets for behaviors deemed courageous in workplaces. Whether you’re challenging your direct boss, addressing those even higher-up, or otherwise taking stands that involve those with more power than you, there’s a good chance it feels—or actually is—at least somewhat risky.

Challenging the Boss

Sometimes you might need to tell your boss that they are off track or just plain wrong: “This policy is not working.” “The way we’re doing this is inefficient.” “That isn’t fair.” “This is dishonest.” Speaking truth to power takes many specific forms, but often involves the same basic reality—you’ll risk upsetting someone above you to try to make something better.

It might seem that pushing back against an operating policy or practice or strategic direction isn’t that risky because you’re critiquing those things, not the boss’s character or overall competence. Still, we all become identified with things we’ve put a lot of energy into, things we’ve supported or stood behind, or things for which we’re accountable. So no matter how politely you say, “Boss, our marketing campaign is flawed” or “Boss, our planning process is flawed,” it’s not at all rare for the boss to hear that as, “Boss, you’re flawed.”

Sometimes challenging bosses about a policy or practice is the only way we can take care of those around us. For example, due to budgetary restrictions, Becky wasn’t allowed to hire more people to keep up with an ever-increasing workload. As a result, some of her direct reports had to take on more and more. Realizing that this had become fundamentally unfair, she challenged management to reclassify her employees, going back and forth for nearly nine months until they received the significant raises they deserved.

Confronting a boss’s disrespectful, hurtful, or otherwise inappropriate interpersonal behavior is often even harder, and less common. It’s no easy feat to step in when a boss makes rude or offensive comments or shows blatant favoritism. Still, some people do take a stand to put a stop to this kind of behavior. Hugh, for example, was a new manager doing everything he could to keep things on track on a day when his restaurant was slammed with about twenty-five hundred guests. When his district manager came in and started screaming at him about dirty sections, Hugh requested that they continue the conversation in the back. Sternly, but respectfully, he told his boss, “Don’t ever talk to me in that demeaning tone and fashion. I can explain the situation, but don’t ever talk to me like that again.” Hugh knew what he was doing was risky, but felt he had to set the tone for how they were going to interact. Fortunately, his manager took it well—he cooled down, and later called to apologize. There was no retribution.

Speaking truth to power can involve defending or shielding those who’ve done nothing wrong but are nonetheless being mistreated. Pedro was presenting some results at a board meeting when the managing director started insisting he was wrong in a derogatory way. While everyone else sat mute, looking at their shoes, Pedro’s direct boss firmly said, “No, I’m supporting these figures, and I’m supporting Pedro because he’s right. And we’ll prove it if you want.” It seems even more admirable when someone speaks up on behalf of a person not in the room whose work or character is being demeaned. While others sit silently, these people challenge power to defend those who can’t defend themselves.

Challenging someone above you might be hardest of all when you’re implicating their ethics. It can be downright terrifying to confront a boss about accounting or safety violations, discriminatory or harassing behavior, or broken promises to employees or clients. Perhaps not surprisingly, but quite disturbingly, WCAI respondents say these conversations happen in only one-third of the cases where they could. Said a different way, that means people don’t confront unethical or illegal behavior by those above them in two out of every three opportunities. Think of all the major damage done because people remain silent.

Fortunately, some people do speak up about their boss’s unethical or illegal behavior. Meredith, for example, was reviewing a presentation to be made to a customer and noticed that her boss had made adjustments to the numbers. When she confronted him in the doorway of his office, he asked her to manipulate the data to suggest that the product was performing better than it was. Loudly enough for everyone around to hear, she said that she would not do so. In another instance, when a downturn was making it hard to hit sales numbers, Marcelo’s boss decided to respond by selling personally identifiable customer data to larger companies—a move that would have harmed customers. In a meeting with the entire leadership team, Marcelo challenged his boss, stating that he believed it was unethical to do this without written permission from every customer. His boss was irate, and the conversations that followed were not pleasant. But the company did not sell the customer data.

Taking It to Higher-Ups

Perhaps your boss won’t clean up his act, and even starts to retaliate because you spoke up. Perhaps it’s too dangerous to even try confronting them. Perhaps they just don’t get it. Or perhaps they agree with you but don’t have the power or willpower to tackle the issue. In all of these cases, you have to take it to higher-ups if you want something to change. This can be just as hard, or even harder, than confronting someone you know better; therefore it’s done too infrequently, according to our survey respondents and others’ research.¹⁵ Fortunately, some people do engage higher-ups.

Alana was relatively new when her boss drove a company vehicle to a bank appointment despite having a suspended license for drunk driving. The boss had an accident on the way back to work and, to save himself, tried to get Alana to say she’d been driving. When she refused, he conned a friend into taking the blame. Alana didn’t want to be an internal whistleblower, and she tried to forget about the whole thing. But when her boss continued to be aggressive and to be derelict in his duties, she knew could no longer stay silent. She arranged a meeting with the company’s chief operating officer and, despite her fear, told him the truth.

When she told her story, Alana reiterated that she knew she was the only one standing between the truth and a permanent cover-up. So why’d she do it? Because, she said, “I have more integrity than that. In the end, being labeled a whistleblower or anything else wasn’t as important as being honest and truthful.” She felt she owed it to herself and to the other people who were dealing with her manager at the time.

Sometimes the reason to challenge skip-level authorities is because they’re the ones with control over resources or policies. Michelle, for instance, knew that patients were having trouble opening their medications because of the excessive amount of packaging. Local quality control personnel were uninterested in making changes, so she took the data about drug safety and stability—which suggested no reason for all the packaging—directly to the operations director and company president. Her goal? To lessen the burden on patients, not make life easier for a set of employees.

In other cases, it’s the skip-level authorities themselves who have to be confronted by someone two or more levels below them. Richard, for example, was among the employees hosting some higher-ups from corporate who were visiting their warehouse. One of the blue-suiters kept referring to a female office employee as “doll.” Despite her visible discomfort, she and everyone around her remained silent. Except Richard, who in a nonaggressive manner quietly said to the senior manager, “Hey, she has a name.” As reported by a colleague, “We were the peons of the company and yet Richard said that to someone who could have easily fired him or had him fired.” Said the colleague, “The guy apologized, and that was that.” And perhaps more importantly, it left him and others feeling closer to each other, “as if we all watched out for each other.”

Demonstrating Agency

Not all acts that risk the wrath of those above you require direct, challenging communication. Sometimes you can do other things that demonstrate your agency—your willingness to decide for yourself what to do and whom to take responsibility for—in ways that might anger your bosses. You might act beyond your scope of formal authority to do what seems right, you might choose to ignore your boss’s decisions or orders that seem wrong-headed, or you might own your mistakes or those of others you care about when you might have stayed silent.

Deciding for Oneself

Sometimes you can’t wait around for instructions or to propose a policy change. You either do what seems right in the moment or you live with the regret that you didn’t. Clay, a restaurant manager, faced this situation when a young customer went into cardiac arrest. He knew that it was a firing offense for a manager to leave the restaurant for any reason. He also knew that an ambulance would take twenty minutes to arrive and that the hospital was only two hundred yards away. He therefore quickly told other employees how to hold the fort in his absence, then drove the customer to the emergency room in his own car. Why? Because, he said, “In that moment, it’s my principles, not the policy, that guides me.”

Ben, a construction engineer, likewise put his customers above company policy at his own risk. His company was paid on a time-and-materials basis, so that the company got paid for any time it spent correcting its own mistakes. Feeling this to be wrong, he unilaterally decided to offer a client a required rework free of charge.

In other cases, people refuse to follow the orders of someone above them. Alan, a research manager in a pharmaceutical company, was told by the R&D president that one of his research teams was wasting time. Shut it down, he ordered Alan, and move the resources to higher-potential areas. Knowing the president’s point of view was not consistent with the most current science, Alan consciously chose to ignore the mandate. “Carry on,” he told his team. This kind of defiance is not easy, and it’s risky for sure.

Protecting or Promoting Others

Defying an order, as Alan did, is one way to protect or promote others’ interests. Sometimes this type of courage explicitly requires taking the hit for someone who has in fact made a mistake or is in the wrong in other ways. Nate, for example, violated a requirement to clear new marketing approaches or expenditures with corporate leadership. Knowing that Nate had done so only to avoid losing out on a key advertising space, his boss took the responsibility and shielded Nate from repercussions.

Amanda, a general manager in a retail chain, faced pressure to fire a supervisor after a stint of underperformance led to a poor store inspection. Believing in her employee’s ability to improve, she shouldered the blame from corporate and refused to fire the supervisor. In these cases and others like them, people defend others whom they could easily allow to take responsibility for their own choices.

Owning Your Mistakes

Sometimes you demonstrate agency by owning up to your mistakes, rather than compounding matters by trying to hide them or letting others shoulder the blame. This is the courage of accepting responsibility or fault, of saying, “I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I admit it.”¹⁶ It’s the courage of telling the whole truth without sugarcoating what happened, so people can get on with making it right before more damage is done by a cover-up.

Alicia, an R&D scientist at a global pharmaceutical company, noted that it can be daunting for project leaders to admit flaws in their research design or results even though it’s obvious that acknowledging mistakes is important when patient health is what’s potentially at stake. “People don’t like to see failure,” she told me. “Sometimes you just get tunnel vision into what you’re trying to achieve.” This makes it hard, and scary, to say, “We’ve wasted our time. We should just drop this.” Likewise, in another R&D environment, Paul realized that his lab’s data was compromised because of a procedural mistake. No one was aware of the mistake, so he could have easily kept it quiet. Instead, he told his supervisor the truth. The result? He ended up with “more work, but a clear conscience.”

What Happens When You Speak Truth to Power

“Fine,” you might be thinking, “you’ve given some nice examples. Inspiring even. But that doesn’t mean it’s still not stupid, on the whole, to engage those in power in the ways you’ve described. Aren’t these more likely to be career-enders than happy endings?”

If you require precise statistics as an answer to this question, I can’t give you any. To my knowledge, no one can. And certainly, bad things do sometimes happen to people who challenge those with more power. People do sometimes get chewed out, dinged on performance evaluations, held back from exciting opportunities or promotions, or, in the worst cases, fired for standing up to those above them.¹⁷ If you take your concerns outside the organization, you’re probably even more likely to get harassed, demoted, or otherwise reprimanded for daring to challenge powerful others. I’ve talked with and know personally people who’ve had these things happen to them, so I’m no Pollyanna about the risks people take when speaking their truth to power or refusing to give up their agency in other ways.

But here’s the flip side to those instances where bad things happen: people engage in these behaviors all the time without ruining their careers or suffering other negative outcomes. And they accomplish the changes they were hoping to make for others or their organizations. Problems do get solved, people do get protected, possibilities do get exploited, and people do start to behave more appropriately or effectively.¹⁸

Sometimes those who act courageously actually see positive career benefits, though few would say that’s what motivated them to act.¹⁹ And, whether these good things happen or not, those who act often walk away with a heightened sense of self-respect and self-confidence.²⁰ They’ve stood up for what they believe is right, and they’ve survived. They have no lingering regret about what they “should have done.”²¹ Colin, for example, worked for a boss who “kissed up but kicked down.” His boss was pleasant to the president but cruel and impatient with her staff. And she’d admitted to others that she loathed Colin. After silently taking the abuse while his own and others’ drive and passion waned, Colin had finally had enough. He first went to her and told her directly how her behavior was impacting the team and his own morale. Then he went above her to the CEO to report on everything that had been happening.

The results? Unfortunately, the CEO didn’t take visible action against Colin’s boss, and morale in the unit stayed low. But the manager stopped harassing Colin and no longer speaks about him behind his back to his colleagues. Colin has no regrets. He’s put it behind him, still believing it was the right thing to do and feeling pleased with himself for standing up and facing the issue directly. Here’s how he explained why, in his own mind, this was clearly a win: “Having been on the receiving end of much bullying as a child, I had never once mustered up the courage to confront my aggressor and fight back. For once in my life, I didn’t turtle. I didn’t just choose the easiest path where I simply endure being disrespected by someone simply because of their position.”

Beyond how you’ll feel about yourself when you know you “didn’t turtle,” there’s also a chance you’ll inspire others to follow suit and be courageous themselves.²² Watching someone else step up reminds others of what’s possible, and can create emotional “elevation”—“the awed and inspired feeling we get when we witness a moral act.”²³

Consider this example. After having watched his manager, who was known for being “over-the-top and cruel,” yet again berate a fellow employee about his appearance and life outside of work, Vic finally stood up. He told the abusive manager he planned to report him to higher-ups and do whatever he could to make sure he never worked another day at the company. Following Vic’s lead, the person who told me this story and the rest of his coworkers banded together, went to corporate, and indeed got the manager fired within a week. Vic’s act, this coworker told me, “empowered the rest of us to take his side and fight back” after being “too scared prior to this.” “It inspired me, and maybe others,” he continued, “to act out in the future rather than worrying about only ourselves. It taught me that no job was worth compromising your ideals or putting up with an abusive manager, even if you’re not directly in the path of abuse.”

It Depends on Others

Here’s the biggest reason no one can tell you with certainty what will happen after you demonstrate truth to power: It depends on others. Remember, courage is an attribution about a behavior. It’s a subjective judgment applied by whomever is labeling the behavior, not an objective description of a behavior. Imagine an employee town hall where a senior leader says the sales team is letting the company down with its lower-than-expected numbers. Mary, a sales manager who knows her team has been working incredibly hard but faces a terrible overall market, stands up and says to the senior leader in front of everyone, “That’s unfair. It is not the team’s fault that the country is in a recession. Frankly, it’s only due to their incredible skill and hard work that we’re not in a much worse situation, like some of our competitors.” The “facts” here are the words Mary has spoken and the context in which she has spoken them. That many around Mary, and perhaps Mary herself, would call her behavior an instance of workplace courage is an attribution—a label that adds special, positive meaning to the behavior itself.

Why does the attributional nature of workplace courage matter? Because people don’t see the world the same way. Some will see Mary’s act of speaking up as a laudable attempt to defend her team; others will see it as an inappropriate public rebuke of a superior. Neither side is objectively (in)correct—we’re not arguing about real versus fake facts here. Courage is, and always will be, in the eye of the beholder, and those with opposite perspectives often disagree vehemently.

Therein lies the problem: the people we are challenging are generally the least likely to consider our actions “courageous” or respond positively. Consider the results from a simple study I ran.²⁴ All participants read about a scientist at a large pharmaceutical company:

Wayne, like other chief research scientists, oversaw a large number of research teams trying to make basic scientific discoveries in therapeutic areas like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. At a recent research review meeting, the president of R&D listened to the various updates from Wayne’s teams and Wayne’s colleagues’ teams and then stated forcefully, “I’m pleased with our progress in the cancer and heart disease areas, but I see little to be hopeful about in the diabetes area. Wayne, I want you to immediately start shifting major resources from diabetes research to the other more promising areas.”

Wayne composed himself for a minute, thinking about what he might say. Then he pointed out, summarizing several different arguments and studies, that he believed all the evidence from the labs pointed in the opposite direction. He stated that his diabetes teams were working as hard as any others in the company, and that they were as close to breakthroughs in diabetes as in other areas, and as close to diabetes breakthroughs as any competitor company. “You heard me,” blasted the R&D president, and then turned to the next agenda item.

The next day, Wayne met with his diabetes research teams. He explained to them what had happened, told them that he believed in them, and that he would continue to defend them and allocate the same level of resources as before. He then met with the CEO and laid out the case for continuing with the diabetes research efforts at the same level, noting that he disagreed strongly with the R&D president’s conclusions. When the CEO said it was ultimately the R&D president’s call, Wayne replied, “I disagree. You’re the CEO. The buck ultimately stops with you. I’m asking you to do your job by listening to the people most intimately connected to the science at hand, rather than just deferring to someone else because it’s easier for you.”

Participants were then told to imagine they were one of five different roles (assigned randomly): Wayne (the actor), a subordinate on Wayne’s diabetes team, a peer (another chief research scientist), the R&D president (Wayne’s boss, and the target of his act), or the CEO (Wayne’s skip-level boss). Taking that person’s perspective, they then rated Wayne’s act on several questions designed to assess how courageous the act was and, to keep it simple here, how “dumb” (e.g., foolish, insubordinate, careless, wrong) the act was.

Here’s what I found. Those taking every perspective except that of the target—Wayne’s boss, the R&D president—saw the act as highly (and roughly equally) courageous. Only those assigned the view of Wayne’s boss, the person being challenged and defied, saw the act as significantly less courageous. Those taking this perspective also saw the act as significantly more foolish, insubordinate, and inappropriate than those viewing Wayne’s act from every other perspective. In sum, just asking people to imagine themselves being the one who was challenged and defied led them to view this act as less courageous and more defiant and wrong. Clearly, courage is a matter of perspective, not fact. Acts are considered courageous by some precisely because there’s a good chance that others will not appreciate what’s been done.

It Depends on You

While it’s undeniable that how your courageous acts turn out depends in part on others’ reaction, it’s also a cop-out to conclude that others are the sole reason why courage might come with too high a price. In many, if not most, instances, how we act also determines what happens next. We can confront, challenge, or disagree with powerful people in ways that evoke more or less threat, anger, and defensiveness simply by changing the how, where, or when of what we say or do.

Though the coming chapters will explore extensively what we can do to tip the odds that our courageous act will have positive outcomes, let me give just a simple example here. Imagine that the team you lead has taken on extra work for months and performed extraordinarily well. Despite strong profits, you’ve just been told that there will be no promotions and only minimal raises for your team members this year. You talk to your boss, and while she agrees with you, she says she doesn’t have any more control over this than you do. You therefore request a meeting with a more senior leader to discuss the issue. Assuming you’ve already shared what the meeting is about, you could dig in by saying:

This concerns me because I know many on my team often get overtures from other companies. I’m worried that if they see a limited future here, we’re at risk of losing incredible talent. This would be bad for us all. I know they love this place, but they also see themselves spending more time here at the same time their kids are growing up and their expenses are rising. Do you think we could try to work together on ways to show them how much we value them, including at least some form of additional raise or bonus? I want to help.

Or, you could say:

This is fundamentally unfair, and I’m sick of trying to defend a pay policy that says there’s no more for us at the same time we all see the huge compensation packages at the top. My people are getting overtures from other companies and, knowing what I know about things around here, how am I supposed to tell them with a straight face that this is a better place for them?! If you don’t do something now, I guarantee a bunch of your best people are going to bail next year and that’ll be on you. So, what are you going to do?

While both statements might represent your truth, it’s pretty obvious that these two options are unlikely to lead to the same response from that senior leader and, hence, to the same outcomes. If you said something like the first statement, you might have a chance of working toward something that benefits your team. And you’d be unlikely to suffer any negative personal repercussions. If you said something like the second statement, the odds are lower you’ll get what you want for your team and much higher that you’d have caused yourself a problem.

In short, the outcomes of challenging power aren’t dictated solely by the situation. They also depend on how you behave.

Is It Worth It?

No matter how skillfully you behave, there are still risks. People do suffer negative consequences some of the time or we wouldn’t associate truth to power behaviors so strongly with courage. That doesn’t mean there aren’t also positive outcomes, or that the act isn’t hugely valuable for others. For example, Xavier, a military officer, told me about his experience speaking up three levels on behalf of a soldier who felt isolated and further victimized after filing a sexual harassment claim. His courage got the soldier transferred to a better environment and led to the soldier’s direct boss being severely reprimanded. It also got Xavier labeled a troublemaker.

Rebecca, the investment manager mentioned at the beginning of this chapter who realized that she was being paid way less than her male peers despite outperforming them, confronted the male founders—her bosses—head on. In the meeting, she presented data about her performance as well as what she had pieced together about her compensation relative to others. She then laid it on the line, saying: “If the difference in pay is not based on objective metrics, there must be another reason. Is it because I’m a woman?”

When the dust settled and a new agreement had been reached, Rebecca’s compensation was doubled effective immediately. Less positively, her pay had now been pegged to a specific metric over which she had little direct control in her role. In the year after the new agreement took effect, she did not see her role expand or compensation increase even as the firm’s business increased overall. And, unfortunately, no broader effort was made to explore or correct gender-based pay inequities throughout the organization.

Both Xavier and Rebecca created some positive change by speaking truth to power, but they also clearly experienced some negative repercussions. Were these consequences worth it to them? Absolutely, say both. Xavier remains proud of what he did, knowing he “allowed this soldier to escape rather than be forever ostracized.” Rebecca was disappointed in her firm’s reaction, but it clarified the path forward for her. She concluded that the only way to fix the problem to her satisfaction—both for herself personally and for other women in their male-dominated industry—would be to start her own firm. Shortly after she told me her story, that’s exactly what she did.

I can (and will) tell you many more stories about folks like Xavier and Rebecca who feel that their actions—despite coming with a mix of bad and good outcomes—were worth it. I can also tell you what my research suggests about just how inspirational these kinds of courageous acts are for others who witness or hear about them, especially if you’re in a position of leadership. For example, Evan Bruno and I had respondents rate the types of workplace courage behaviors discussed in this chapter, varying whether they reported on the positive effects of seeing each behavior done or the negative effects of seeing the behavior not done when opportunities arise. We also varied whether people reported on the effects when the behaviors were done or not done by either their direct boss or a peer.

We found that for almost every behavior rated, the motivational impact of a boss doing or not doing something was far larger than when a peer did or didn’t do the same behavior. This is consistent with all sorts of research showing that we attend more to those with more power, expect more of them, and see their behavior as more symbolic of the organization’s culture. Our data shows that we’re most inspired when we see our own boss stand up to his or her own boss(es), be it about unacceptable interpersonal behavior or unethical or illegal behavior. We’re also highly impressed when our boss goes to bat for us to those above him or her or defends or takes the hit for us with higher-ups in order to protect our well-being.

On the flip side, when do bosses do the greatest motivational harm by not acting? When they don’t speak up or take other action about the most egregious types of behavior. If you want to lose your subordinates’ trust, respect, and willingness to work hard on your behalf, let them see you stay silent in the face of illegal or unethical conduct or disrespectful, unprofessional, or hurtful behavior by others. If you think people don’t notice your inaction or aren’t bothered because they know it’s really hard to do these things, our data suggests you should think again.

If you’re not in a managerial role, does that mean your opportunities to inspire others are more limited? Not at all. In fact, our findings suggest that peers are positively influenced by seeing us tackle all sorts of difficult conversations. Stand up to the boss about his or her unethical or illegal behavior, and your peers are going to be impressed; likewise if they see you go to skip-level bosses about big problems. You’ll also inspire your peers by advocating upward on behalf of others.

The overall message here? No one is free from judgment—flattering or harsh—when they face opportunities for courageous action. But does knowing this make it worth it to you? That’s for you to decide. Only you can evaluate what’s most important to you, what you want your life to stand for, and how much you’re willing to risk in pursuit of those objectives.

What about You?

Being the change you want to see, as Gandhi encouraged, starts with an honest assessment of where you are. How courageous do each of the behaviors discussed in this chapter feel to you? How often do you actually do them when the opportunity arises? To find out, take the “Truth to Power” portion of the free Workplace Courage Acts Index (www.workplacecai.com) now.

When you’re done, study the results. What’s your fear, or pain, around the behaviors covered in this chapter? How do your responses compare to those of everyone else who has taken the survey?

The coming chapters will address the strategies for choosing your actions carefully and a method for building a specific action plan to do them more skillfully. For now, set aside any embarrassment or shame about your current truth, and don’t waste time rationalizing where you’re at. What you see as really hard may be easier for others, but I assure you that the reverse is true too: some things you find easier are the hardest for others. Remember, too, that context matters a lot in determining how risky or worthy something is perceived to be. A highly courageous act in your context could be pretty safe in another and even cowardly in others. Most of all, remember that if the behaviors discussed in this chapter were easy and everyone else were consistently doing them, I wouldn’t be writing this book.

Remember

• Fear of speaking up and engaging in other acts that might anger those with more power than us is widespread, for both real and imagined reasons. That’s why truth to power is the prototypical form of workplace courage.
• People of all types nonetheless do demonstrate these courageous behaviors in all kinds of workplaces. They speak truth to direct bosses and skip-level leaders, they use their own judgment in ways that might anger authorities, they defend others from those in power, and they admit mistakes despite the potential for trouble.
• While bad things do sometimes happen as a result of challenging power, good things also happen. Outcomes depend not just on how those in power react, but also on how you do what you do.
• While others will likely be appreciative, and maybe even inspired to act, only you can decide if and when it’s worth it to you to speak truth to power. Only you can choose courage for yourself.