Courageous employees make the lives HR managers easier because they are willing to address problems that would be easier to ignore.
The following questions and suggestions may be useful for evaluating a job candidate’s commitment to courage. The questions are courtesy of
Bill Treasurer, founder of Giant Leap Consulting, Inc., and author of Courage Goes to Work.
Describe a time when you had to disagree with someone in authority and stand your ground. What was the situation? How did the other person react? What did you do?
Bill says managers who ask these questions should pay attention to how the respondents portray themselves. An authentic response will probably include a reference to vulnerability. Courage, Bill notes, isn’t the absence of fear; fear goes hand in hand with doing courageous things. Standing up to someone in a position of authority or influence, as Marvin did with the dishonest vendor, would be frightening for a lot of people.
In The One-Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson present the “praise down/criticize up” model of management. This upends the traditional arrangement in which direct reports extol the virtues of their bosses, and bosses have the freedom to find fault with their direct reports. Blanchard and Johnson say that if companies are to succeed, their leaders must welcome disagreement, even — or especially — from their subordinates.
A person who is willing to expose an injustice like fraud, sexual harassment, or bullying is one of the Good Ones-- high-character employees whose commitment to honesty, care, courage, and other moral qualities benefits their employers, their clients, and themselves.
Tell me about a time when a direct report pushed back on you and felt strongly about a position. What was the situation? What did they say, and how did you react?
This question, Bill says, aims to get a sense of the type of leader the candidate is. Does he or she invite people to speak their minds? It takes a strong leader to admit to the possibility that he or she is mistaken or hasn’t thought a matter through thoroughly enough.
“McKinsey & Company is one company that prides itself on constructive disagreement,” Bill notes, adding that in his experience this is a rare trait in corporate culture.
The best leaders, Bill observers, welcome principled pushback. “They don’t want to be surrounded by sycophants and yes people. Otherwise, they’ll be closed off from the good information they need to make good decisions. That’s why they do well to listen to people who have enough backbone to resist going along with dunderheaded ideas.” Having less power and authority may explain why direct reports don’t always speak up when something bothers them. But that doesn’t justify the practice.
Next time, we’ll look at what it means to be a fair person and how to evaluate this quality in job applicants.
Dr. Bruce Weinstein is on Twitter at @TheEthicsGuy. A more in-depth version of this post appears on
The Ethics Guy Blog.
Through his high-content, engaging, and interactive keynotes, workshops, and webinars, Dr. Bruce Weinstein, The Ethics Guy®, works with organizations that want to do the right thing every time and that know the key to their success is the high character of their employees.
Bruce writes about ethics, character, and leadership for FORTUNE, and his signature presentations include:
- The Good Ones: Ten Crucial Qualities of High-Character Employees
- Ethical Intelligence: Five Principles for Making the Best Decisions at Work and Beyond
- To Yell the Truth!™ A Fast-Paced, High-Energy Ethics Game Show Based on YOUR Organization’s Values and Code of Conduct
- Is It Still Cheating If I Don’t Get Caught? How Smart Students, Teachers, and Parents Make the Right Decisions (Almost) Every Time
All State Insurance, Astellas Pharma, Marathon Petroleum Corporation, The Home Depot, the National Football League, Northrop Grumman, the National Business Aviation Association, the Mechanical Contractors Association of America, the South Carolina National Guard, and the National Association of College and University Business Officers have been among Bruce’s many clients.
Bruce has discussed ethical issues in business, politics, and the news on NBC’s Today, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNBC’s Fast Money and Power Lunch, Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, and a wide range of programs on CNN. In addition to his regular commentaries for Fortune, Bruce’s writings on ethics and character have appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg Business, Investor’s Business Daily, Huffington Post Business, USA Today, and the in-flight magazines of many airlines.
Bruce received his BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College and an MA and PhD in philosophy with a concentration in bioethics from Georgetown University and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. The W. K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan awarded Bruce a National Fellowship in leadership development.
LinkedIn page
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Email him at Bruce@TheEthicsGuy.com, or call him at 646.649.4501 (U.S.)
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