勇敢的对话：如何用心领导（英）

Strategy & Corporate Finance PracticeCourageous conversations: CEOs know that courage is crucial to guiding organizations throughuncertainty. Every conversation is an opportunity for clarity. byKurt Strovink,Meagan Hill, andMike CarsonwithEric Sherman Leadership,at its best, is a matter of the heart. Courage, which underpins every act ofleadership, is also a matter of the heart; it comes from the French wordcœur—heart. AsWinston Churchill observed, “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities,because . . . it is the quality which guarantees all others.” The point is simple: Courage is bothmoral and practical. It is not sentiment or bravado. It is the willingness to face what is real, invite Today’s world makes those choices more urgent. Employees are exhausted, trust in institutionsis fragile, and volatility has become the norm. Among senior leaders, 53 percent report feelingburned out,1and 84 percent feel underprepared for future disruptions. Meanwhile, 75 percent ofemployees say their boss is the most stressful part of their workday,2and only 25 percent When courageous conversations are avoided, situations fester, misunderstandings deepen, andrelationships fray. Left unattended, issues grow out of hand, and everyone suffers. Courageprevents that drift. It keeps relationships healthy and resilient, ensuring colleagues are capable Courageous conversations come in many forms, but four patterns recur in nearly everyorganization. Across the leadership cycle described in our recent book,A CEO for All Seasons,each phase of a leader’s tenure—spring, summer, fall, and winter—calls for its own expression ofcourage. In spring, as leaders step into new roles, they need transparency about what they don’tyet know. In summer, as they steer the company to new heights, courage means settingstandards clearly and offering honest feedback while building trust. In fall, when there’s animperative to set the organization on a new S-curve, courage lies in staying ahead—naming In this story, we define four cases that demand courageous conversations: legitimizingprofessional dissent, clearing “withholds” with transparency, bringing performance truths toevery interaction, and shaping a performance culture with honest feedback. These cases ariserepeatedly, in patterns that test and strengthen a leader’s capability. Each demands a different Professional dissent: Legitimizing the minority view Teams with high psychological safety are two to three times more likely to generatebreakthrough ideas—yet dissent is often quietly suppressed through hierarchy, fear of reprisal,or simple inertia.Professional dissentis the courage to voice a contrarian view, even at personalrisk. Yet fewer employees feel safe challenging a superior’s view, and most leaders themselvesadmit to avoiding upward challenges. This silence damages performance. Research shows thattransformations are 5.3 times more likely to succeed when leaders role model behavioral Examples abound. In sport, a Premier League manager told us his most important conversationswere not with star players but with assistant coaches willing to challenge his tactics midseason.“That saved our campaign,” he said. The CEO of a global manufacturing firm begins eachexecutive meeting with the question: “What are we not seeing? What are we not saying?” Overtime, this shifted the culture from guarded compliance to open contribution. During the For CEOs, the task is to legitimize dissent so it becomes routine rather than risky—shiftingchallenge from an exception to an expected part of how the team thinks and decides.Structured mechanisms can help embed this. Premortems, in which teams imagine a decisionhas failed and explore why, can create psychological safety, expose blind spots, and strengthen Designating one member of a meeting as a “chief challenger,” responsible for testingassumptions, helps build the craft of dissent. And defining challenge capability as an executiveskill both elevates and democratizes truth seeking. When constructive dissent is recognized and Leaders sometimes worry that encouraging dissent will slow decision-making or fragmentexecution. In practice, the opposite is often true. As Cyrus the Great observed,“Diversity incounsel, unity in command.” The executive craft lies in drawing out diverse perspectives, testingassumptions rigorously, and then forging unified momentum from that input. Superior reasoning Many CEOs apply a practical discipline when disagreements arise between senior executives.Rather than immediately rendering judgment, they give both leaders the opportunity and theobligation to resolve the issue together. The CEO makes it clear that if an agreement cannot be reached, they will decide—but deliberately holds back from doing so at first. This approach, Leaders use other techniques to cultivate this capability. For example, some rotate a “learningobserver” in meetings—a person tasked with noticing how dissent, challenge, and decision-mak