Chief Learning Officer - November 2007 - (Page 51)

This directly points to the need for courage action skills, but as with all learning curves, a conscious effort is required to develop personal courage and insert courage action skills at work. Awakening courage can be as simple as reading an autobiography of a courageous person or watching films that portray true courage. Learning executives can be a model in developing a courage leadership environment. They can demonstrate and initiate a contemplative practice that develops their abilities to reflect on who they are at work. They also can exhibit intangible decisions that apply courage action skills such as eliminating manipulation in favor of being direct. Once you begin to recognize courage, the first step is mandatory: You must embrace the true “heart and spirit” definition of this forgotten virtue. In Latin, “virtue” means “energy,” so to realize the full potential of courage’s empowering energy, we must become alert to the facets of life that affect our expression of courage, such as swallowing your voice when witnessing an injustice. How can intangibles be valued? CLOs can take the rest of their lives to split hairs over whether organizations should focus on training and development for tangible, hard skills or focus on the major market value reflected in a company like Google, that is, the intangibles. If you choose the latter, you will begin to notice that the dominant issue hovers around the variety of people who come to work each morning with different integral levels of courage consciousness. These integral levels either lift the company’s spirit or keep it complacent. (Complacency is one of six courage killers, and conformity is another.) If your organization’s goal is to improve productivity, retain valuable employees, diminish stress (e.g., number of “mental health” days) and increase team effectiveness, then it’s critical to stop and reflect on the organization’s “mood” and its level of dysfunction. For example, do the majority of your employees come to work saying they have the opportunity to do what they love and do it well and that their co-workers are great? Lapses of Courage Hard skills do not determine business success. In fact, business failures almost always can be traced to lapses of courage by the company leadership. The empty shells of these once-vibrant companies clutter the corporate landscape like rusting hulks in a naval boneyard. Why? Far too many companies keep courage on a leash in the workplace, allowing corruption (another “courage opposite”) to run rampant. How do businesses staffed with the “best and brightest” employees who all “did their jobs” end up as the latest example of corporate scandal and mismanagement? The origin of corruption lies in a broad spectrum of organizational hypocrisies that can stem from intangibles such as dysfunctional management teams, interpersonal animosities or a core group of unconscious people whose questionable interpersonal skills interact to undermine an organization. The money that corrupt organizations spend on lawyers, public relations campaigns and damage control is a huge waste of resources, dwarfing the negligible cost of developing value through intangibles such as a courage leadership business model. Profiles in noncourage are rampant, so how can learning executives nurture individual courage growth? Several intangible insights are required to develop a leader’s courage and the organization’s cultural awareness into courage leadership. The following describes a problem and a solution that show how you 51 November 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer http://www.clomedia.com

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Chief Learning Officer - November 2007 Editor's Letter Table of Contents Imperatives Selling Up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five Rediscovering the Essence of Learning Cornell University Maintains Productivity While Pursuing Higher Education CLO Profile How Loyalty and Employee Engagement Add Up to Corporate Profits A Strategic Foundation The Evolution of the LMS Ariba: Growing Sales Skills in Conjunction with LMS Technology Leveraging Change to Build Productivity Equinox Fitness: Leveraging Change to Build Productivity Tangibles or Intangibles: Where’s Your Value? Raising the Stakes: The Strategic Role of the CLO Case Study Business Intelligence Case Study Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - November 2007

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