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Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage w/ Ranjay Gulati

• Francesca Ranieri

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Here’s the deal—fear isn’t the villain. 

Left alone, it just drives. 

In this episode, we sit down with Harvard Business School professor and Thinkers50 honoree Ranjay Gulati, author of How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage  to talk about acting through fear—at work, in leadership, and in a world that feels permanently uncertain. We get into why uncertainty hijacks the brain, what separates risk from true unknowns, and how everyday people “hack” fear with rituals, reframes, and the right support squad. For leaders, we get real about absorbing ambiguity, setting a confident narrative (without turning into a motivational poster), and why courage—not conformity—is becoming a competitive advantage.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why uncertainty (not danger) triggers fear—and how to build a rapport with it
  • The freeze → flight → fight reality, and practical “fear hacks” that actually help
  • The four kinds of support that make courageous action possible (resources, info, moral, feedback)
  • How to reframe your team’s story to build self-efficacy without the cringe
  • What bold leadership looks like in down markets (plus the 9% who invest and win)
  • Why outcomes don’t always prove courage wrong—and how to “give luck a chance”
  • The culture shift from fear/anger to purpose/impact—and why courage is the new currency

Find Ranjay: 

On LinkedIn

His Website 

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.

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SPEAKER_06:

So, how do we develop this rapport with fear? That I think is the real thing to understand. Otherwise, fear left to its own devices is gonna hijack us.

SPEAKER_04:

Hey, this is your work friends. I'm Mel Platt, and I'm Francesca Rineri, and we break down on the now and next of work, so you stay ahead.

SPEAKER_00:

What's up, Mel? How are you? Good, how are you? Good. I am totally into the whole lube jewelry heist and now the gambling ring. I feel like we're going back to old school crime, and I'm actually really loving it. Did you see the detective in France who looked like Pink Panther? Oh my god. The hazel, the scarf.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. Yeah. The suit, the coat. What's happening?

SPEAKER_00:

I'm all for it. I'm actually all for it. The real world is scary and entertaining all at the same time. I agree.

SPEAKER_04:

I agree.

SPEAKER_00:

We talked about boldness, but in a different way.

SPEAKER_04:

We did. We did. We sat down with Ranja Gulati, who is the author of How to Be Bold, The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage. Listen, Ranjay is an expert in everything in this space. He's a distinguished Harvard Business School professor. He's a social scientist. He also wrote the book, Deep Purpose. He is part of Thinkers 50. And the Dalai Lama did the intro for his book. So if you need any sort of reason why you should probably read this book, let that be one of them.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how you tap that. You don't.

SPEAKER_04:

You don't. You just don't. I know. He was such a pleasure and joy to speak with right now. More than ever, just the timing of this book feels right and needed, given all of the external impacts to people, internal impacts for folks that work. What are you thinking?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, to your point. Wow. Perfect time for this book. This is absolutely evidence-based, but also how people who have been courageous, what did they do? And then how can the most fearful among us do those things? And it's actually very practical steps we can all take. And hand again, we all need to stop sitting and waiting and start moving into action. And if you want to know how people did it before you, how people are doing it now, and how you can do it, this is your episode. 100% with that.

SPEAKER_04:

Here's Ramsay. Something that you said is courage is acting through fear, not ignoring it. Why do you feel like maybe today that matters more than ever?

SPEAKER_06:

I think to understand that you have to get to the origin of fear. I hadn't understood that myself, honestly, until I read some research by a very famous psychologist at the Harvard Kennedy School, and she studies emotion. And one of her studies was about the emotion of fear. And it turns out what activates fear, because fear is a primal human emotion hardwired in the primitive brain. This is not software we're dealing with hardware, okay? This was a survival emotion from pre-existing cave dweller times, right? And the point of origin of fear that activated for survival was uncertainty. Uncertainty activates loss of control, and that just hijacks the amygdala. You don't think anymore, the prefrontal cortex doesn't need to process, you are just in survival mode. And so it's uncertainty. I think that's the first thing I had to understand. Then I had to read the research, some research by an economist, Frank Knight, who made a distinction between risk and uncertainty. And so now I'm trying to understand risk is where you know the distribution of outcomes. You can model it, say 10% chance of this, 30%. Uncertainty is unknown. I don't know. I don't know. And so when uncertainty activates, that activates fear. Then we see what is the response to fear. Now everyone says fight or flight, right? That's what I said too. And then I realized I looked at my own behavior. Fight is the last response. It's usually freeze, flight, and occasionally fight. So then it all started to make sense to me. And now what's happening today? Is there more uncertainty? Yes. Let me give you a simple statistic. In a recent analysis of earnings calls by CEOs of public companies, they used the word uncertainty three times more in three months than they did in the entire prior year. Wow. Yeah. Harvard Business Review cover feature, this last issue, was about courage and uncertainty. And the editor in her cover essay says, we are facing an uncertainty crisis. Yeah. So it's all around us. The first lesson to me was it's normal to be afraid in times of fear. Maybe there's I'm giving you my own bias. As a young man growing up, I felt ashamed when I was scared.

SPEAKER_05:

It's like, you're scared, tough it out, baby. Get out there and go to that basement. So what if it's dark? There's no ghost down there.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06:

And I'm like, okay, I gotta go. And I think first thing is to just come be comfortable and okay with the fact that I'm scared. Yeah. And Tom Cruise, who some people like and some don't, but who does most of his stunts himself. So he did one, which was he drove a motorcycle off a cliff for the last uh Mission Impossible six times till he felt he had gotten it right and he parachuted down into the valley. And he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said, It's not that I'm not afraid when I do these things. I've learned to be okay being afraid. So how do we develop this rapport with fear? That I think is the real thing to understand. Otherwise, fear left to its own devices is gonna hijack us. So, how are we gonna engage fear? First of all, calling it out, saying, Yeah, I'm afraid. That's okay. Now what? And I have a story in the book about my mother, and my mother's one line always stuck with me, which was just because you're afraid doesn't mean you do nothing.

SPEAKER_04:

I love the concept too of just name it to tame it to start with. Like really just sit. You can thank my therapist for that.

SPEAKER_00:

His next book is name it too.

SPEAKER_04:

I love that line. I have one of those emotion wheel pillows on my couch. And I just think it's sorry, I'm very feeling you're like, what am I really feeling here? Because there is that initial fear. And I was also scared of my basement growing up. I think there were total ghosts down there. I know it for sure. I don't know about you, but as soon as you recognize or say, All right, I'm afraid, it seems to take that inner fire burning down a few octaves, just a little smidge, just by doing that. So I love the example you just shared.

SPEAKER_06:

But Mel, I'm a sociologist by training. And I think society has created this illusion from Hollywood movies. James Bond, Jason Bourne, these characters who are emotionally troubled. Yeah. We portray them as fearless characters. And I'll just tell you a quick personal story. So, father, who's briefly mentioned in the book, he was a military officer, and for a period of time he was in military intelligence. And India was in a very bloody war. He was in a dangerous combat mission behind enemy lines. So they did this combat mission. They successfully accomplished it. It was a critical mission for the war. He comes back. I'm 10 years old, I'm proud of my dad. And I remember this conversation I had with him. He and I went for a walk, and I said, Dad, now I'm watching James Bond movies in those days. I was really into this, and my dad's a military officer. And I said, Dad, when you were out there, were you scared? Now the answer I was looking for was no. The answer my dad, who was a very honest person with me and always spoke up what he felt, he said, son, it was very scary. We were out there behind enemy lines. We had no supply lines, so no extra supplies coming in. We had no escape plan, no extraction plan. And we had lost our element of surprise. The enemy found out about us. So they were on our tail. So here we are in the midst of behind enemy lines, running around trying to kind of He said, but it was scary. I had a job to do. I was responsible for my team, for my country. So I did it. I only registered one thing as a 10-year-old. I can't believe he was scared. So we have this kind of, I would say, fear shaming that we do. And maybe there's gender bias over here. Maybe boys experience it more than I don't know, maybe not. But beyond that, I think I came to realize, and I looked at all these courageous characters whom I interviewed, they would find a way to hack fear. It wasn't just taming it, naming it only, they hacked it. They would find ways to hack fear. I'll give you the most common one that has been around for thousands of years, by the way, is prayer. For thousands of years, people prayed to a higher power, hoping that would save them. Harriet Tubman, who ran the Underground Railroad, kept going back with a big bounty on her head. They were like, she's the one, find that woman. But she had this intense belief that there was a higher power on her side. And so that calmed her down. Others use rituals. I don't know if you know this, but Katie Ledecki, a famous Olympic athlete, when she gets nervous, she starts reciting her grandmother's name. Adele, amazing musician, right? A singer, she's terrified of performing. And so when before she goes on stage, she takes out a picture of Celine Dion. So people rely on rituals, they rely on beliefs, but then there were other hacks I found that people were doing. And here's the part that I found fascinating. I found real hard social science research to explain that behavior. And then that led me to realize oh my God, this is learnable skills. Maybe all of us can do it, and we all let fear overwhelm us. Maybe we can. Honestly, it was for me. The book started out as a kind of exploration of fear for me, but I slowly felt that I had to write it as a book.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. It's such a human experience. We all feel fear. We all try to work through it. And sometimes it could, like you mentioned, make you just freeze or fight, fawning, not moving forward, and you get stuck. So I really love that you've put out this research. I know in the workplace today, it we know it's super volatile. And as you mentioned, that increase in the word uncertainty just being used in town halls, it's coming from executive leadership. And then you think flowing down to teams, just that level of uncertainty that might be happening. If you had to name what the cause of the courage gap inside most companies today is, what is that?

SPEAKER_06:

So if you look in organizations, what do organizations do? So when you build an organization, even a small company, or as you start to get slightly bigger, you start to compartmentalize work. Silos, right? You then want accountability. Have you done your job? What's your KPI? Then you want to create reliability and predictability, like standardize work. Right? So I standardize, I routinize, I organize, I quantify. So all these things are good. You need that if you're gonna scale up an organization. But in the process of creating this system of accountability and predictability and division of labor, we build systems of risk aversion and caution. Don't screw it up. Meaning the translation of that is there's very little upside and there's very big downside. So by design, actually, you create a culture and environment of caution. Tread lightly, don't go in there like a bull in a china shop. And when young people come into the organization, they'll have new ideas, enthusiasm, and excitement. I want to do something, I wanna and then after a little while it dampens down, and we create systems of conformity. Now, my colleague and good friend, Amy Edmondson, has written about psychological safety that designers of organizations should create safety in the workplace, psychological safety. But I feel in addition to doing that, you need to give people the muscle to speak up regardless. One of the people I interviewed from my book is a former student of mine, Francis Haugen. She was the whistleblower at Facebook. Yeah, she took a year thinking through should I because this is gonna blow up her career. She here's a Harvard MBA, high-powered tech executive living her dream. But you see how she resourced herself to take that action. A, she didn't do it alone. That's another myth that we have that courage is a solo affair. It takes a village. And then I looked at the social science research and saw what she had done. In the research on support, they find that there are four types of support that help people find voice or courage. First one is resource support. Resources. Second one is information support. Third one is moral support. And the fourth one is appraisal or feedback support. You can see this in entrepreneurs too. If you get a really good venture capitalist, they will not only give you money, which is resources, they will also give you information, they'll also give you moral support, and they'll also give you feedback support. And that's what Frances found. It was COVID. She went home. Her mother asked her, If you're so upset, why aren't you doing something about it? And she said, Somebody else could, and why me?

SPEAKER_05:

There are thousands of people working at Facebook. Like, why should I be the one to have to like bail the cat?

SPEAKER_06:

And her mother's like, You're not you, then who? And then she talked to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and the reporter said, We'll help you. Then she talked to a law firm which specialized in whistleblowers, and they said, Well, this is what you need to do, and this is how it's gonna affect you, and this is how you're protected. She talked to a friend of hers who was a priest who gave her feedback and said, Let's talk it through together, and let me tell you how you're processing it. So, you know, you discover that courageous actors are rarely alone. Now, I have to tell you, I was embarrassed actually when I found this research. Because one of my favorite cases to teach is a case about Erna Shackleton. Shackleton is the South Pole explorer who went down in the 1920s and tens, actually, down to the South Pole, and he was with 28 men, his ship sinks, and then he miraculously, oh, after two years lost over there in three lifeboats, he brings all 28 men back alive. And we have black and white video from a cameraman he took with him back down there. So we show the footage, we talk about Shackleton, and it's amazing. What did Shackleton do? What did Shackleton do? So I'm writing this book, I realized Shackleton didn't do it alone. He had two people in his inner support squad without whom he was toast in his own diaries. He recorded moments of despair. So I found that some courageous were resourced with the collective they were part of. It sounds random that, oh yeah, Shackleton did it, must have been a great guy, God knows what kind of childhood he had, must be an aberration, didn't have to deal with fear. He's an exception, he's a hero. And then people like me amplify that heroic story, which I did for a long time myself, and they're like, No. So that was insightful to me. That there are these nuances around how these heroic characters somehow take on fear. He was scared. He admitted he was scared. You wouldn't think so. You're a South Pole explorer, dude. That's what you do for a living. You've done it multiple times going down the South Pole. What do you mean you're scared? You were scared.

SPEAKER_00:

It's interesting because when I think about the archetype of a CEO or the archetype of a leader, feeling fear, admitting fear, admitting vulnerability is typically not part of that persona. When we think about how we redefine courage at work, most decisions CEOs are making right now. It feels like they're going to say, I have to make decisions because I'm beholden to a shareholder, I'm beholden to the system, I'm beholden to stock market price. Because they're beholden to that, it doesn't feel like the risk of being courageous is worth the reward of it. What's the upside for someone to be courageous from a leadership perspective?

SPEAKER_06:

Francesco, you asked a great question. Spot on, right on the money, right now, present time question. So let me go back in time. Aristotle, one of the earliest essays I could find about courage was Aristotle's writing about courage. And he made a distinction. He said, on one extreme was cowardice, and the other extreme was reckless. And courage was somewhere in the middle of that. So courage in his mind was deliberate, thoughtful action in the face of fear. Not reckless. Now there's a fine line between reckless and courageous, also, right? And part of the challenge for CEOs, which I think is now powerful course, they have to satisfy multiple stakeholders simultaneously. And those stakeholders want very different things. And you're never gonna make everybody happy. Right? So no matter what you do, somebody's gonna be pissed with you and upset. Employees want to get paid more, customers want to pay less, right? Society wants something from you. So here you are trying to navigate your way through that. Right? What is right and wrong is there is no right or wrong. Easy answer over here for you. Well, guess what? The job of a leader now is navigating through a very polarized environment where disparate stakeholders want very different things from you. And you gotta roll with the punches. The one study that triggered this whole project was a CEO study of what do CEOs do in down markets? And it was based on a very simple idea that all CEOs tell you that the best time to get ahead of competition is not up markets, it's down markets. But so I said, okay, let's see. So I actually got data going back three recessions. This is in 2010. And I said, let me see how many companies invest for growth in down markets. What do you think? What number?

SPEAKER_00:

I know the number, but I'm gonna overshoot it. I'm gonna say 1% because I know what the number is.

SPEAKER_06:

Okay. It was 9%.

SPEAKER_00:

9%. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06:

And those companies came out of the recession much stronger. That's why the article, which was published in Harvard Business Review, was called Roaring Out of Recessions. But it it was just to me fascinating to see what the 91% were doing. They all know it intellectually, but I have to admit, I my hypothesis, I didn't interview anybody in a recession. I'm waiting for another recession so I can find out what they are doing.

SPEAKER_00:

Wait too much. I'm just gonna wait two months and I'll be here.

SPEAKER_06:

Hey, give me a recession. I need to do a research study then. Come on.

SPEAKER_00:

You got it.

SPEAKER_06:

I know exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

There's a few things that really strike me because Mel and I met at Deloitte. And one of the things that Deloitte was very much known for was being a people-centric organization. And that was something that was part of their core purpose that we are the people firm. And in 2008, 2009, I remember Barry Salzberg, who was the CEO at the time, made a capital call to all the partners and said, You guys need to cop, you guys, gals, people need to cop up a lot of money each to build what was called Dullet University down in Westlake, Texas, because we are going to invest in a culture of learning and a culture of development for our people. Now, this is 2009, right? And the economy is still not great. They are investing, they're part of that 9% that you talked about. And when they came out of the recession, they were so much further ahead because they had this stack of talent on board, people that believed in their purpose. They were known as the people firm. And by the way, they rode that brand very deeply for the next 10 years. When you have this unifying purpose and you're making the moves, even in down markets, to make good on that promise, make good on that purpose. People live that and they feel that. I understand why the 9%, I love that you did this research, that they actually do better when they come out of it, because that's always been our theory, but it's nice that you have the numbers around it. But it takes these courageous moves, though, to make good on that frame. We've seen this and we keep on seeing this, and we'd love to see more of it because when people do act in this way and towards that purpose, they come out better for it. And honestly, it's a better place to work. Most of the time, people right now are just this place blows. The energy blows, the tensions there. But then when you have these companies that have this rallying cry to your point about culture having an emotional energy to it, it just feels more virtuous in general.

SPEAKER_06:

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I've studied founder-led companies in the past, and you look at some of the founders after they leave or when the company gets big, one of their first common laments is my company has lost its soul.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06:

Even if you look at Starbucks, their founder, Howard Schultz, multiple times has said, Oh my God, the company's lost its soul. We've lost our soul. I gotta come back. I know. That's the other part of it. That's a bad side of it. Recently, Lul Lemon's founder said the same thing about Lulu Lemon. Uh-huh. That Luleman has lost his soul. There's so many, I'm teaching an MBA class on turnarounds and transformations. And so many of them talk about this idea, but I also want to clarify that sometimes this bold action doesn't work out. Courage, by definition, involves sticking your neck out. It doesn't always pan out. I wrote a case on Weight Watchers. They hired a really dynamic, smart CEO, Seema Sistani, who was quick to see that Weight Watchers had to start prescribing GLP ones, even though it went fundamentally against everything they believed in. So she buys a company that's prescribing it. It's just the world is moving so fast that they're not able to turn the corner as fast as the world is turning. Or Blackberry, which brought in a guy called John Chan, who said, We're done with hardware. We need to be a software company because we have the most secure software backbone even today. Right? Because Blackberries, that's why Blackberries were the most secure devices. So let's become a software. Great idea, amazingly well executed. You're a publicly listed company, and it's really hard to convince the market that you are a different company now. We always measure things by the outcome, not by the process or the effort. Yeah. So not every courageous action has a kind of a happy ending to the story. Some of them don't always play out in the way you would have hoped. But doesn't mean these actions were not courageous.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06:

And these were hard. So I'm seeing now these stories of transformations. Some of them are amazing. They work out. And we are, by the way, we business observers, researchers, we're very opportunistic. If it works out, we say, oh, what a genius! I knew it. I knew they were gonna do that. That was brilliant. And if it doesn't work out, we say, what a loser. I would have told you right away from there was a this was a stupid idea. And I don't agree. I think sometimes, but in organizations today, we need to learn to be more bold.

SPEAKER_04:

You have outlined the five courage strategies. Yeah, we've talked about a couple of them, like in the context of individuals, but I'm hoping we could talk about them in the context of like teams and in organizations, like with if you're a leader in an organization. One is around changing the narrative or creating a more positive narrative. So when fatigue sets in, reframing, but how can you help your team without sounding like a motivational poster when the world feels like it's on fire? How can you create that narrative that creates an environment where they feel like it is safe to be courageous or bold, even if that bold move doesn't give the outcome that was desired?

SPEAKER_06:

A couple of thoughts. You mentioned the word narrative. And actually that was the starting point for the whole story.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06:

And I think narrative is personal, individual, but it can be for a team and can be for an organization. And it's fascinating that we think it's true, but it turns out to be very powerfully true. You change the narrative, you change your behavior. And there's a really old research to back this up. So there was in the 1800s, there was a very famous sociologist, Max Weber, and Weber wanted to study what propels human action. Logics for action. And the straw man was the logic for action is very utilitarian calculus rational, cost benefit. And it's true, that is a very powerful motivator of human behavior. Would you agree with that? You do the cost benefit.

SPEAKER_02:

It's powerful, it matters.

SPEAKER_06:

We all calculate cost benefit and say, is it worth it or not worth it? Then I do it. But he also pointed out that there's another logic for action which is more interpretive. It's meaning. It's emotional. You may call it non-rational, even. But it's powerful. And this meaning interpretation of the world is about how you look at the situation and how you look at yourself in the situation. It's both. It's outward looking and it's inward looking. It's how you understand. And I think as a team leader, I think we need to reframe our narrative that what is the situation? This is our moment. This is our Olympic moment. I'll give you an extreme example of this. So I interviewed a lady, Dr. Summa Jang, who was an ER physician down in New Orleans. And at that time, in during early days of COVID, she was a young mother with two children in her 30s. And COVID took off. And she's in the ER every day with people coming in with very advanced stages of COVID. Most of them, even when vaccines came out, refused to get vaccinated down there because of all the misinformation going around. And she has to decide: should I keep coming in? I'm going home every night and I got two little kids and I got a husband.

unknown:

Right?

SPEAKER_06:

Now she's doing all the things that we don't know. She's like washing herself, taking a shower, going, coming in through the basement, throwing out her clothes into the washing machine, doing all that stuff, but she's still worried. And she and her teammates talked about it, and they said, if we abandon work now, what were we doing? This is our Olympic moment. So how you look at the situation and say It's great to be a hero in good times. What are we gonna do to up our game now? How do we step up? So, how do we create that emotional energy that this is our hero moment and this is what we were meant to do? And it's gonna be hard, it's gonna be scary, but we can do it. So that's changing the narrative. Another piece of the puzzle there is how do you build up the confidence? Mo a lot of times people look at difficult, challenging things, and they're not sure they can do it. So, how do you build up that? It's not confidence only, it's what uh this famous Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura calls self-efficacy. How do you build self-efficacy? And so that's another piece of this. Again, I'm talking about how you how do you resource the team to support each other, to change the narrative, to build up their confidence, to align it with their purpose, maybe if you want to. I think all these things become important as they are for individuals, as they can be for teams. So I think the narrative idea is a big one.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

And the next one I was going to ask about was also confidence. It's something that you brought up earlier, is like the word uncertainty, just it's almost like death tasks and uncertainty are now the three big things you can always plan on. And so when you think about when everyone is in this position of being underqualified for the future, is it just accepting that and just owning it? And does that help build confidence? Hey, look, we're all underqualified here because none of us can ever really predict the future.

SPEAKER_06:

Look, I think you're right. None of us can predict the future. None of us knows what work is gonna look like in five years. But I think we can prepare ourselves for what is coming down the road as best we can, knowing that it might not be the right preparation, might be the wrong preparation, but I'm gonna do it. I'll give you you can't just rely on luck.

unknown:

No.

SPEAKER_06:

So it's not like I'm gonna just wait and see, and hopefully it'll work out. Shackleton, back to Shackleton again. At the end of it, when he comes back, a reporter asks him, like, hey, listen, I know you everyone's saying you're this leader who heroically brought all your people back alive, but listen, you got lucky. You go in a lifeboat across 800 miles on the roughest sea on the planet, and somehow magically, without a full navigation set of equipment, you land on that little island where the whaling station is. That's luck, right? Then you have no mountain and gear, mountaineering gear, you cross over mountains and glaciers across the island to get to the whaling station. That's also luck. So Shackleton listens to him and says, You know, you're absolutely right. We were very lucky, but we gave luck a chance. We gave luck a chance. So, what are we gonna do to give luck a chance? You're gonna need some luck in in these kind of crazy uh uncertain times. You're gonna need some luck, but what are you gonna do to give luck a chance? So, I think it's the question to ask is how do I retool myself? Yeah, and having that can-do mindset I can do it versus a victim routine. I gotta tell you, the most comforting feeling for most of us is to feel like a victim. Because why? Because then you can blame everybody else.

SPEAKER_04:

Safety. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06:

And so that is a big learning I had as I was observing some of these characters.

SPEAKER_04:

A lot of teams always look to their leader, right? You set the tone. So when a leader is feeling uncertain and struggling with their own confidence because they might not have all of the answers, what can leaders do to lean into that and own it maybe a little to help their team have courage?

SPEAKER_06:

So I'm a big fan of my colleague and friend Bill George, who wrote about authentic leadership. But I think some people took this, his really pioneering ideas into this vulnerability is a good thing. And I think we took this vulnerability too far. I think in times of uncertainty, followers don't want their leaders falling apart.

SPEAKER_05:

I don't know what to do. I have no idea.

SPEAKER_06:

What do you guys think? I'm just being vulnerable with you. No. Yeah. This is times when followers want confidence, clarity, right? They want certainty more than uncertainty. You have to, as leader, shoulder that uncertainty on you. Now, I did say earlier, you don't have to do it yourself. You can find your own support swap to help you shoulder it. But ultimately, you have to absorb, you have to be a shock absorber for others and resource yourself to be able to manage to navigate your way through this uncertainty. Indecision kicks in, right? Nobody wants to make a decision. So guess what? You as a leader, I have to like nudge that along and say, we're gonna make some tough decisions.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, that was like the fourth thing I was gonna talk about here was what you said about that community and finding connection. That's what's going to help that leader. It's so important for leaders to have that outside community too. So they can do that because it's a team sport that will help fuel everything.

SPEAKER_06:

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm curious about what's giving you hope about courage in the workplace today. Are you seeing glimmers of hope or things that make you feel like a couple of things.

SPEAKER_06:

Unrelated to my book. It's not, oh, they're all reading my book and now I have hope. That's not the answer. Just to be very clear, I think is the fact that so many leaders are recognizing that courage is a key driver for their future success, that being bold in times of uncertainty is going to unlock their strategy and competitive advantage. And that they recognize that they can't do it alone. You can't wave a wand and make the company or the organization courageous. I think that gives me hope. The realization they understand that to win in the marketplace, to be a winning company, you're gonna need courage. And I'm just finishing a case on Boston Scientific, which actually 12 years ago was a failing company and today is a$150 billion company. You know what the mantra for the company was when the CEO took over, Mike Mahoney took over 12 years ago? Winning spirit. Right? So this kind of recognition that winning, bold, courage translates into market success. That organizations are naturally risk-averse, that you need to really nudge them collectively to think courageously. And I think so. People working in organizations should realize that courage is gonna be a currency. It's gonna be winning for the organization, for the teams, and for individuals who decide to take bold action. It's not gonna work out every time, but I think penalizing for bold behavior is gonna go away or go down compared to what we've been used to. Conformity is not what organizations are gonna expect from their people. I think we'll be better off for it.

SPEAKER_03:

It's refreshing.

SPEAKER_06:

Yeah. That's my hope. I'm a hopeful person. I like to believe in the best. So fingers crossed.

SPEAKER_04:

All right, rapid round, Ranjay. It is 2030. What do you think work is going to look like?

SPEAKER_06:

Very different. And and I think we all don't have a clear idea of what it will look like.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. Okay. What's one thing about corporate culture you wish would just die already?

SPEAKER_06:

The fact that if you look at how people experience work and the fact that the two most common emotions at work are fear and anger is not a good thing. I think culture is not just behavioral norms, it's emotions. It is emotional culture. And I think we're in a place where we need to re reset culture to elicit positive emotions, not just fear and anger.

SPEAKER_04:

What do you think the greatest opportunity most organizations are missing out on right now?

SPEAKER_06:

I think we are missing out on the opportunity to realize that as human beings, we aspire to be part of something bigger than ourselves. And when we are feel connected to something bigger than ourselves, we're willing to go to great lengths for it. And we have yet to fully tap into that innate human desire to feel like I'm having an impact, I'm making a difference, I'm really reshaping a market, a customer experience, or even the way the world around me works.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. Okay. This is a little personal. I don't mean to put you on the spot. What music are you listening to right now?

SPEAKER_06:

Oh, the music I listen to. I love Ed Shirin.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, do you? What's your favorite Ed Shurin song?

SPEAKER_06:

Huh?

SPEAKER_03:

Do you have a favorite or are you just Photograph?

SPEAKER_06:

Photograph?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, it's so good. That's so good.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay. What are you reading right now? It could be an audiobook. It could not be a book. It could be a magazine, like something that brings you joy.

SPEAKER_06:

I have been reading, rereading Atomic Habits and another book called To Risk It All. Oh. That's the Navy Admiral.

SPEAKER_04:

Oh, that sounds interesting. Who do you really admire?

SPEAKER_06:

I admire the person who wrote the foreword to my book, which is His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. That's a big one. What's a piece of advice you would like to leave everyone with if they get nothing else out of today? What would you want them to walk away with?

SPEAKER_06:

There's a reason Aristotle said courage is the master virtue that unlocks all other virtues. And I think when we find courage, it allows us to do so much more with our lives.

SPEAKER_00:

Ranjay, thanks so much for joining us today. Appreciate you.

SPEAKER_06:

It was great to talk to both of you.

SPEAKER_04:

How can folks stay in touch with you?

SPEAKER_06:

LinkedIn is the best way to find me. I have a newsletter I put out on LinkedIn every week or two. I have a website which is Ranjaybolati.com. Thank you, Mel. Thank you, Francesca.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_04:

This episode was produced, edited, and all things by us, myself, Mel Platt, and Francesca Reneri. Our music is by Pink Zebra. And if you loved this conversation and you want to contribute your thoughts with us, please do. You can visit us at yourworkfriends.com. But you can also join us over on LinkedIn, join us in the socials. And if you like this and you've benefited from this episode, and you think someone else can benefit from this episode, please rate and subscribe. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going. Take care, friends. Bye, friends.

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Francesca Ranieri

Co-host
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Mel Plett

Co-host