I find that most advice on courage at work is aimed at the employee. Speak up and challenge the plan. The assumption is that bravery is a personal supply, and some people simply have less of it.
That’s not what the research on courage points to. Jim Detert and Evan Bruno at the University of Virginia's Darden School identified 35 scenarios that people describe as courageous, then compared how brave each one feels with how often it actually happens. They found that the two move in opposite directions: the braver an act feels, the less often it occurs. Confronting a peer's inappropriate behaviour happens less than half the time, and taking responsibility for a colleague's mistake about 42% of the time.
Yet expecting courage to improve with promotion leaves people feeling disappointed. People at the top and the bottom of organisations reported that almost all of the behaviours took the same amount of courage and happened equally rarely. Only two became more common with seniority: owning a novel idea and going into bat for a colleague. Even in workplaces rated high on psychological safety, standing up to a boss over unethical conduct or inappropriate behaviour (for example) still took significant courage.
Leaders may also be less well placed to judge this than they assume. A 2026 survey of over 1,000 UK employees and 300 HR leaders found that 54% of junior staff thought speaking up was pointless because nothing meaningful would be done, compared with 27% of senior leaders.
Therefore, if courage is scarce at every level, asking people for more of it isn’t a great strategy. Instead, leaders should change the conditions so that ordinary tasks stop feeling like acts of courage. A permission to be pessimistic - something I wrote about recently - would be a great place to start. Or maybe a standing agenda item ‘What is not being said that needs to be?’
A better strategy would be to demonstrate that something actually happens when people do speak up. You don’t then ever need to tell people, ‘it’s a safe space’, you’ll be demonstrating that it is.
This matters for results as well as much as for wellbeing. Psychological safety reduces the risk without removing the need for courage altogether, and each time someone speaks up and is thanked rather than punished, the next person is likely to have a little less to weigh up. Leaders who want better results therefore have a direct interest in making the courageous act easier to do.
Courage will always have a place at work. The sensible aim is to stop spending it on things that should be easy, and to answer the courage that does appear, with action and praise.
