Links:

Helen's business book: The Future of Time: how 're-working' time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing

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My January newsletter: 'Goodbye hamster wheels'.

Engage for Success radio talk about time intelligence and The Future of Time

Workshop for Coach Matters on 'Applying consulting skills to grow your business'

Jim Detert's website https://jimdetert.com/

Jim on Linked In



Transcript:

Helen: I am delighted to be joined this week by Jim Detert. Jim is the John L Colley Professor of Business Administration at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, and a Professor of Public policy at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, both at the University of Virginia. He has received numerous awards for his teaching in both MBA and executive MBA programmes.

His writing on workplace courage and related topics is grounded in decades of formal research and brought to life based on intimate portraits of leaders and ordinary people he's come to know personally. Jim is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, and his research has appeared in many other leading professional publications.

He's also the author of 'Choosing Courage: the everyday guide to being brave at work' published by Harvard Business Review Press. Jim thrives on empowering people to have difficult conversations, to engage rather than avoid challenging situations and to competently embrace other opportunities for courageous action in their own lives and workplaces.

Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant, Jim!

Jim: Thank you for having me. It's great to be with you and your listeners Helen.

Helen: Thank you. I had the pleasure of reading your book over the festive break and I'm really looking forward to getting under the skin of workplace courage with you today.

And if I'm right, timing-wise, I think we were both writing our own business books during the first winter of lockdown. Is that right?

Jim: I think I might have been a few months ahead of you there. But yeah, I had certainly the same experience as you of launching a book right smack in the heart of the first year in the pandemic. So yeah, that was certainly a novel experience among the obvious, many novel experiences we had!

Helen: Yeah. And did you find lockdown helped or hindered the writing process for you?

Jim: It's interesting. I had been gearing up to write the book for quite some time but I was the dean of our executive MBA programme at the time, and I had fallen into the trap of not writing because I didn't have these huge stretches of time. And my wife, for the Christmas holiday gave me a writing magazine.

And it just happened that the first article and the first issue I opened up was called something like 'How to write your novel in nine minutes a day' and laid out this basically, like if you just wrote, you'd write this many words in nine minutes and that would produce like a 500 page book actually within a year.

And so I went into the end of that year and I think I remember I started on December 27th. I decided I was going to write 15 minutes, just 15. And I told myself, look, even if I'm sick, no matter what I'm doing that day, I can find 15 minutes. So I'm going to write 15 minutes a day, and I'm not going to skip a day until I have a draft of this book done.

And I, I don't remember anymore what the exact finish date was, but I never missed a day. And on something like June or July I was in fact done with a draft. And, and that for me worked incredibly well because it taught me that it is about just time in chair, but also that I didn't have to wait for or have these huge chunks of time.

I think it's actually a great tip for just in general doing things that feel too big to do. It's just that incredible reminder of saying most of the time if you allow yourself, exercise say, I don't feel like doing it to, if you allow yourself to say, look, I'll just get started. Five minutes, and if in five minutes I don't feel like continuing, I'll let myself stop. The vast majority of the time you'll go a lot further. So in the end, I didn't need the huge chunks of the pandemic , I had the draft before then.

Helen: Yeah, that's really interesting to hear. And I totally agree that setting really small, more easily achievable targets each day just helps take that pressure off because when you've got 55,000 or more words to write it's quite a weight to get through it and to know that that page needs to be filled each day.

So yeah, I'm really interested to hear, and I'm really impressed that you wrote every single day, including weekends and holidays.

Jim: I did, I did. But it's actually - and I hope we'll talk about this - it's actually very relevant to the issue of developing one's courage muscle and becoming more confidently courageous, is this notion of small, steady steps of progress and not trying to tackle the hardest thing first, and also not expecting yourself to be incredibly productive or capable at first. It's the same set of principles that actually in the end underlined how I wrote the book.

Helen: Yeah. Fantastic. Well, we'll definitely get a bit more into that very shortly. But I gave a very quick feel for listeners of your career and the roles you've held and your education and career are focused on management and sociology and organizational behaviour. Was that a career path that you had consciously planned from the outset and have you always wanted to and chosen to stay in academia?

Jim: Yeah. So, I, I think there are roughly speaking two kinds of people in this regard. And I have to admit, I've always been jealous of the first type, these people who say like, I, at eight years old, I knew I wanted to be a doctor or, whatever. And I, I've always been jealous of that. It seemed like somehow that would be easier. But that was not me.

I am in the second type, which is that I have gotten to where I sit today largely by doing things and being reasonably attuned to whether I'm enjoying them and feel like continuing them or actually I'm quite clear I don't like them, I don't want to do them.

From college on, I got to where I am largely as much as by closing doors that clearly were not interesting to me or didn't feel right for me. And, I guess one way of staying on the right path for oneself is to just not actually get on the wrong path or as quickly as possible, get back on a path. And that has definitely been the case for me.

Helen: Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting reflection that just how often do we consciously choose not to follow a particular opportunity or actually even by staying in what we're doing, we're making that conscious choice actually to stay committed to the the role in hand, even if we don't realize we're making that as a conscious choice.

And so when did you get to start to become interested in courage in the context of our world of work? I know it's something you've been researching and writing about for many years, but was there something that triggered that or led you into that?

Jim: So the initial intellectual trigger was actually very early in my PhD studies. I did a large project on a challenge of a speaking up problem, right? A company whose climate was riddled with fear and a sense of futility around speaking up. And I actually found that ended up being my doctoral dissertation.

And I found as part of that process that the general finding, and of course it remains true, is that when people feel it's safe to speak up, generally they're more willing to do so and do, and when they think it's risky or futile, they don't. But that there was a small set of people in my data who explicitly said no, it's not safe, but I do it anyway.

And I remember, very early on I had made a note to myself: this is clearly an instance of workplace courage recognizing the risk, but acting anyway. And I actually started a draft of a first paper on courage, but then, life happened and I didn't do anything with it. But I was teaching leadership courses, graduate, MBA level courses, executive MBA courses and repeatedly at the end of my courses, I would give just a short wrap up speech, and I'd say, look, we've added a lot of tools to your toolkits. You've learned a lot of concepts and frameworks about leadership.

But I need to say one more thing, and that is, I don't think it matters how big your toolkit is. The moments will come when you either have the courage or not to use the tools. And that, I believe, is what's going to define you as a leader. And it was that plus, then maybe two or three more minutes of some inspirational quotes about being courageous that I would end the course with.

But I started to consistently get feedback saying, 'this should have been the course' and 'we need a course on this' and 'why isn't there a whole module on courage?' It was really that repetitive desire from the students that I was working with or consulting engagements I was doing that led me to finally say, okay, this is no longer just an intellectual interest for me.

It's clear. It's clear that people out there recognize the need for more willingness and more competence in the realm of doing scary things that feel important or worthwhile or morally correct. And I think it connects a lot to what we were just talking about, choosing paths.

I have often thought when I see people, particularly in executive MBA or consulting, people in their let's say forties, people who have been working 20 years or so already. And there's a little bit of a sense of like Thoreau's quote about, most men - of course nowadays it would say people - lead lives of quiet desperation.  And by no means I'm saying the people I work with are desperate, but that sense of, you've been working 10, 15, 20 years and that sense of, is this it? I got 20, 30, 40 years left. Is this it? Am I just on this path where I'm not fully engaged or satisfied, I don't feel fully respected or included or alive, but I don't know what to do. I don't know how to be more agentic. I don't know how to stand up more for myself. I don't know how to be bolder. I don't know. In a lot of cases, I don't know how to have the courage to change organizations or jobs.

And I think that at some level it was that, that continuous emotional sense I got from people of there should be more. How can we find more? That really made a difference in motivating me to to learn more.

Helen: Yeah. And would you say that with the relatively recent rise or focus on purpose-driven careers and responsible purpose-driven businesses that you've seen that need increase and become much more conscious in people over the last 5, 10, 15 years? Or is it that it just varies by age that people get to, is one reference point you just mentioned and I guess the pandemic has inevitably led a lot of people to question what they invest their time and their weeks in, and whether it's worthwhile.

Jim: Yeah. As I know, from your own background and work, it's a little hard to discern which signals, which things we're seeing a lot more of now are really new in the underlying causes versus are just manifesting because the pandemic has finally led people to say enough, or my priorities are now finally different.

As you well know, if you look at things we've been tracking for a long time, like employee engagement, if we look at job satisfaction, true feeling of inclusiveness or commitment to an organization, these have been frankly, bad for a long time way, way, way decades before the pandemic.  It is not news in the pandemic that many people didn't feel trust in their manager, didn't feel the culture of their organization was healthy or fulfilling; all of these things, as you well know, they've been around for a long time. And listeners know that, listeners know their job didn't just suddenly become any of those things in the pandemic.

What has probably changed for quite, for millions of people around the world is the overall calculus of what will I put up with or what do I want for my life, or what trade offs have I now. I think that has changed. But we've known that the world of work is not really all it could or should be for a really long time.

Helen: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point that, the data's been saying the same thing for a long time, and

Jim: It has.

Helen: we need to differentiate between causes and triggers or different spotlights highlighting things we've been ignoring for too long.

Jim: I think what's changed is the willingness to do something about it on the employee side,

Helen: Yeah.

Jim: You would say like the employer or the organizational causal, this is not news, right? That people are disengaged or feel like cogs in a machine or any of the other things we read about.

Helen: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's dig into courage a little bit next and early in 'Choosing Courage', you make the point if I've understood it correctly that courage is really an everyday skill that we can all practice and hone and apply rather than something that the fortunate few happen to have been genetically born with that gives them an advantage.

Is that right? And if so, can you just say a little bit more about that?

Jim: Yeah, I mean, first of all, let's just talk about the evidence itself. Is there evidence that there is some kind of personality or genetic disposition that leads to competent, courageous action? And the answer as far as I'm aware is no, there is no such evidence.

It's not just that I can't find it or, people more recently haven't been able to find it. In some form or other people have been looking for this for a long time.

In World War II right there there were folks who at great risks to themselves sheltered Jews for sustained periods of time. And after World War II many social scientists studied and tried to figure out like, were these people different? They're the famous Milgram 'deference to authority' shock experiments, and similarly, right, Milgram spent years trying to figure out were there personality dispositions that explained it? And pretty much across the board, the answer has been no. There's no magic bullet personality that makes people courageous or skillfully courageous.

And a different way to think about that, which we can generally all resonate with is, In all philosophical or religious tradition, there are cardinal virtues, right? Or core virtues or values moderation kindness, fairness. And I don't think we walk around with a narrative that says, it's unfortunate that 90% of people are jerks because only 10% were born with the kindness gene.

Or it's, it's unfortunate that 75% of people are like foolishly immoderate, wasteful and crazy because only 25% were born. Yeah, we don't do that. When we talk about virtues, the expectation is it's hard to do these things, but everybody has the potential and obligation to do them.

Helen: Yeah.

Jim: For whatever reason, when it comes to courage, we like to put it in a different category and say, I guess that's just for some of us, some of the time and it's because I wasn't born that way.  And there's a lot of reasons why that probably is. If you think about narrative stories, the narrative about the hero is indeed that the hero's a very special kind of person, right? Is a superhero. And that narrative, of course, contributes to the idea that most of us are not that. And then of course, when asked ' name a courageous person or tell a courageous story', most of us will naturally default to something about Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or whoever. And so we also, we talk about that incredible person.

And so one of the things I've been very conscious about in my own work is, I talk about the bank teller and the supermarket clerk and, and people who are just like you and me. Because I think the stories we tell also either reinforce the narrative that it's just special people or they help us see no, it's people just like us who are owning the responsibility to stand up and do hard things, and to practice getting better at that.

Helen: Yeah, I think that's so important as a message, isn't it? And I completely agree with what you're saying about, we have over time developed this kind of cult of the CEO or of the great almost superhuman individual. And and yet what you were saying about there is no genetic differentiation when it comes to courage, that's actually a very reassuring and encouraging message.

And I wonder if one of the reasons why we don't treat courage in the same way we treat the other virtues, as you were just describing, is perhaps because of the fear factor and, somebody might absolutely see something they want to do, or an injustice they want to put right, or want to bring about, a change that feels really stretching or challenging.

But they're probably weighing up the pros and cons of doing that and thinking about, okay, well what's, what's the potential fallout and the negative risks to me? So c an you explain how you help people overcome, those kind of limiting fears?

Jim: Yeah, I think you're right by the way about that. Like when you're raising your kids, right? If one of my daughters said something mean to the other, or was complaining about fairness or whatever, first of all, we would never be subject to them saying, 'well, I can't be nice to her, what do you think I am, Winston Churchill?' we don't talk that way about other virtues, right? So that makes it a little easier right out of the gate. But then also you're right, like being moderate in our choices or being kind, they don't feel risky, right? They don't, they don't usually have quite the fear element that courage does. And so I do think that's what distinguishes that's one of the things that distinguishes courageous action.

So how do you deal with that? Well, a few ways. One, I think it's helping people realize that one of the reasons courageous actions feel so frightening and risky is that when we're asked to think about being courageous, we tend to think about that scariest activity.  We tend to think about, oh, you're telling me to be more courageous at work. You're telling me to blow the whistle and be on the BBC or lose my job. When in fact actually what I'm mostly saying is what if you just gave that peer some honest feedback about the way what they said to you hurts, or what if instead of sugarcoating the truth about why your subordinate's not getting a promotion, you just told the truth about their limitations and what they need to do.

And so one of the ways I think we help people deal with this fear barrier is you change the scale of the action to much, much more manageable starting behaviours and you help people realize, yeah, we're not talking about martyrdom, blow-up-your-career level behaviour and certainly not right out of the gate.

And then I think, there's a different element of, of asking people to just do some actual reconsideration of like, what identities do you say are important to you? What life objectives do you say are important to you? What, what values do you claim to have? What do you hope your legacy will be? And then to say, can you actually achieve any of those things by not undertaking some risk?

And I think most people if they're honest will say, look, I can't say I support these causes or these identity groups or these values, and never take a risk. That's the nature of the world, right, is that those things are violated, those things are put in jeopardy. And so I think part of it is helping people change the magnitude of the fear they experience. But the other part of it is helping people ask themselves some questions about 'is it reasonable for me to continue this storytelling about myself and the regrets I do or don't want to have if I'm not willing to take some action?'

Helen: Yes. That makes sense. And you, you mentioned it a little earlier, about how you deliberately chose everyday people in everyday work situations as data points and anecdotes and case studies in the book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about them because so often business books are about great big events in great big companies, with very high profile, almost celebrity .Leaders and that can feel quite distancing as a reader. I don't necessarily relate to that personally. So I found that in incredibly relatable about your book

Jim: yeah. I mean, one of the things that you, you learn over time when you really engage in this domain is that, it's a bit sad for me to tell you this, but I think there is a difference between being inspired by something or someone and being inspired to do something and the more heroic and distal the person we're talking about is, the more we are inspired by them, but distinctly not inspired to do anything. Because it's too easy to say, I'm not that, I'm not like that. And so if you want to shrink that gap between, 'it's inspiring oh, and I'm supposed to do that too' I think people have to be relatable.

Helen: Yes, which is really helpful to bear in mind, as we listen to that, if we're thinking about something we want to change where we work or in in our industry, is that we don't have to set up some great big campaign or secure a load of stakeholders on board or funding or whatever. Actually by taking small everyday steps and acts of courage, we are more likely inspire others who are watching and observing to take the same or similar steps. Which in its own way, can lead to a groundswell of behaviour change and, and shifting of norms over time.

Jim: I think that's, I hope that's true. I think it's true. I also think it's true that people often we have a hard time understanding all the different ripples of influence. And so, too often we stick our neck out, we do something that felt risky to us and maybe even we got a little bit hammered for, and we say, well, it didn't do anything anyway. But what we're not seeing is that in so many instances, change is cumulative. Someone says something hurtful to you or someone else and you say, 'hey, I didn't think that was cool'. And And maybe the person who you say that to says, 'yeah, don't be such a .....' Or, gets defensive, okay, fine.

But that doesn't mean that when the person hears, 'hey, that isn't cool', or some variant of 'don't talk that way' enough times, at some point it's not going to sink in. This is offensive. It also doesn't mean that if you and others start to say that enough times, eventually someone with more power is going to realize this guy or gal's a jerk and I need to take some action. So part of it, I suppose, is the way we think about what it means to be influential when we're courageous and realizing that effects take time, right? Systems and people desperately want to stay the way they are. You need to keep chipping away and not thinking like your one act produces the result.

Helen: Yeah. Or that it has to be instantaneous, as you say, because so often, and I can think of instances of this in my own career, where I've seen someone behave a certain way that was inspiring to me and it doesn't mean I'm going to act on it myself tomorrow. It might percolate for quite a long time. And ...

Jim: That's right.

Helen: ...the actual opportunity to practise it might not come around for a bit.

And so you're saying we shouldn't feel discouraged that if we don't see immediate results. That makes sense.

Jim: I guess the one other thing I would just add to that is I also think it's, in many cases, it's just not the right standard anyway for judgment. People will often say to me, well, I tried to use all these tools. I think I was pretty skillful in my communication. But that person just wouldn't change. So, so this is all for nothing.

And I said, well, I think that's the wrong standard. That standard suggests that you could ever get to a place of having, complete control over others, which you cannot. I think the standard in a lot of cases is actually when you go home at the end of the day and you look in the mirror, and you ask yourself the question, was I as skillful as I could have been in that moment? Am I proud of what I did and tried to do today? If your answer to that question is yes, then you have succeeded. So sometimes, right, it's also just about what's your definition of success?

Helen: Yeah. And accepting the limits of our control and influence and as you say, we can't change other people.

Jim: That's right, the only people we can control is us and are we okay with how we have behaved? That's the one standard you can control.

Helen: Yes. Yeah, that's a really helpful reminder, and I know in the book you break down acts of courage and help people think about how they set the scene for a courageous act and managing the messaging and priming people, if that's helpful, et cetera. Then actually, in the moment, but then also importantly, you talk about the follow up to the courageous acts and how it's easy to forget about that, but that can be a crucial part of making a really positive impact. Or, picking up the pieces more constructively if it hasn't quite gone according to plan.

Jim: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. If we were to say, okay, hey listeners, do you think this is obvious enough, yes or no, and you say, is setting the stage important? Right. Building the right coalition? Building up your own credibility? Yeah. All your listeners would say, yeah, of course that's important.

If you'd say, is getting clear on whether this is the right issue for you to raise? Is it the right time? Everybody would say yes. And if we'd say, well, then the how you deliver the message itself matters, right? Framing matters, being non offensive, managing emotions. Do those things matter? Everybody would say yes.

I think - and it certainly was the case for me - the thing that I certainly hadn't thought as much about, but I really learned from careful discussions with people who were described by others as really good at taking courageous action that made a difference, was this follow up step.

And indeed it matters, no matter how the initial effort went. Let's say you make a presentation, a pitch to change x. Even when it appears to go well, the people involved are engaged, they listen, they say, 'yeah, thanks, that was ... that's really persuasive' usually, right, 97% of the time what happens is they say 'okay, thanks for bringing that up. Let's move on to the next item on the agenda'. But you haven't actually secured a commitment to when this is going to be reengaged, or are any resources actually going to be allocated? Right? So even in the best case scenario, you have to follow up if you want that to happen.

And then there are plenty of cases, where anytime you're in the realm of suggesting, what if we did less of X and more of Y or, I know we've been committed to X, but I think it's no longer the right strategy. There are people in the room who own X, who care about X, who stand to lose if you move away from X, who are going to be bothered, who are going to take it personally.

And so, oftentimes, this is so hard to hear, right? Because you steel yourself, you get ready, you practice for that big moment, and what do you want to do afterwards? You want to go back to your office, or you want to go home and you want to protect yourself and be done with it for a while. And it's really hard to say: actually, the most important conversation that might be forthcoming, which is I have to go knock on that colleague's door and say hey, I saw an expression on your face, or I heard you say X, and I realized that maybe this wasn't working for you or resonating for you, or I accidentally offended you. Can we talk?

And I think it's one of the most neglected steps, is paying enough attention and then having enough courage to go take those follow up steps to repair or check in with folks.

Helen: Yeah. I can see how that final step has the potential to be really transformative in terms of moving everybody on maintaining harmonious relationships, holding your ground, but respecting where other people are coming from and what's important to them too.

Jim: Yeah. And in the end, since almost anything complex in an organization, any meaningful change requires like the support and interdependence of a lot of people, it also can just, honestly, even if you say I don't care about this courage angle, blah, blah, blah, fine. Don't care about the courage angle, but just in your own self-interest, it's change management 101 to say you, don't want to leave a third or a half or whatever the people feeling like they're going to be in blocker mode.

Helen: Yes. I was just thinking that as you were describing and giving some of those examples that it was reminding me of classic stakeholder management is who's in the room? What do they care about? What perspective are they going to have on this? What's important to them?

And if we just barge in with our own agenda and we don't stand in their shoes, then we're going to be missing lots of important signals and opportunities to really find compromise or points of agreement as well.

Jim: And just information, right? Because the other thing is that when you you see somebody frown or they make a comment, we all do this, right? We draw a conclusion, right? We go from that particular stimulus to an inference about what it meant. They hate my idea. They're mad at me. It could be, it might be, but it could be a bunch of other things!

And so like sometimes the reason you have any kind of courageous conversation is not per se because you think it's going to change something in the here and now, but because it's information that helps you understand where that person is at and what you're going to need to do going forward.

Helen: Yes, I'm chuckling because I often leap to those assumptions in conversations with my husband at home and I see an expression and I think, oh, I know what that means.

Jim: Yeah.

Helen: If I take the a minute to say, I saw that on your face or, or you just did that, does this mean x? I am gobsmacked how 99% of the times I've got it wrong! He's like, no, no, not that at all!

Jim: Yeah. I think we got a little bit off in psychology, over the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years. There's been this whole thing in psychology, right, we call it 'theory of mind', which is basically just a fancy way of saying, are we good at knowing what other people are thinking? Can we infer correctly? And then there was originally this neuroscience that said, oh yeah, we have mirror neurons and all this. And it was a positive, optimistic view on theory of mind, on mind reading. Actually, if you look at the data more, the newer data the story's not so optimistic at all.

I think a fairer conclusion is: we're pretty lousy. We're pretty lousy at mind reading, and we would be massively better served by assuming we don't know, and therefore better ask.

Helen: Yeah. That's great. So listeners, if you only take two things from this conversation, remember that no one is born with more of a courage gene than anyone else. And secondly, we are really bad at mind reading so bear that in mind!

And Jim, thank you so much for talking to us about what's in your book and sharing so much of the practical advice and wisdom and insights and examples that we can reflect on for our own work lives and careers. I was just going to ask a final question, which is obviously you've created this book which is influencing people's thinking about their experiences at work and what's important to them personally. Has there been something in particular that stands out in your mind as a resource or perhaps a conversation over your career that has been really instrumental for you as well?

Jim: So, the obvious answer here is to talk about all the books on communication skills and all these kinds of things. And yes, those have been important to me, but actually, there are two domains of knowledge I think are really important and under-utilised by all of us.

One is more reading of biographies, memoirs, and not just the Winston Churchill and Abe Lincolns, but all sorts of folks who were in their own way, non-conformists or lone wolves or just courageous actors, people who made small changes that ended up being really noteworthy.

I think if one way to be inspired and to to learn about how a) they were human, just like all of us, they had hurts, fears, problems, they got smacked down a few times, it's to read biographies and memoirs. So I do a lot of that kind of reading.

And the other domain of reading that I think is under-attuned attuned to is stuff on cognitive behavioural ... It's called cognitive behavioural therapy, but it's really just cognitive behavioural thinking. Because a lot of what prevents us from speaking up or not screwing it up when we are speaking up is the inner dialogue we have, right? So, we might be in the meeting and I say, 'Hey Helen I think we should do X.'

And then you say, 'well, I'm not sure now's the right time'. Which might be innocently, just a comment about when we should do it, but I twist that into 'she always hates my ideas. She never goes for what I want to do. She's such a dot, dot dot.' Right? In other words, what I'm doing is in my head, I'm catastrophizing, I'm engaging in black and white thinking.

And so I think that, reading about cognitive behavioural therapy, like learning to recognise when your inner dialogue is unhelpful and not productive and frankly wrong; and how to get better at catching yourself and changing that inner dialogue is really, really, really useful.

Helen: Yes, I couldn't agree more and it's great to hear you express it so articulately. And on the biographies point, I read avidly as well and business books and fiction, but the one category I've read less of is biographies. So actually you've inspired me to pick up a biography for an upcoming book to read.

But thank you for talking to us and explaining how we can look differently at courage at work and you've really inspired us to understand it a bit better, practice it more confidently and more competently, which is, I know, a key point in the book, that we apply more skill at it. And how can listeners connect with you or follow your work if they've been enjoying the podcast conversation with you?

Jim: So you could visit my website, it's jimdetert.com. I think I'm maybe the only Jim Detert in the world doing anything like this, not hard to find and also find me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great way to follow me. I post a lot of new ideas and I share things from all the other places I publish. So I would say, connect with me on Linked and then also follow me on my website would be great.

Helen: Fantastic. Thank you. Best wishes for your ongoing research and, and teaching in this area. We look forward to following the new ideas and thinking that will come from that. And thank you so much for being a brilliant guest!

Jim: Thank you.