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The gap between what a leader is doing and what that leader is capable of almost always comes down to fear. Dr Margie Warrell calls the cost of it the timidity tax, and it is paid every single time someone chooses the safe option over the one that would actually move things.
Who is on this episode
Dr Margie Warrell is a bestselling author, leadership coach and advisor to organisations including NASA, Microsoft and Visa. Her book The Courage Gap is the basis for much of this conversation. The principle that has guided her since childhood on an Australian dairy farm is that growth and comfort cannot ride the same horse.
What they covered
Margie's framing of the problem is a pair of consistent errors: we overestimate the risk in front of us and underestimate ourselves. Both are predictable, which is what makes them correctable. The practical consequence is that a leader's judgement about whether something is too risky is usually a judgement about their own discomfort, dressed as analysis.
From there she makes the case that courage is not a personality trait some people were issued and others were not. It is a learnable skill, which matters enormously if you are trying to build a team that will tell you the truth and make decisions without you in the room. Her evidence from the founders she has worked with, Richard Branson among them, is that the successful ones did not avoid failure. They changed their relationship with it, which is a different and much more teachable thing.
The last part of the conversation is about scale: what it takes to move a courage mindset from one person to a team and then to an organisation, which is where most leadership development quietly fails.
Key insights
- The timidity tax is real and recurring. Every deferred decision and unsaid thing has a price, and it does not appear on any report.
- You are not assessing risk, you are assessing discomfort. Margie's pairing of overestimated risk and underestimated self is a usable check before a decision you are avoiding.
- Courage is a skill, so it can be trained and expected. That reframes it from something you hire for to something you build.
- Successful founders did not dodge failure, they changed their relationship with it. The difference is what makes the behaviour repeatable rather than lucky.
- Growth and comfort cannot ride the same horse, which is as true of a company's operating rhythm as it is of a career.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
