Elevate Courage: The Neuroscience of Work Positive Teams
Jill Schulman showed up to her first day of Naval ROTC orientation in hot pink silk shorts with matching pumps.
She researched the dress code carefully. Officers wore no jeans. She covered that. She missed a few other things. The senior Marine who spotted her in the crowd leaned over and told her she would never make it as a Marine.
She became the commanding officer of a 200-person unit.
She then served five years as a combat engineer before founding a leadership development firm rooted in a single insight she shared with me on the Work Positive Podcast: fear is the primary force preventing teams from performing at their best.
That’s right, fear rather than lack of talent or resources.
The antidote to fear is courage, the ability to act in the midst of fear.
The E in D.R.E.A.M. is for Elevate Courage.
Candor Rather Than Comfort
Jill identifies three arenas where fear most commonly paralyzes work teams.
Communication, where people withhold ideas, concerns, and honest feed-forward.
Career progression, where talented people wait for confidence rather than understanding that confidence follows bravery.
Innovation, where organizations keep doing what they always do because the alternative requires tolerating uncertainty.
Jill told me, “The real goal is candor, not comfort.”
Growth, innovation, honest communication, and creative problem-solving all require the willingness to be uncertain in front of others. Teams who lack that willingness suppress the information their people leaders most need to hear.
Bravery is Trainable
Most people leaders assume bravery is a personality trait. Either someone has it or they lack it. Jill’s research transforms that assumption.
She told me, “Bravery is like any skill. It’s a learnable, teachable skill and they need to practice it over time.”
The human brain finds it difficult to distinguish between perceived fear and actual fear. Rejection, humiliation, and failure register in the same neurological territory as a fall from a thirty-story building. As a team member stays quiet in a meeting rather than raising a real concern, they respond to a nervous system that evolved to keep humans alive in a dangerous world. The “cave person” in the brain sees a saber-toothed tiger in every Tuesday status update.
Google’s Project Aristotle studied high-performing teams for years and identified psychological safety as the single most important factor. Safety lets your team stare down the cave person and say what needs to be said anyway.
The Leader Goes First
Dr. Will Sparks sees the same dynamic from a different angle. As people leaders punish candor and reward compliance, the team learns the lesson fast. Bring wins rather than challenges. Raise numbers rather than concerns. Challenges then accumulate below the surface until they erupt at the worst possible moment.
The antidote is simple: You as the people leader go first.
Jill shared something counterintuitive and powerful. “Be brave enough to ask for help.”
People leaders who ask for help model vulnerability. Teams who see vulnerability modeled learn that honest conversation is safe. Honest teams solve challenges before they become crises.
Your Elevate Do One Thing (DOT) Challenge
In your next team meeting, share one thing you are uncertain about and ask for your team’s thinking.
Name the uncertainty out loud.
Invite candor.
Listen for what rises.
If sharing your uncertainty feels uncomfortable, that feeling is exactly the point. Bravery means acting in the presence, rather than the absence, of discomfort.
Work Positive Bottom Line
Elevate courage on your Work Positive team. Do One Thing today.
This post is from Dr. Joey Faucette's best-seller, D.R.E.A.M. Teams @ Work: Cultivate the Work Positive Teams You Dream About.
