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188 PART 3: THE PERSONAL SIDE OF LEADERSHIP
8. Do you have the courage to take a moral stand that your peers and even authority
figures will disagree with? Why?
9. Do you agree that it is important for leaders to do the right thing even if no one will
ever know about it? Why or why not?
10. A consultant recently argued that the emphasis on corporate governance and social
responsibility has distracted leaders from key business issues such as serving customers
and beating competitors. Do you agree? Should leaders put business issues first or
ethical issues first?

Leadership at Work

Scary Person
Think of a person in your life right now who is something of a scary person for you. Scary
people are those you don’t really know but who are scary to you because you anticipate that
you won’t like them, perhaps because you don’t like the way they act or look from a distance,
and hence you avoid building relationships with them. A scary person might be a student at
school, someone at work, a neighbor, or someone you are aware of in your social circle.
Scary people trigger a small amount of fear in us—that is why we avoid them and
don’t really get to know them. A test of courage is whether you can step through your
fear. You will experience fear many times as a leader.
For this exercise, your assignment is to reach out to one or more scary persons in
your life. Invite the person for lunch or just walk up and introduce yourself and start a
conversation. Perhaps you can volunteer to work with the person on an assignment. The
key thing is to step through your fear and get to know this person well enough to know
what he or she is really like.

After you have completed your assignment, share what happened with another per-
son. Were you able to reach out to the scary person? What did you discover about the
scary person? What did you discover about yourself by doing this activity? If you found
the exercise silly and refused to do it, you may have let fear get the better of you by ratio-
nalizing that the assignment has little value.

In Class: The instructor can give this assignment to be done prior to a specifi c
class. During class it is a good exercise for students to discuss their scary person experi-
ences among themselves in small groups. The instructor can ask students to report to their
groups about the scary person, revealing as many details as they are comfortable with,
explaining how they summoned the courage to reach out, and the result. After the groups
have finished their exchange, the instructor can ask a couple of student volunteers to report

their experiences to the entire class. Then students can be asked questions such as: Looking
back on this experience, what is courage? How was it expressed (or not) in this exercise?
How will fear and courage be part of organizational leadership?

Leadership Development: Cases for Analysis

Young Leaders Council
Gehan Rasinghe was thrilled to be appointed to the Young Leaders Council at Werner &

Burns, a large consulting and financial management fi rm located in Boston. When Rasinghe
had first joined the fi rm he’d had a hard time fi tting in, with his accented English and quiet