“He built a ‘Grand Coalition,’” it stated, “taking people from the three main parties.” He took care, it continued, “to include old rivals.” At the top is a quotation from Churchill himself: “We have differed and quarreled in the past, but now one bond unites us all.” One thing that stood out to me, given the aspects of leadership that I’ve spent my life researching and writing about, was a plaque that described the composition of Churchill’s first War Cabinet. A Team of Rivalsĭuring that same visit to London, I visited the Churchill War Rooms - the set of underground rooms near both the prime minister’s residence and key government buildings - from which Winston Churchill and his key advisers worked (and often ate and slept) in relative physical safety throughout the years of bombing that devastated the city during the Second World War. “Remember a time in the last week,” she asks them, “when someone in your organization challenged you?” If it takes a long time for them to come up with something, or they can’t, that’s a pretty informative statement about the actual conditions they’ve created for speaking up. That’s why I found Megan’s question, which she said she poses regularly to leaders she works with, to be so insightful. Yet as I’ve written before in Harvard Business Review, that doesn’t mean even those who say they want input are actually regularly and systematically doing the right things to create that behavior in those around and below them.

These days, of course, leaders know that they’re supposed to say they value input from everyone, from anywhere in the organization. I talked about my research on everyday courage at work - the subject of my forthcoming book - and she focused on employees speaking up to those in power, which might be the prototypical workplace courage act because of the career risks it can entail.

Recently I had the chance to share the stage with Megan Reitz, a professor at Hult Ashridge Business School in the U.K., at the Thinkers50 conference in London.

The team of rivals