Courage is The Way

There’s a phrase leaders say too easily. And I’ve grown tired of hearing it.

It arrives with a shrug or a chuckle, the worn-out mantra of someone who’s confused endurance with leadership: “they need to develop a thick skin.”

I’ve heard it said about young aides encountering erratic bosses, about engineers presenting to founders who mistake cruelty for clarity, about designers enduring public takedowns under the guise of “raising the bar.” I’ve heard it in marketing meetings where strategy gets torched for sport, in boardrooms where VCs sharpen their questions not to probe but to perform. It’s a power play disguised as rigor. And too many call it coaching when it’s anything but.

The phrase is a lie. And worse, it’s a betrayal.

As leaders, we’re not here to harden our people. We’re here to fortify them. Not with callouses, but with courage.

Courage is what moves us forward. Thick skin is what keeps us from feeling how far we’ve strayed.

Courage steps in with eyes open, knowing the risks, choosing to speak anyway. Thick skin flinches inward, bracing for the hit, hoping not to feel it.

Courage is active. It moves toward the hard thing with conviction. Thick skin is passive. It absorbs, deflects, numbs.

Courage is built in relationship, in trust, in the quiet knowing that even if your voice shakes, someone will listen. Thick skin is built in isolation, in silence, in the lonely belief that you are on your own.

Courage says, “I’ll go first.” Thick skin says, “I’ll survive.”

And here’s the part we forget, the part that makes courage different from bravery. Bravery is a spark you carry inside. Courage is something others can hand you. It can be fostered, modeled, passed down. That is the miracle of it. We encourage each other—literally, we give courage—to speak, to act, to rise. That means courage is not just a virtue. It’s a responsibility. And leadership, if it’s worth anything at all, was never about mere survival. It was about showing up vulnerable and courageous, and helping others do the same.

Thick skin dulls the senses. It teaches people to absorb the blow, not question why it came. To get back in the box and swing again, even if no one taught them how to read the pitch. Thick skin makes people tolerate bad behavior that should never have been normalized. It breeds survivalists, not leaders. And when we call that growth, we’ve already lost the plot.

At its core, this mindset erodes the very foundation of a healthy team. It replaces trust with guardedness. It turns constructive conflict into theater. It makes people commit to the performance, but not to each other. Over time, you stop hearing real voices. You hear rehearsed ones.

Mercurial men in power rarely change. They charm, they provoke, they test the edges of what they can get away with. And if we make it our developmental strategy to throw rising stars in front of them like rookies facing a Cy Young pitcher without a helmet, then it’s not their toughness being tested. It’s our judgment. And our culture.

What they need isn’t volatility. It’s clarity. Not unpredictable flares of brilliance, but accountable models of leadership. We can’t demand grace under fire and then light the match ourselves. That’s not mentorship. That’s abdication, dressed up as toughness.

There’s a moment I still carry. A young VP of Product at a fast-moving tech company was preparing to present at her first board meeting. She’d built something elegant. A clear, grounded vision that held. But the night before, she admitted she was nervous. “He’s going to interrupt,” she said, meaning the President, “and he’ll tear into something just to prove a point. But it’s fine. It’ll toughen me up.”

I wish I had said then what I know now. You don’t build muscle in chaos. You build it with confidence, with a team behind you offering courage, and a coach who knows when to step in and when to let you swing.

Because the cost of those moments, if we’re honest, is not just discomfort. It’s erosion. It’s the slow unraveling of belief in one’s own instincts. And when a voice like hers begins to hesitate, starts swinging late or second-guessing the pitch, we don’t just lose a contributor. We lose the future she was meant to shape.

If we believe in organizational health, we have to build it from the inside. That means trust before territory. Support before spectacle. It means knowing that when someone shows up unsure, our job is not to test them, but to lift them to a place where they can risk being real. That is how accountability lives. That is how performance thrives.

I’ve never believed leadership is about shielding people from heat. But I do believe it’s about walking them through the fire, with head high, shoulders square, and a hand on their back that says, “I see you. I’ve got you. You’re not alone.”

That’s how you build courage. Not by demanding silence in the storm, but by showing up in it.

So let’s retire the myth of thick skin. Let’s bury it next to the other relics of a colder, more careless time. In its place, let’s raise a new creed. One that says leadership is not born from humiliation, but from trust. That someone will have your back when the room goes cold. That your value isn’t measured by how well you take the hit, but by how often you help someone else avoid it.

We’re all, at some point, the shepherd or the shield. Let us be the kind of leaders who don’t just withstand storms, but hand others the courage to brave them with us.