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other officials to launch the ship by July 25, 1628, and threatened, “If not, those responsible would be subject to His Majesty’s disgrace.”6 The man in charge, Admiral Clas Fleming, knew the ship shouldn’t be launched but wouldn’t convey this bad news to a very irritable king.7 He would not speak truth to power. The absence of courage shows up in a variety of expected ways, but also in some less obvious ones. In the example of the Vasa, fear, conflict avoidance, and need for approval were the manifestations of lack of courage. Lack of courage shows up in many organizations as micromanagement, failure to empower others, risk aversion, overcontrol, and perfectionism. Often I’ve spoken with leaders about creating cultures that foster courage in their organizations. Some organizations unwittingly have done just the opposite. Professor Martin Seligman performed one of the most memorable studies in psychological research, which he later called “learned helplessness.” Dogs that had been conditioned with an electric shock while restrained internalized the sense that they were “helpless.” Even given the opportunity to escape the shock, these conditioned dogs would not jump over a low fence to escape a new shock. They learned to be helpless.8 Leaders create learned helplessness in their organizations in a variety of ways. For example, the “punishment” of truth tellers extinguishes truth telling in a hurry. Micromanagement and failure to empower make people feel helpless and incompetent. Employees begin to protect their jobs rather than setting big goals and trying to achieve them. We have likely worked in organizations that couldn’t handle the truth, and those organizations undoubtedly had a variety of ways to extinguish truth telling. We may have hard choices to 154