Courage Goes to Work: How to Build Backbones, Boost Performance, and Get Results

Courage is the elemental, but often overlooked, key to business success. But how do you create a courageous workforce? How can you, as a manager, help your workers to take risks, confront crises, and deal with company and industry changes? Bill Treasurer shows how to systematically develop courage in your employees, just like you develop any other workplace skill. He draws on his years as a top courage-building consultant to offer a proven approach for inspiring workers to leave their comfort zones and harness their fears so they step up to challenges more readily. Ultimately, a courageous workforce is a more energetic, innovative, and productive workforce.

About the Author

Bill Treasurer is the founder and chief encouragement officer of Giant Leap Consulting, Inc., a courage-building company. Bill is the author of Right Risk: 10 Powerful Principles for Taking Giant Leaps with Your Life (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003), a book about personal courage. He is also the chief editor of Positively M.A.D.: Making a Difference in Your Organizations,Communities, and the World (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004), a compilation of stories from world-renowned experts that inspire readers to make a positive difference in their organizations.

Bill’s insights have been featured in more than one hundred newspapers, including the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Boston Herald, and Investor’s Business Daily. Bill’s ideas have also appeared in such magazines as Woman’s Day, Business to Business, Redbook, Fitness, and Harvard Management Update.

Since 1991, Bill has been strengthening people’s leadership skills, improving team performance, and helping executives to behave more courageously. Among others, Bill has facilitated sessions for CNN, Starbucks, GE, Chrysler, Toyota, Bank of America, the Home Depot, Credit Suisse First Boston, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Prior to founding Giant Leap, Bill was an executive in Accenture’s change-management and human-performance practice, eventually becoming the company’s first internal executive coach. He began his career as a leadership consultant with High Performing Systems, Inc., and as a team-building instructor with Executive Adventure, Inc.

Before getting a “real job,” Bill traveled the world as a member of the U.S. High Diving Team. During that time, he performed more than fifteen hundred high dives, from heights that topped one hundred feet. More than three hundred dives were performed while on fire (see the cover of Right Risk as proof)!

Bill holds a master’s degree in administrative science from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay and an undergraduate degree from West Virginia University, where he attended school on a full athletic scholarship for springboard diving.