We don’t often talk about the quiet trade-offs leaders make, not in dramatic decisions or high-stakes strategies, but in the subtle, daily choices that shape team dynamics. The comments that were left unchallenged. The discomforts that needed to be avoided. The truths that were softened to maintain peace.
These aren’t just social niceties. These are decisions. And often, these decisions trade comfort for courage. And that’s where leaders often forget that courage creates true trust.
The Illusion of Safety
Leaders are encouraged to create psychological safety, and for good reason. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson defines it as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” Still, as I wrote in “It’s Not About the Space. It’s About the Person”, safety doesn’t come from carefully curated environments alone. It comes from people. It’s how a leader listens, how they respond to challenge, and how they make others feel seen. Edmondson’s research supports this too: when someone in the room makes space for vulnerability, teams speak up more, share mistakes, and innovate faster.
Some mix safety with comfort, but you shouldn’t. In fact, genuine safety often includes moments of discomfort, tension, and vulnerability.
Brené Brown, whose work on courage and vulnerability in leadership, puts it plainly: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” When leaders avoid difficult conversations in the name of preserving calm, they may unintentionally reinforce silence and weaken trust.
The Neuroscience of Avoidance
Avoiding discomfort is biologically wired into us. The brain’s amygdala responds to social threat in much the same way it does to physical danger. A 2021 study published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found that leaders often avoid giving critical feedback when they anticipate emotional discomfort, even when they know the conversation is necessary and helpful. So, in other words, your brain would sometimes rather fake its own Wi-Fi outage than tell a colleague their presentation missed the mark. The result is a leadership pattern of knowing what to do but avoiding how it feels.
The Cost of Comfort
Leaders who routinely choose comfort over courage often experience ripple effects in their teams:
- Reduced accountability, as difficult truths remain unspoken
- Slower learning, as people hold back insights or questions
- A fragile harmony that masks disengagement or quiet resentment
- Increased risk of burnout, for both leaders and team members, when unresolved tensions accumulate
Ronald Heifetz, a voice on adaptive leadership, writes that “the work of leadership is holding people in a state of productive tension long enough for real change to happen.” That tension is where clarity, growth, and transformation begin. Comfort may feel easier, but it is rarely the path to progress. As Jari Sarasvuo put it “ kehittyminen loppuu tyytyväisyyteen” freely translated “growth ends where satisfaction begins.”
Questions for Courage-Oriented Leadership
- Am I protecting peace, or avoiding progress?
- What conversation have I postponed because it feels awkward?
- What emotion am I actually trying to avoid right now? Discomfort, guilt, rejection?
- What assumptions am I making about discomfort? And are they actually true?
From Comfort to Courage
Leading with courage does not mean being harsh or aggressive; it means being bold and confident. It means choosing truth over ease. It means offering clarity when ambiguity feels safer. It means being willing to show up, even when the stakes are emotional rather than strategic.
That might involve naming a difficult dynamic in a meeting. Or giving feedback early, before silence becomes tension. Or asking the vulnerable question in a room full of peers. These actions are rarely comfortable. But they are the foundations of trust.
As Brené Brown says, “You can choose courage, or you can choose comfort. But you cannot choose both.”
Leadership should be choosing courage, even when comfort whispers the easier way.
