Courageous Cultures

How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates

By: Karin Hurt, David Dye

Narrated by: Karin Hurt, David Dye, Amy Edmonson

Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

From executives complaining that their teams don’t contribute ideas to employees giving up because their input isn’t valued—company culture is the culprit. Courageous Cultures provides a road map to build a high-performance, high-engagement culture around sharing ideas, solving problems, and rewarding contributions from all levels.

Many leaders are convinced they have an open environment that encourages employees to speak up and are shocked when they learn that employees are holding back. Employees have ideas and want to be heard. Leadership wants to hear them.

Too often, however, employees and leaders both feel that no one cares about making things better. The disconnect typically only widens over time, with both sides becoming more firmly entrenched in their viewpoints. Becoming a courageous culture means building teams of microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates working together.

In our world of rapid change, a courageous culture is your competitive advantage. It ensures that your company is “sticky” for both customers and employees.

In Courageous Cultures, you’ll learn practical tools that help you:

• Learn the difference between microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates and how they work together.
• See how the latest research conducted by the authors confirms why organizations struggle when it comes to creating strong cultures where employees are encouraged to contribute their best thinking.
• Learn proven models and tools that leaders can apply throughout all levels of the organization, to reengage and motivate employees.
• Understand best practices from companies around the world and learn how to apply these strategies and techniques in your own organization.

This book provides you with the practical tools to uncover, leverage, and scale the best ideas from every level of your organization.

©2020 Karin Hurt and David Dye (P)2020 HarperCollins Leadership

Critic reviews

Expertly written, organized and presented, 'Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates' is an ideal DIY course of instruction that will lay out a successful approach for management to get the most value out of what their employees have to offer to maximize corporate success in a highly competitive and highly stressful business environment.—Midwest Book Review

Don't we all want to promote a culture where our employees are able to speak up, speak truth, solve problems and hold each other accountable? In Courageous Cultures, Karin and David use story telling and examples to share the formula organizations need to 'Own the UGLY' and create a culture where employees do not have a fear of speaking up and can take organizations to new heights.—Kye Mitchell, Chief Operations Officer, Kforce

In a world of accelerating disruption, Karin and David provide powerful tools to tap into the innovative and problem-solving capacity of every employee. No grandiose, glamorous, otherworld theory here; Courageous Cultures is a compendium of straightforward, proven, practical ideas and solutions. Read the book, and up your game.—Whitney Johnson, award-winning author, Disrupt Yourself and Build an A Team

Excellent Ideas for today’s workplace

Culture, we all talk about it, but which companies actually cultivate a positive, courageous culture? This book is an excellent read with so many great ideas on ways to encourage your teams to work courageously. I am excited to implement some of these in my team to encourage growth and leadership within my department.

logical approach to amazing culture

What a great book on culture, well thought out proven techniques in a well written book. I enjoyed the authors reading the book. I look forward to listening again so I can put these ideas to work from the ground up on our new startup. If you want to make your company great listen to this book.

Not all that courageous…

I finally had to close the book and give up. They do far more talking about various issues & scenarios that are an issue than they do how to actually go about changing your culture to help resolve such issues. It felt like listening to people complain for hours about what they don’t like at an org — but authors not offering any practical approaches or solutions to shifting the behaviors at an org and thereby changing the culture. It was exhausting. I have no idea why this has so many stars but unless you have a zero EQ they don’t really tell you anything you don’t already know. Very disappointing.

Nothing new, stack of rehash

This book does not present a new idea or a new theory. The following are the content of the book which is available in the work of more famous authors and books.
1- Be clear,
2- Be curious
3- connecting
4- Trust
5- Talk politely, the book mentions that someone said for VPs in a meeting "you are wrong".
...
Each of these items are well researched and there are more credible books on each topic.
There is a part that the authors are quoting a saleswoman who asked every customer " where are you working?" and then the authors do not explain how to fit this question on other situations to get a similar result with different questions.
The authors are quoting in the beginning of a chapter and then say "Mr. James".

The narrators are changing even in the middle of a topic.
At the end of the book, you don't know what was the structure of the book and what is the current practice and what is the solution offered by the authors.

Awful female narrator

Difficult to enjoy listening with overexcited female narrator. Hired narrator would have been much better.
Book has no real “how to” to implement this one-pony-show book (only cultural belief is speaking up). Other books far better on culture such as “change the culture, change the game” which has a WAY TO IMPLEMENT the cultural change.
Also, the focus is solely on the cultural belief of speaking up - more specifically, focusing in even further on bullying and discrimination - an enemy of the speaking up cultural belief.
Final assessment: far too limited in scope to be helpful.
Skip this one.