Close your eyes and picture a bold leader.
I'll bet you saw someone loud. Big voice. Big gestures. First to speak in the meeting, last to leave the stage. The person who fills the room and expects the room to like it.
Now picture the person on your team who once told the CEO, calmly and to her face, the project was going to miss its date. Who told you the truth when everyone else nodded.
Which one of those two was bold?
When Debra and I interviewed Advita Patel for Corey-osity Unleashed, she took the word apart in a few sentences. Boldness, as most of us picture it, is a Western, Eurocentric idea. Extroverted. Loud. Center of attention. Her definition is plainer and a lot harder to fake: saying what you need to say without fear of retaliation.
I've been chewing on it for weeks. I think she's right, and I think the loud version costs us more than we notice.
Even the Researchers Use the Loud Definition
Here's the part I found striking. The leadership research doesn't only reward loud people. It describes them with the word "bold."
In 2002, Timothy Judge and his colleagues pulled together 222 correlations from 73 samples to see which personality traits line up with leadership. Extraversion came out as the most consistent correlate, for both who gets picked as leader and who gets rated as effective.
Seven years later, Judge and a different set of co-authors described what extraverted leaders tend to do. According to the passage quoted in a 2011 paper by Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David Hofmann, they "behave in bold, aggressive, and grandiose ways. They like to be the center of attention."
So there it is in black and white. Bold sits in the same sentence as aggressive and grandiose. Our hiring and promotion systems learned the definition from somewhere.
Whose Definition Is It?
Advita's point about the Western lens isn't a throwaway line. There's data behind it.
Psychologist Jeanne Tsai at Stanford studies what she calls "ideal affect"... the feelings a culture teaches people to want. American culture values high-energy states like excitement and enthusiasm. East Asian cultures place more value on calm.
In 2016, Tsai's team looked at the official photos of leaders. Top-ranked American leaders showed more excited smiles than top-ranked Chinese leaders, across government, business and universities. Then they went bigger. They measured ideal affect in college students from 10 nations, and eight years later coded the smiles of 3,372 legislators from those same nations. The more a nation valued excitement, the more excited its leaders looked. The more it valued calm, the calmer its leaders looked.
Think about what this means for a global team. If you grew up in a culture where a leader shows strength through calm, and you work for a company which treats loud as the only signal of confidence, you'll be passed over for being the wrong kind of bold. Nobody will tell you so. They'll say you need more "presence."
What Loud Costs You
Fine, you might say. Loud leaders get picked. But do they get results?
Grant, Gino and Hofmann tested exactly this. In the first study, they sent questionnaires to 130 pizza delivery stores and got complete data back from 57 store leaders and 374 employees. When employees were passive, stores with extraverted leaders made more profit. When employees were proactive... the people who speak up with ideas... the pattern flipped. Stores with more introverted leaders made more profit.
The second study is my favorite. They put 163 college students into groups and gave each group ten minutes to fold as many T-shirts as possible. Each group included two planted helpers. In some groups, after about a minute and a half, one helper said, "I wonder if there's a more efficient way to do this." The other said, "...I have a friend from Japan who has a faster way. It might take a minute or two to teach it, but do we want to try it?"
The researchers found extraverted leaders were less receptive to the idea. Groups with proactive followers did better when the leader acted less extraverted. When followers spoke up, the loud leader's team folded fewer shirts because the leader was too busy leading to listen.
Read it again if you manage people. The cost of loud leadership isn't the noise. It's the good idea somebody on your team stopped offering.
Bold Is Saying the Thing
Go back to Advita's definition. Saying what you need to say without fear of retaliation.
None of it requires volume. Some of the boldest moves at work happen in a quiet voice:
- An engineer telling her manager, one to one, "I don't think this plan works, and here's why."
- A new hire asking a question in a room full of senior people because nobody else would.
- A team lead saying "no" to a deadline he knew his team would miss, and taking the heat for it.
- A manager saying "I don't know" in front of the whole team.
Each of those carries a risk. Each one puts something on the line. None of them needs a megaphone.
Advita makes the same point from the other side. In a conversation with Workvivo, she said, "A lot of people mistake loudness for being confident. And in fact, the opposite is often true." I agree. I've come to think the loudest person in the room is often the one with the most to protect.
The "Without Fear" Part Is Your Job
Here's where Advita's definition gets uncomfortable for leaders. Boldness has two halves. The person has to say the thing. And the place has to stop punishing them for it.
You control the second half.
My own research found 99.5% of survey respondents had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Every one of those bosses taught somebody to stay quiet. If people on your team only speak up when they're loud by nature, you don't have a bold team. You have a team where the quiet people learned to keep their heads down.
Advita also told us boldness and vulnerability work as partners, not opposites. Being vulnerable is a risk, and it takes boldness to take the risk. I wrote about checking who's in the audience before you open up, and the same check applies here. If the room punishes honesty, the bold move might be finding a different room.
How to Spot Real Boldness on Your Team
If you lead people, try these this week:
1. Count the quiet "no"s
Who on your team has told you something you didn't want to hear? Not loudly. Clearly. Those are your bold people. Make sure they know you noticed.
2. Change who speaks first
In your next meeting, ask the quietest person for their view before you share yours. Extraverted leaders, in the pizza study, crowded out proactive ideas. Speaking last gives the ideas room.
3. Reward the risk, not the delivery
When someone brings you bad news in a shaky voice, thank them for the news. Don't coach them on their "presence." The content took courage. The volume is irrelevant.
4. Check your own definition
Look at your last three promotions. Did you promote the people who said the true thing, or the people who said things loudly? If you're not sure, Advita's book Decoding Confidence is a good place to start. I also wrote about why the airport-bookshop version of confidence fails most people.
So Who Was Bold?
Back to the two people you pictured at the start. The loud one and the one who told the CEO the date would slip.
I know which one I'd want on my team. I also know which one most organizations promote.
So here's my question. When was the last time you said what you needed to say, quietly, knowing it might cost you? And when was the last time someone on your team did the same... and what did you do next?