Dare to Lead
Brave work. Tough conversations. Whole hearts.
Book Edition Details
Summary
"Dare to Lead (2018) explores how to find the inner courage to lead a great team. Drawing on Brené Brown’s research and experience as a leadership coach, it shows how you can harness your emotions, quash your fear of failure, and become a daring leader in an increasingly competitive world. "
Introduction
In boardrooms across the globe, leaders face a paradox that defines our times: the very qualities that got them to their positions of power may be the ones preventing them from truly leading. Traditional command-and-control approaches crumble in the face of complex challenges that demand innovation, authentic connection, and the courage to navigate uncertainty. The research reveals a striking truth: the most effective leaders are not those who avoid vulnerability, but those who embrace it as their greatest strength. They understand that daring leadership isn't about having all the answers—it's about having the courage to ask better questions, to engage in difficult conversations, and to create cultures where people feel safe to take risks, fail, learn, and ultimately thrive. This journey toward brave leadership requires us to shed the armor that has protected us but also limited us, and step into the arena of authentic human connection where real transformation happens.
Rumbling with Vulnerability
At its core, daring leadership demands that we redefine our relationship with vulnerability. Rather than viewing it as weakness or exposure to be avoided, courageous leaders understand vulnerability as the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and meaningful change. It's the emotion we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure—precisely the conditions under which leadership happens. Colonel DeDe Halfhill discovered this truth in a profound way when she decided to ask her airmen a question that most military leaders would never consider. During an awards ceremony, when a young airman asked when the intense operational tempo would slow down because they were all tired, she made a bold choice. Instead of offering standard reassurances, she asked everyone who was tired to raise their hands. Nearly every hand went up. Then, drawing on her understanding of vulnerability as a leadership tool, she asked an even braver question: "Who's lonely?" Fifteen hands shot up, revealing the real issue beneath their exhaustion. This moment of authentic inquiry transformed not just that meeting, but Halfhill's entire approach to leadership. By creating space for honest conversation about difficult emotions, she uncovered the root cause of her unit's struggles and opened pathways for genuine support and connection. Her willingness to be vulnerable—to ask questions she didn't have answers to and acknowledge feelings that military culture often suppresses—created the psychological safety her team needed to perform at their best. The practice begins with recognizing that vulnerability is not disclosure or oversharing, but rather the courage to show up when you can't control the outcome. Start by paying attention to your physical responses during challenging moments—the racing heart, tight chest, or clenched jaw that signals you're emotionally activated. Instead of pushing through or shutting down, pause and get curious about what you're experiencing. Practice the simple but powerful phrase "the story I'm telling myself" when sharing concerns or feedback with your team. Remember that vulnerability without boundaries isn't courage—it's recklessness. Set clear intentions about what you share, with whom, and why. The goal isn't to eliminate the discomfort of uncertain moments, but to develop the grounded confidence to stay present and engaged when the stakes are high and the outcome is unknown.
Living into Our Values
Values-based leadership transcends the realm of inspirational posters and corporate mission statements to become the practical foundation for decision-making in complex situations. When leaders can clearly articulate their two core values and translate them into specific, observable behaviors, they create an internal compass that guides them through the most challenging moments of leadership. The power of this clarity became evident in Stefan Larsson's transformation of Old Navy. When he took over the struggling brand, he didn't start with strategy or restructuring—he started with values. Understanding that the company's original vision was to make aspirational American style accessible to every family, he worked with his team to identify the behaviors that would bring those values to life. This meant shifting from a culture of fear and hierarchy to one built on learning and trust. Larsson implemented weekly learning sessions where outcomes were neither judged as good or bad, but simply read as data points for improvement. He moved the leadership team into a glass-walled office in the center of headquarters, literally and figuratively making their decision-making process transparent. Most importantly, he operationalized the value of continuous learning by teaching his team to ask, "What did we set out to do, what happened, what did we learn, and how fast can we improve?" The transformation was remarkable: twelve consecutive quarters of growth and one billion dollars in additional sales. But perhaps more significantly, the culture shift created a sustainable foundation for ongoing success because every team member understood not just what the company valued, but how to live those values in their daily work. To operationalize your values, begin by identifying your two most important guiding principles—the beliefs that define who you are at your best. Then define three to four specific behaviors that support each value, as well as three to four "slippery behaviors" that you're tempted toward but that contradict your values. Create concrete scenarios where you've lived into or away from these values to make them real and actionable. Establish early warning systems by identifying how you feel physically and emotionally when you're operating outside your values. Most importantly, share your values and their behavioral indicators with your team, creating mutual accountability and deeper trust through this transparency.
Building Trust Through BRAVING
Trust forms the invisible foundation upon which all effective leadership rests, yet it remains one of the most difficult concepts to define and develop. Rather than treating trust as an abstract quality, daring leaders understand it as a specific set of behaviors that can be practiced, observed, and measured. The BRAVING framework breaks trust into seven essential elements that transform vague conversations about trustworthiness into concrete actions for building stronger relationships. Charles Feltman's definition captures this perfectly: trust is "choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person's actions." This risk-based understanding helped a team leader recognize why his relationship with a direct report was deteriorating. During their BRAVING conversation, they discovered the issue wasn't about reliability or integrity—it was about boundaries. The leader was consistently arriving late to their one-on-one meetings because executive team meetings ran over, sending an unintended message that their time together wasn't a priority. Once they named this specific trust breach, they could address it directly. Together, they developed strategies for protecting their meeting time, including building buffers between meetings and establishing clearer communication when schedule changes were unavoidable. This targeted approach allowed them to repair the relationship quickly because they were addressing the actual behavior, not making general accusations about trustworthiness. The seven elements of BRAVING—Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, Vault, Integrity, Nonjudgment, and Generosity—provide a roadmap for these crucial conversations. Each element can be broken down into specific behaviors that teams can agree to practice and hold each other accountable for demonstrating. Begin by having team members individually assess where they see strengths and growth areas in your working relationship using the BRAVING framework. Then come together for honest conversations about specific behaviors rather than character judgments. Focus particularly on the Vault aspect—both keeping confidences and not sharing information that isn't yours to share. Practice Nonjudgment by creating space for team members to ask for help without shame, remembering that asking for support is actually a sign of leadership strength, not weakness.
Learning to Rise After Falls
Resilience isn't an inherent trait that some leaders possess and others lack—it's a learnable skill set that can be developed through practice and intentional effort. The most effective leaders understand that if they're going to dare greatly, they will inevitably face setbacks, failures, and moments of feeling emotionally overwhelmed. The key difference between those who recover quickly and those who get stuck lies in their ability to navigate the three-part process of learning to rise: the reckoning, the rumble, and the revolution. The reckoning begins with emotional awareness—recognizing when you've been "hooked" by a situation and are operating from a reactive rather than responsive place. This moment of recognition prevents the common tendency to offload difficult emotions onto others through blame, anger, or avoidance. During a particularly stressful period of launching multiple business initiatives simultaneously, this awareness transformed what could have been a damaging kitchen argument over lunch meat into an opportunity for connection and mutual support. The rumble involves getting curious about the stories we make up when we don't have complete information. Our brains are wired to fill in gaps with narrative, often defaulting to worst-case scenarios that protect us from disappointment but prevent us from seeing situations clearly. In the lunch meat incident, the story being constructed involved assumptions about disappointment, criticism, and relationship strain—none of which matched reality. The simple phrase "the story I'm telling myself" created space for truth instead of assumption. The revolution happens when we own our stories completely, allowing us to write new endings rather than being controlled by old patterns. This doesn't mean the difficult emotions disappear, but rather that we develop the capacity to stay connected to our values and our people even in challenging moments. Practice begins with developing body awareness to recognize your early warning signs of emotional activation. Learn to pause and breathe—literally—using tactical breathing techniques to create space between stimulus and response. Write down your "shitty first drafts" of difficult situations to externalize and examine the stories you're creating. Most importantly, remember that feelings are temporary visitors, not permanent residents, and your response to them shapes both your leadership and your relationships.
Summary
The path to daring leadership isn't about eliminating fear, uncertainty, or discomfort—it's about developing the skills and courage to engage with these inevitable aspects of leadership in ways that serve both you and the people you lead. As this research powerfully demonstrates, "courage is contagious," and when leaders dare to be vulnerable, live their values, build trust intentionally, and learn from their falls, they create cultures where innovation thrives, people feel valued, and meaningful work gets done. The choice is clear: you can lead from a place of armor and self-protection, achieving moderate success while exhausting yourself and your team, or you can step into the arena of authentic leadership where the greatest rewards require the greatest risks. Start today by identifying one conversation you've been avoiding, one value you've been compromising, or one story you've been telling yourself that needs to be examined more closely—and choose courage over comfort in that single moment.
By Brené Brown
