Book SummaryDare to Lead, by Brené Brown

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Dare to Lead

Should leaders allow themselves—or their employees—to be vulnerable? Many organizations say no. But in Dare to Lead, researcher Brené Brown argues that courageous leaders who allow vulnerability—in themselves and in others—are essential to thriving work cultures. In this guide, you’ll learn the four skills you must practice in order to lead courageously—facing vulnerability, choosing and practicing values, building trust, and developing failure resilience—and how using these skills effectively can help your team overcome difficult situations and encourage creativity and innovation. Along the way, you’ll learn suggestions from other experts on the best ways to practice these skills.

Skill #1: Face Vulnerability

According to Brown, the first skill you must practice in order to become a courageous leader is to face vulnerability. She explains this is a vital skill because you can only build an innovative, creative work culture if your team feels comfortable failing and taking risks.

In this section, we’ll first define vulnerability: What exactly is it, and why is it essential that we understand it well? Then, we’ll name the benefits of facing vulnerability.

What Is Vulnerability?

Brown defines vulnerability as exposure to the risk of failure or emotional harm. However, she argues, most people have three main misconceptions about vulnerability—which leads them to avoid it.

Misconception #1: Being vulnerable means you’re weak. As Brown notes, people often view their refusal to acknowledge vulnerable feelings as a courageous act. However, she argues that it signals the opposite: They’re not brave enough to engage with their vulnerability. Rather, Brown contends, feeling vulnerable is a sign that you were courageous enough to approach—not avoid—exposure to risk and uncertainty.

The Difference Between Vulnerability and Weakness

In her earlier book, The Power of Vulnerability, Brown explains that many people who are in a position where showing weakness can be harmful—like executives—mistakenly associate weakness with vulnerability and so believe they can’t be vulnerable. But in Daring Greatly, Brown elaborates further on the difference between vulnerability and weakness, explaining that Merriam-Webster defines vulnerability as “open to attack or damage,” while weakness is “the inability to withstand attack or wounding.” In other words, being vulnerable means that you’re open to harm but not totally defenseless. Moreover, she presents studies that prove that acknowledging your vulnerability makes you stronger: If you don’t acknowledge your vulnerability, you’re not prepared to protect yourself.

Misconception #2: You have to trust someone in order to be vulnerable with them. Brown contends that this misconception explains why people refuse to be vulnerable with people they don’t know well. However, Brown argues that vulnerability and trust happen simultaneously, in a constant exchange of small moments; neither comes before the other. As Brown explains, when someone reaches out to you and you choose to engage with and respond to their vulnerability (instead of ignoring it), you earn their trust and the right to be vulnerable with them in turn.

(Shortform note: While Brown argues that vulnerability and trust happen simultaneously, Start With Why author Simon Sinek argues that trust comes before vulnerability: In the workplace, employees must trust their leaders before they feel vulnerable enough to take risks. So how, as a leader, can you get your employees to trust you? Sinek explains that trust is based on shared beliefs: We believe that someone who shares our beliefs is more likely to have our backs and not take advantage of us. So you can earn your employees’ trust by showing them that you share their values.)

Misconception #3: Being vulnerable means you have to share everything. Brown clarifies that courageous leaders practice vulnerability with limits and don’t overshare personal feelings or information with their team. Instead, they talk openly about the emotions surrounding uncertain but work-relevant situations—like a new product launch.

(Shortform note: As a leader, how can you effectively create a boundary on what you will—or won’t—share with your team? Try creating SMART boundaries: Your boundaries should be Specific, Mutable—in other words, flexible based on the situation, About You—not about what others do near you, Reasonable, and Talked Through—in other words, you communicate them and compromise on them if necessary.)

The Benefits of Facing Vulnerability

Now that you understand what vulnerability is, we’ll discuss the benefits of productively engaging with it—and teaching your team members the value of doing so. Brown names three benefits of facing vulnerability: It helps you have tough conversations, discourages defensive behaviors, and helps you understand and overcome shame.

Benefit #1: Facing Vulnerability Helps You Have Tough Conversations

As Brown notes, leaders must sometimes have tough conversations that have uncertain outcomes or demand emotional exposure from...

Dare to Lead Summary Introduction: Why Brave Leadership Matters...and What’s Getting In Its Way

We’re living in a rapidly-changing world that demands constant innovation and creativity from organizations. But there are four errors that organization leaders make that get in the way of creativity and innovation.

Error #1: Trying to engineer vulnerability and uncertainty out of the workplace

By refusing to allow the risks and uncertainty in their workplaces, leaders create work cultures where team members don’t know how to control their natural emotional reactions to uncertainty and failure. Instead, their team members are driven by their emotions toward defensive behaviors that hold them back, such as perfectionism, criticism, and a refusal to take responsibility for their mistakes.

Furthermore, many leaders use unclear or untrue language in tough conversations in a bid to protect themselves from the negative emotions that might be sparked by honesty. By doing this, leaders create work cultures that are void of the honest and productive feedback that allows team members to improve themselves.

Error #2: Not establishing clear values

When a leader doesn’t spend time clarifying an organization’s values, those values will be too ambiguous to be modeled or...

Dare to Lead Summary Chapter 1.1: What Vulnerability Is (And Isn’t)

Vulnerability is exposure to the risk of failure, to situations with uncertain outcomes, or to the possibility of emotional harm. Facing your vulnerability is at the base of brave leadership: it’s only in meeting vulnerability head-on that you can master your response to the fear and uncertainty that come along with it. Before you can face your vulnerability, you need to understand what it looks like. There are six widely-held myths about what vulnerability is, and how you should react to it.

Myth #1: Being vulnerable means being weak

While vulnerability does stem from situations that make you feel afraid, it’s important to understand that vulnerability isn’t fear. Rather, it’s recognizing your feelings of fear and knowing that something out of your control may happen, and being brave enough to push on anyway. It’s not weak—walking into, rather than avoiding, tough situations or the potential for failure takes an immense amount of courage.

Myth #2: Vulnerability isn’t for me

Life is naturally full of experiences that have uncertain outcomes and expose you to the risk of failure—it’s not possible to have a work culture void of vulnerability....

Shortform Exercise: Bring Vulnerability to Your Workplace

As a leader, you need to debunk the myths of vulnerability in your workplace—and be the first one to model how vulnerability can be allowed.

Think about how the myths of vulnerability show up in your workplace. What messages do you send about vulnerability? (Example: Risk is considered a weakness, not a brave learning opportunity—team members’ risky ideas are shut down with no consideration.)

Dare to Lead Summary Chapter 1.2: Having the Courage to Start Hard Conversations

Leadership naturally demands that you engage in difficult conversations where you give and receive feedback, or bring up emotional issues that your team is facing. These conversations often stir up fear and uncertainty—you can’t control how they will go, and often they depend on a great deal of emotional exposure.

It’s tempting to shy away from the uncertainty of these conversations. Facing vulnerability, however, grants you the courage to approach these conversations with honesty and clarity—your guiding principle in difficult conversations should be that it’s kind to be clear, and unkind to be unclear. This ensures productive conversations that foster learning and give you necessary insight to best serve your team.

First, we’ll look at how this principle should guide feedback sessions, and then we’ll discuss how you can depend on clarity of language to open conversations about difficult or awkward emotions.

Giving and Receiving Clear Feedback

Often, people give feedback that is polite, but dishonest. Their argument is that giving polite feedback is the nice thing to do—but the real motive isn’t so altruistic. In fact, people give polite feedback because it’s...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Giving Clear Feedback

Being clear in your feedback about your expectations and intentions is essential to avoiding more problems down the line.

Describe a recent situation where you gave unclear feedback that resulted in unfair frustration with a team member.

Shortform Exercise: Open Up Tough Conversations

As a leader, you need to be willing to address tough emotional issues with your team members and open up a conversation about them.

What’s an awkward or difficult emotional topic that you think the people in your organization need to talk about? (Think: loneliness in the military, burnout among teachers, doubt within a worship community).

Dare to Lead Summary Chapter 1.3: Lowering Your Defenses

Often, leaders try to engineer vulnerability out of their work cultures because they believe that it will make their team members more efficient and less susceptible to emotions. In fact, when organization members aren’t given the opportunity to face their vulnerability and think through their emotions, they allow their ego to take control and become more susceptible to emotional reactivity. The ego will adopt any behavior that might protect it from being bruised by negative emotions such as embarrassment or shame.

Leaders and their team members usually resort to one or several of 16 defensive behaviors—in this chapter, we’ll walk through how these behaviors present themselves, how they hold back your team, and how brave leaders take steps to discourage them and solve their sources.

Behaviors to Avoid Difficult Emotions

Defense #1: Numbing Difficult Feelings

When prevented from engaging with negative emotions, team members may escape their feelings with numbing agents such as drinking, shopping, over-scheduling, gambling, and so on. Besides the obvious risk of addiction, this threatens their mental health because it’s not possible to choose which emotions...

Shortform Exercise: Recognize and Combat Defensive Behaviors

Practice spotting defensive behaviors in your organization and taking steps to discourage them.

Describe a recent situation where one of your team members resorted to a defensive behavior (such as perfectionism, criticism, or overcompensating to prove their worth).

Dare to Lead Summary Chapter 1.4: Accepting Shame & Showing Empathy

Many defensive behaviors in the workplace are, at their core, about avoiding the threat of shame—the feeling that something you’ve done (or not done), a goal you haven’t achieved, or an ideal you didn’t measure up to makes you a flawed person unworthy of connection, love, or belonging.

Shame touches your core, telling you that you deserve failure, are deeply alone, and that your bad actions are not just behaviors, but who you inherently are. It’s sometimes grouped with other negative emotions such as guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment, which are usually short-lived and relatively superficial. However, it’s important to understand how shame differs from these emotions—it’s much more painful and frightening, and therefore much more powerful.

Shame is not the same as guilt. Guilt happens when you act against your values, giving you the feeling that you’ve done something bad. It may be uncomfortable, but it’s usually a valuable learning experience that reminds you of your values, and prompts an apology or behavioral changes. Shame, on the other hand, is the feeling that you are bad and usually doesn’t reveal any sort of learning experience—instead of making changes,...

Shortform Exercise: Build Shame Resilience

Shame is a powerful feeling that can drive you to defensive behaviors if you don’t keep it in check by practicing shame resilience.

Describe a recent situation at work where you felt shame.

Shortform Exercise: Practice Empathy Skills

You and your team members can diminish shame and defensive behaviors in your organization by responding to shame with effective empathy.

Think of a time when someone shared shame with you, and you practiced “false empathy.” What was their experience, and how did you respond?

Dare to Lead Summary Chapter 1.5: Developing Confidence and Curiosity

When faced with vulnerable moments or tough decisions, brave leaders depend on their “grounded confidence.” Grounded confidence is confidence firmly rooted in strong values, self-awareness, and curiosity—it’s what allows you as a leader to face your vulnerability instead of running away and hiding behind defensive behaviors. It’s a crucial component to any healthy work culture, but it’s not something that you inherently have. It needs to be developed, in two ways: continually practicing your values and self-awareness, and approaching your work with curiosity.

Continually Practice Your Values and Self-Awareness

The first component—continually practicing your values and self-awareness—is what allows you to think clearly and with integrity when things get hard. Think about how in sports, you practice the same footwork or play over and over again. You do this so you can perform it perfectly every time, even in the heightened pressure of a game. Your body goes through the motions, while your mind focuses on the rest of the field instead of your feet.

Continually practicing your values and...

Dare to Lead Summary Chapter 2: Choosing and Practicing Your Values

Grounded confidence requires that you have strong values, which makes the second skill of brave leadership, choosing and practicing your values, particularly important. If you don’t have clear values guiding you through vulnerable situations, it’s very easy to make decisions outside of your integrity. Either you let the voices of critics take control and make decisions you don’t necessarily agree with, or you avoid vulnerability by doing what’s most comfortable instead of what’s right.

We’ll discuss the process of clarifying your values and ensuring they’re put into practice, and then we’ll explore how to effectively carry that process into your organization.

Choosing & Practicing Your Values

As a leader, your first step should be to make sure that you’ve clarified your own values—these will be your guide in making tough decisions, taking risks, and showing your team how to face vulnerability. When choosing your values, consider what your innermost self holds most important in life. Your values should be so defined and clear that acting in line with them doesn’t feel like a conscious choice—they’re simply who you are.

The tricky part of choosing your values...

Shortform Exercise: Choose and Practice Organization Values

Identifying value-supporting behaviors makes it easier to teach and evaluate values, and spot opportunities for improvement.

Choose two core values (such as connection, equality, authenticity, kindness, or loyalty) that drive your organization. Recall that it might be easier to list ten values that are important and then narrow down to the two that should drive decision making and behavior.

Dare to Lead Summary Chapter 3: Building Trust

The third skill of brave leadership—building trust—is essential to innovative cultures, because trust allows you to rely on others and feel that they have your best interests in mind, and to feel comfortable breaking the status quo or suggesting new ideas. However, as essential as this skill is, it’s rarely brought up in discussion. There’s a huge disconnect between how trustworthy you consider yourself and how trustworthy you consider others to be—but this disconnect is never addressed, for fear that doing so will cause an emotional reaction in the “less trustworthy” person.

Brave leaders understand the importance of recognizing the trustworthiness of their team members, and vice versa, so they don’t shy away from having conversations about trust. However, these conversations don’t speak directly to a team member’s trustworthiness, as it’s a touchy topic and usually prompts a defensive response. Instead, brave leaders talk about trust by discussing the behaviors that demonstrate trustworthiness. Attaching behaviors to the concept of trust accomplishes two goals:

• Firstly, as with values, behaviors can be modeled, taught, and evaluated. Problems with the vague...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Assuming Positive Intent

You can build trust with your team members by assuming positive intent and rethinking how your actions may be getting in their way.

Think of a recent situation where a team member fell short of your expectations and you made a negative assumption about their intent.

Dare to Lead Summary Chapter 4: Developing Failure Resilience

The fourth courage-building skill is developing failure resilience—that is, the ability to get up, dust yourself off, and move on after something goes wrong. This is an essential skill for leaders to teach, because people are more likely to take risks and try new ideas when they’re confident in their ability to recover from any setback.

Unfortunately, many leaders teach failure resilience after a failure has already happened. Imagine teaching a skydiver how to land once they’ve already hit the ground—you’ll be dealing with a lot of broken bones and a long recovery. In the same way, if you don’t teach your team members how to “land,” you’ll end up wasting time recovering from problematic behaviors—such as covering up mistakes, blaming others, or perfectionism—that are based in the fear of failure. Brave leaders teach the steps of failure resilience from the very beginning of the onboarding process—this normalizes failure, and signals that team members will be supported, not shamed, when (not if) it happens.

Teaching failure resilience is more important now than ever, as millennials and GenZ enter the workforce. These generations are often not well-equipped to handle...

Shortform Exercise: Examine Your Bad First Draft

Practice the process of unraveling a bad first draft in order to separate the facts of a situation from your insecurities and biases.

Think of a recent time where you made up a story and worst-case scenario to explain what was happening. Describe the story you told yourself. (Ex. Jack didn’t say hello to me this morning. He must be upset about that typo I made in his presentation. I bet he’s going to take me off that new project.)