Dare to Lead. — Book Summary

Dare to Lead is about modern workplace culture that offers vulnerability, trust, values, and resilience as the most crucial leadership qualities. Daring to lead is about being brave enough to embrace leadership that exposes fear and uncertainty.

Drawing on Brown’s personal experiences as a leadership coach, as well as recent research, this book explores how you can harness your emotions, quash your fear of failure, and become a daring leader in an increasingly competitive world.

You’ll discover the impact of your values, emotions and interpersonal relationships on your effectiveness as a leader. You’ll also learn why, in a competitive and hostile working culture, you nonetheless need to let yourselves be vulnerable if you want to get ahead.

To be a daring leader, one who is not afraid of change and new challenges, you must embrace vulnerability, recognising it not as a form of weakness but as a willingness to acknowledge when you don’t know all the answers. Instead of protecting the ego by avoiding difficult situations, embrace vulnerability by encouraging empathy, curiosity, and shared purpose. Operationalise the organisation’s core values; and build trust by setting clear boundaries and being reliable and generous. Build resilience by recognising when a situation or emotion has a hold over you; learn how to recognise and accept the feeling and create a story that you can control.

“You can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. Embrace the sucks.”

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The Four Skill Sets of Daring Leadership

Rumbling with Vulnerability.

Vulnerability is a universal human emotion that we feel when we expose ourselves to others and during times of risk or uncertainty. Nonetheless, despite being such a familiar feeling, there are damaging myths surrounding vulnerability, mainly associated with weakness.

Brown uses the term “rumble” to imply a commitment to “listening with the same passion with which we want to be heard.” Being brave means staying both fearless and vulnerable and sticking with the process of problem identification and solution, no matter how messy it gets.

Leaders need to spend a significant amount of time communicating their subordinates’ feelings and fears. If they fail to do this, they can expect to spend even more time managing their workforce’s unproductive and ineffective behaviour. Importantly, leaders can solicit more transparent feedback from subordinates by really listening to them.

Living into Our Values.

“Daring leaders who live into their values are never silent about hard truths”.Self-awareness and self-love matter. Who we are is how we lead.

Your leadership courage speaks volumes about how you conduct yourself in the role and the values you demonstrate in that behaviour. Leading with compassion and patience will produce a more transformative outcome than will simply leveraging the authority granted by your title.

Below are some questions to help you operationalise your values:

1. What are three behaviours that support your value?
2. What are three slippery behaviours that are outside your value?
3. What’s an example of a time when you were fully living into this value?

One of the hardest things to do in the workplace is to stay aligned with our values when giving or receiving feedback. Being in the right frame of mind to give someone feedback requires: being willing to sit next to them, not across from them; accepting the need to listen and ask questions; and acknowledging their strengths and thanking them for their efforts, not just listing their mistakes. In addition, giving feedback means holding accountable without shaming or blaming and discussing how resolving challenges will lead to growth.

Receiving feedback is challenging because we cannot control the person’s skill or know their intentions. Tactics that can help include reminding yourself that you are brave enough to listen, that you can take what is valuable here and leave the rest, and that this is the path to mastery. Your ultimate aim is to listen, integrate the feedback, and reflect it with accountability.

Braving Trust.

“Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; it’s choosing what’s right over what’s fun, fast or easy, and it’s practising your values, not just professing them”.

While Brown focuses on the courage and bravery needed to be a transformative leader, the element of trust is critical to that transformation. The people you lead will need to feel “safe, seen, heard and respected” so that they can trust your courage and follow your direction.

Our values inform our judgments about what is most important in our lives. Therefore, making a list of things that are highly important to us is essential to narrow to the one or two fundamental values that guide our behaviour and hold them close when times get tough.

The author introduces the acronym BRAVING to inventory strengths and areas for improvement in working relationships with subordinates.

• The B stands for boundaries. This element involves respecting others’ boundaries.
• The R stands for reliability or doing what we say we will.
• The A stands for accountability. We take ownership of our mistakes, apologise for them and try our best to make amends.
• The V stands for vault. We are a vault of information that other people have shared with us over time. Trust, is knowing what not to share.
• The I stands for integrity: choosing courage instead of comfort and doing what is proper rather than easy, fun or practical.
• The N stands for non-judgment, which means people know that they can tell us how they feel or ask for help without expecting us to judge them for doing so.
• The G stands for generosity, being consistently generous in our interpretation of the words, actions, and intentions.

Learning to Rise.

“When we have the courage to walk into our story and own it, we get to write the ending. And when we don’t own our stories of failure, setbacks and hurt — they own us.”

Brown uses the analogy of teaching first-time skydivers the right way to land before they’ve ever jumped out of a plane. So likewise, courageous leadership should be taught in the same manner. Failure is inevitable, and even the most courageous leaders should be prepared to handle that. Otherwise, the first failure will undermine that bravery and reassert the resignation that the current cultural norms are here to stay.

To learn resilience, start by recognising when a situation or emotion has hooks in you. So often, we end up offloading our feelings onto others, getting angry instead of acknowledging hurt, pretending everything is fine when it really isn’t, or hiding away the pain instead of facing it.

The most effective strategy for recognising emotion is something that soldiers call Tactical Breathing: inhale deeply through the nose for a count of four; hold the breath for another count of four; exhale slowly through the mouth for a count of four, and keep the empty breath for a final count of four. Tracing a square on your desk while doing each of the four stages can help calm you down and re-centre when in the grip of intense emotion.

When we open ourselves up to vulnerability, we open ourselves to courage and creativity. When we let go of our perfectionist tendencies and our fear of failure, we find the bravery to improve ourselves and have complex, meaningful conversations with our colleagues. In other words, we need all of our emotions on board if we’re going to become daring leaders.

Embrace your vulnerability and explore your feelings instead of numbing them.