Brené Brown on Being a Steady Leader in Tumultuous Times

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0:33I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

0:44So today's guest is the renowned researcher and author, Brene Brown. She's probably best known for her work on vulnerability, for her book, Dare to Lead. It's really interesting to talk to her now because like many of us, she is struggling with this moment in time. She does not feel like we're okay in our culture, in our business lives, and that we're disconnected and distrustful. So what she's calling for, for herself and anyone who wants to go along with her on the ride, is to do the hard work to find your balance, find your true north, to lead from your values and not your fear. I mean, that sounds a lot like my recent conversation with Ranjie Gulati about how leaders find courage in uncertain times.

1:21and that often does involve turning inward first, figuring out your purpose and your personal story and your support network and then taking action based on that thinking. Yeah, and look, Brene is always entertaining. She's quick with metaphors and lessons from culture, from sports. She talks, for example, about how the best leaders learn to develop a kind of pocket presence like football quarterbacks have, right? Where you have a brief moment to size up the risk, to size up the situation and make the best response. And what's interesting is she argues this phenomenon is not just a natural gift, but is observable and measurable.

1:58That is something I would love to learn. So I can't wait to hear this conversation. I would also like to learn it. So it's the type of argument that illuminates Brene Brown's latest book, Strong Ground, The Lessons of Daring Leadership, The Tenacity of Paradox, and The Wisdom of the Human Spirit. Here is my conversation. So we're in a moment that I guess I would call dynamic. And I don't mean in the necessarily positive sense, but where you have volatility, but also major shifts. And I feel like almost everything is up for grabs. A little bit like the 1960s, although very, very, very different.

2:32You know, what does good leadership look like when the ground seems to be shifting so dramatically? Yeah, I think it's interesting.

2:41Brené Brown:The word dynamic is interesting. I think what I'm feeling personally is massive instability and unpredictability. Even our ability to forecast in short increments of time has been completely disrupted. And I think good leadership right now is about settling the ball. I'm going to jump right into a sports metaphor. Are you going with me? I'm good. I'm good with that. Yeah, I think it's about the metaphor I've been thinking about lately is a visual that I have of both my kids when they played soccer when they were five. And five-year-old soccer is a really fun thing to watch because balls come in really fast and hard at head height.

3:25Brené Brown:And a kid sticks their foot up in the air and tries to kick it somewhere smart at head height. And invariably it goes off the field. But I think that's what a lot of leaders are doing right now. Balls are coming in hard and fast, unpredictably high. And instead of jumping up and catching the ball with their chest, dropping the ball to the ground, putting their foot on the ball to maintain possession, looking down the pitch, thinking strategically, anticipating where people are going to be based on training and skill, we're just making really fast, non-strategic decisions that sometimes are because we are in scarcity mode and we're not deploying the skills we have.

4:12Brené Brown:And more often right now, I think it's we don't have the skills we need. So I think there's one other thing, which is that in periods of uncertainty, hyper-uncertainty, there is a school of thought that you have to be decisive, right? Don't be a victim of this. You have to. So there's a bias toward action. So I feel like one of the paradoxes is that, That versus, you know, systems thinking is having this sort of comeback, right? Where the counter advice is no. Consider what you were saying. Slow it down. Think holistically about, you know, how a decision will affect whatever it is, the entire company, the entire organization.

4:51How are you seeing those two imperatives play out?

4:55Brené Brown:Well, as a big fan of systems theory, I love to see it. I don't know that it ever went away, but I love to see the renaissance of the language and thinking about it. I think the foundational strategic thinking of everything we're doing right now has to be systems theory. How internal systems are impacted by what we're doing, how that bounces off external systems. In systems theory, we learn that in order for systems to operate, the boundaries of a system have to be permeable. So feedback flows in and out of systems bringing new information. We recalibrate, we send out information so there's a permeability around systems.

5:36Brené Brown:And whether that's biological or leadership systems, it doesn't matter. When we don't have those permeable boundaries and the walls around a system close, which you're seeing everywhere right now out of self-protection, what ends up happening is a system becomes self-referencing. An example of this is a CEO feels a ton of pressure to develop and implement an AI strategy. But because of scarcity, the system walls, they're not taking time for feedback. They're not red teaming. They're not doing a premortem. They're not thinking through alignment of business strategy and technology strategy. They're not skilling up their people.

6:14Brené Brown:And so what ends up happening is that system becomes self-referencing. And in this climate, that's losing. On AI specifically, that report that we all read from MIT that said 95 % of AI projects do not have a positive ROI, whether that's the methodology was accurate, whether it was too soon or not too soon to do research like that. I've talked to a lot of people who are taking that to heart and are slowing things down, applying more of a systems approach specifically to AI. We know it produces value, but just kind of getting the first thing we can out there is no longer the viable approach. Yeah.

6:52Brené Brown:It's one of the things that I seem to, in this book, be taking a lot of a lot of constructs and concepts that we use and adding an adjective to them. So yes, urgency, but productive urgency. Yes, risk-taking, but strategic risk-taking. Unproductive urgency is always action over impact. And I think when you look at that MIT study, and yeah, there's people asking very good questions about it, but it should not be ignored. And I'm a tech optimist. What I'm not is optimistic about people's reflexive decision-making when they're in scarcity mode. So on the topic of authenticity, whether we like that word or not, we've lived through this period where leaders were comfortable, or many leaders, the best leaders, were comfortable being outspoken about their values.

7:44Values like sustainability, like diversity, like long-term thinking. Suddenly, in the U.S. at least, a lot of the CEOs who spoke that way now don't dare do so because these topics have become controversial. And in the context of kind of the authenticity or vulnerability that seems to produce the leadership we admire, are we seeing an absence of authentic leadership now in this suddenly highly politicized business moment?

8:15Brené Brown:I think we're seeing fear. I don't think a value that can be abandoned based on administration is a value. It might be a marketing or branding idea, but a value that's abandoned based on who's in the White House is not really a core value. The expression of values may change over time, and they should. For example, there are a lot of companies right now who have integrity as a value, but when they operationalize that value, they've never contemplated data governance. They've never contemplated privacy. They've never contemplated authentic voice politically. And so I think it's a leader's job to be able to lead for impact around mission, regardless of the administration.

9:07Brené Brown:They don't get a break there. And it's also a leader's job not to abandon the values of the company. That is a very short-term game in a long-term world. Yeah, I like that. I wrote a piece along those lines pitting Davos man versus Mar-a-Lago man and just said, this is a clarifying moment. You know, if you really believe in these things, this is a moment to double down. If you don't, as you were saying, if it was just performative, maybe that's not a value and that's not who you are or who you're coming to be. Yeah, and also don't, if it was performative and you're not finding a way to move forward in your integrity, then don't be shocked by the consumer backlash.

9:53Absolutely. So the book is called Strong Ground. What is Strong Ground exactly? And how did you decide that was the concept that you really wanted to identify to drive this book?

10:03Brené Brown:It starts with pickleball, of course. Of course. Yeah. A tennis player for 30 years. I scoffed at pickleball for two years and then it took me two games to start playing six days a week. I would do it, but I'm too young for pickleball. I got whipped up on yesterday pretty bad by a couple of 20-year-olds. So it has its moments for sure. I got injured and when I went to a trainer, he told me I had no core and that I was, yeah, which was rude. But yeah, he actually had me take a test and he's like, you scored a 10 out of 10. And I was like, of course I did. And he said, no, a 10 out of 22, sorry.

10:44Brené Brown:And he said, your physical age is like 77. I was like, oh my God. And he said - A perfect 10 out of 22. Yeah, exactly. And you don't have to be a researcher to be like, damn, that's bad. So he basically said I had a compensatory injury that I didn't have the big strong muscles that I needed to do what I wanted to do on the court. So I was using inefficient muscle groups and I was getting hurt. And the more he talked, the more I thought about the leaders I work with. He said things like, we're going to go slow, we're going to be thoughtful, and we're not going to build on dysfunction. And so in a very serious moment while I was trying to find my lats, which I was confused I didn't have, he looked at me and he said, he called me Brown.

11:29Brené Brown:He was a very tough guy. He said, Brown, find the ground. So I looked down at the floor and he said, no, not the floor. Find your ground. Use your mind to connect with your body and feel the ground under your feet. And it took me a minute, but when I did it, I felt like I had tapped into something that both gave me a sense of real stability, but also a springboard for some power that I needed to do what he was asking me to do. And so strong ground became my mantra, not just in the gym, but also before a hard meeting, before coaching with the CEO. It was very much, okay, strong ground, find your athletic stance, get grounded down in your values, not just for stability, but also for agility.

12:15Brené Brown:I think right now, given the velocity, this pace of change, we need to find our ground, both to provide stability. I mean, here's the thing, Adi, we're not neurobiologically wired for what's happening right now. Our nervous systems, our brains hate uncertainty. It makes an action bias look like nothing. You know, right now we're just like, solve, solve, solve, solve. So I think the ground is that place. It's like if there's a chapter in the book on the tush-push, just the physics of the ground, I think is what we need right now. For our very global audience, we will explain that tush-push is a play in the National Football League.

13:03But yeah, but it's a play that involves kind of elaborate teamwork, right? And is inordinately successful.

13:10Brené Brown:It's very successful. And if you're not in the U.S. or not a fan of the National Football League, where it came from is scrum in rugby. So it's a bunch of folks creating force to move a ball by grounding into the turf and pushing together. And why I love it as a metaphor for leadership is it's almost hard to defend because our thinking is if we go over this mass of people creating force and moving, that's smart. But the lesson, Newtonian physics, is when you lose touch with the ground, your force is completely depleted. Force is not just your body weight, but your body weight times pushing against the ground.

14:04Brené Brown:And so I think Newtonian physics is a really good leadership metaphor for what we need right now. A bunch of folks in an organization firmly planted in their values, very clear on mission, very clear on goals, pushing in the same direction and not becoming untethered.

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15:45So we often ask leaders, you know, what is it you want from HBR? What is the most valuable kind of content we can give you? And the answer is often we want to see examples of other people, of our competitors even, in some crucible moment or solving some problem. And, you know, people have said it's like watching game time, right? That's kind of what they get out of it. So you have this phrase, you use this phrase, pocket presence for leaders, which I love that because it kind of gets at this hyper uncertain, hyper volatile moment, but how you have to execute. Talk about pocket presence.

16:21Brené Brown:Yeah, it's interesting because I came up during a period of time where there was a lot of focus on executive presence. and that's a really gauzy construct for me as a researcher. At its best, I don't understand exactly what it means. At its worst, I think it introduces a ton of bias into what do we think a leader should look like. And in this very funny moment, I have to share that I texted Adam Grant and we're really good friends. And I said, hey, okay, if I take down executive presence in the book. And I just got the three dots on the iPhone. And I was like, oh, uh-oh. He's going to tell me don't do it.

17:04Brené Brown:And he said, yes, absolutely. It's cover for discriminating against introverts and women. And then two seconds later, and while you're at it, could you take down charisma as well? Pocket presence is very observable and measurable and teachable. And it's a term out of, again, the National Football League. It's about a collective competency. A quarterback is said to have pocket presence. When he gets the ball, the folks who protect him have about three seconds to protect him before like 1 ,500 pounds of defenders come crashing in. And can he, in a very short amount of time, make decisions about how to move the ball down the field, run it, pass it, hand it off, whatever it is.

17:49Brené Brown:And underneath this term is what I think we need today. One, anticipatory thinking. He doesn't throw the ball to where the receiver is. He reads the field and throws the ball to where the receiver's going to be in a second or two seconds based on their training. Two, temporal awareness. We completely underestimate this skillset for leaders. The rumor has it that Tom Brady, the quarterback for the Patriots for many years, had an internal clock that was so precise, he knew exactly when to let go of the ball. And he could tell where the people were around him, protecting him by the shaking of the field through his feet.

18:34Brené Brown:I mean, this is temporal presence. Leaders need temporal presence. How much time do I really have here? How do I slow down my team without losing a sense of productive urgency. So anticipatory awareness, temporal awareness, and the third big one, and this is, I think, a hard one, which is situational awareness. What system is my team sitting in within our organization, within the market, and within the geopolitical world? And how does that impact our decisions that we make every day? So I love pocket presence as a collective competency for teams. Part of this has to be pattern recognition, too.

19:12You're doing it over and over again. So my favorite quarterback, I'm a Washington Commanders fan. So Jaden Daniels, he's a kid, he's in his second year, and he is incredible. But one of the things that seems to differentiate him is he basically uses a kind of a VR set sort of thing. where so all day long, even when he's not on the field, he doesn't have anybody else to play with. He's basically experiencing everything you're describing, where you have a couple seconds, 1 ,500 pounds of enemy is bearing down on you. And yet somehow you sort of see the whole field. And, you know, I'm interested, you know, how do you how do executives develop, you know, how do they get that kind of pattern recognition?

19:54You know, you got to learn on the job. You can't really do it pretend, but how do they develop that skill?

20:00Brené Brown:One of the biggest chapter in the book, and it was the hardest chapter I've ever written in my career, and I've written a lot of books and a lot of chapters, was a chapter on what I call grounded confidence. How I got there is through the initial leadership study on courageous leadership, where my hypothesis was completely wrong. I've never been more wrong in my life. We studied 150 transformational leaders, and we defined and operationalized transformative leaders by leaders who created performance results that were enviable by their competitors and had cultures where people wanted to work. And it was shocking to me because it was the first time in my 30-year career as a qualitative researcher that when we asked 150 leaders across the world, different industries, what's the future of leadership?

20:51Brené Brown:They had the same answer, which is we must have braver leaders and more courageous cultures. My hypothesis was the biggest barrier to courageous leadership is fear. And Adi, I'll tell you just a moment that I'll never forget. It's just etched in my mind. I was sitting across from one of those leaders kind of playing back the findings to him. And he said, let me be very clear. If you're creating a list of courageous leaders and you're defining that as people who don't feel fear, don't put me on your list. I'm afraid every day. And I was like, what? So it's not fear that is the barrier to courageous leadership.

21:33Brené Brown:It turns out that it's armor. It's how we protect ourselves when we're afraid, when we don't have the emotional awareness to say, shoot, I'm in fear right now. I'm making scarcity-based decisions. I'm not thinking fully. So what we replace armor with is grounded confidence. And one of the big grounded confidence skills, it's a collection of 30 skills and mindsets, was pattern recognition. By another name, it's intuition. There's a big debate about whether do we use our gut or do we use data? I just watched something recently where Jeff Bezos said, if it comes down to data or my gut, I'm going with my gut.

22:11Brené Brown:But it's actually not how intuition and pattern recognition works. It's a cognitive process where your mind filters through a hundred files very quickly to recognize a pattern where you've been there before. How did you handle it and what was successful? One of the greatest ways that leaders can develop pattern recognition, because we don't watch tape, there's nothing to watch, makes it easier in sport, is to make sure when there's a failure or a setback around a decision, a strategy, or a performance metric, that there's open discussion about that. And that that discussion is about learning and embedding the learning.

22:55Brené Brown:Because what you're doing is you're creating a mental file system that sharpens pattern recognition. And so if you want to increase pattern recognition, open conversations around hard learnings is key. Yeah. I mean, look, we all want to be Steve Jobs. I don't need no stinking focus groups. But I think what you're talking about is there are processes that can make you smarter, can make your institution smarter. I want to get back, though, to what you said about armor, because I think that's important. The idea of breaking down armor. I mean, it's sort of a classic of, I don't know, you know, adolescent psychology, neurobiology, you know, sort of breaking down the armor, the hero's journey, all these things.

23:38But the armor comes back, right? And we wrap ourselves in armor to, yeah, to feel safe. And I'd love your thoughts on how do you embrace fear as a positive? How do you perpetually try to break away the armor that holds you back as a leader.