Management & Leadership
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Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Brené Brown has taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she's showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead.
Don't miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart!
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG
Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential.
When we dare to lead, we don't pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don't see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don't avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it's necessary to do good work.
But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we're choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we're scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can't do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start.
Four-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brené Brown has spent the past two decades studying the emotions and experiences that give meaning to our lives, and the past seven years working with transformative leaders and teams spanning the globe. She found that leaders in organizations ranging from small entrepreneurial startups and family-owned businesses to nonprofits, civic organizations, and Fortune 50 companies all ask the same question:
How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture?
In this new book, Brown uses research, stories, and examples to answer these questions in the no-BSstyle that millions of readers have come to expect and love.
Brown writes, "One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100 percent teachable, observable, and measurable. It's learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It's why we're here."
Whether you've read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong or you're new to Brené Brown's work, this book is for anyone who wants to step up and into brave leadership.
Don't miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart!
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG
Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential.
When we dare to lead, we don't pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don't see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don't avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it's necessary to do good work.
But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we're choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we're scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can't do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start.
Four-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brené Brown has spent the past two decades studying the emotions and experiences that give meaning to our lives, and the past seven years working with transformative leaders and teams spanning the globe. She found that leaders in organizations ranging from small entrepreneurial startups and family-owned businesses to nonprofits, civic organizations, and Fortune 50 companies all ask the same question:
How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture?
In this new book, Brown uses research, stories, and examples to answer these questions in the no-BSstyle that millions of readers have come to expect and love.
Brown writes, "One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100 percent teachable, observable, and measurable. It's learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It's why we're here."
Whether you've read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong or you're new to Brené Brown's work, this book is for anyone who wants to step up and into brave leadership.
Editorial Reviews
"With Dare to Lead, Brené brings decades of research to bear in a practical and insightful guide to courageous leadership. This book is a road map for anyone who wants to lead mindfully, live bravely, and dare to lead."-Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook, founder, LeanIn.Org and OptionB.Org
"Brené visited Pixar to talk with our filmmakers. Her message was important, as movies are best when they come from a place of vulnerability, when the people who make them encounter setbacks and are forced to overcome them, when they are willing to have their asses handed to them. It is easy to sit back and talk about the values of a safe and meaningful culture, but extraordinarily difficult to pull it off. You don't achieve good culture without constant attention, without an environment of safety, courage, and vulnerability. These are hard skills, but they are teachable skills. Start with this book."-Ed Catmull, president, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios
"Whether you're leading a movement or a start-up, if you're trying to change an organizational culture or the world, Dare to Lead will challenge everything you think you know about brave leadership and give you honest, straightforward, actionable tools for choosing courage over comfort."-Tarana Burke, senior director, Girls for Gender Equity, founder, theMe Too movement
"We asked Brené to bring her work on courage and vulnerability to our Air Force base. This is a tough audience, many of them with significant combat experience. Within five minutes, you could have heard a pin drop. Brené cuts through the noise and speaks to what makes us human and makes the mission happen. Dare to Lead is about real leadership: tenacious, from the heart, and full of grit."-Brigadier General Brook J. Leonard, United States Air Force
"Brené is Google Empathy Lab's Obi-Wan Kenobi. She has profoundly inspired our product leaders to designin and embrace vulnerability, rather than engineer it out. It's a critical and transformative act to bring your alive, messy, wholehearted human self to work every day. Dare to Lead is the skillful and empowering Jedi training we have all been waiting for."-Danielle Krettek, founder, Google Empathy Lab
"Applying the principles from Dare to Lead to my work as a principal has ...
"Brené visited Pixar to talk with our filmmakers. Her message was important, as movies are best when they come from a place of vulnerability, when the people who make them encounter setbacks and are forced to overcome them, when they are willing to have their asses handed to them. It is easy to sit back and talk about the values of a safe and meaningful culture, but extraordinarily difficult to pull it off. You don't achieve good culture without constant attention, without an environment of safety, courage, and vulnerability. These are hard skills, but they are teachable skills. Start with this book."-Ed Catmull, president, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios
"Whether you're leading a movement or a start-up, if you're trying to change an organizational culture or the world, Dare to Lead will challenge everything you think you know about brave leadership and give you honest, straightforward, actionable tools for choosing courage over comfort."-Tarana Burke, senior director, Girls for Gender Equity, founder, theMe Too movement
"We asked Brené to bring her work on courage and vulnerability to our Air Force base. This is a tough audience, many of them with significant combat experience. Within five minutes, you could have heard a pin drop. Brené cuts through the noise and speaks to what makes us human and makes the mission happen. Dare to Lead is about real leadership: tenacious, from the heart, and full of grit."-Brigadier General Brook J. Leonard, United States Air Force
"Brené is Google Empathy Lab's Obi-Wan Kenobi. She has profoundly inspired our product leaders to designin and embrace vulnerability, rather than engineer it out. It's a critical and transformative act to bring your alive, messy, wholehearted human self to work every day. Dare to Lead is the skillful and empowering Jedi training we have all been waiting for."-Danielle Krettek, founder, Google Empathy Lab
"Applying the principles from Dare to Lead to my work as a principal has ...
Readers Top Reviews
Jo Dee FinkAntony
I appreciate the straightforward manner that brunette Brown delivers her message. It's not corny or condescending. I believe my money was well spent.
JenniferJo Dee Fi
Wow. This book has been an incredible asset in shaping my perspective and approaches to leadership. Highly recommend.
Laurens BonnemaJe
This book was one big aha moment for me. There is nothing in it I did not already know, but the way it is written is so engaging, so easy to grasp, so convincing, that when I finished the book, I immediately started hunting for the stories I am telling myself. Rumbling will be something I’ll practice for the rest of my life. Thank you, Brené, for writing this insightful and useful book!
ELLIOTT ZAKEMLaur
Concept of vulnerability and how to lean into it is what resonated with me. Would recommend to anyone looking to lead more effectively and build trust in their professional and personal relationships.
BookwyrmELLIOTT Z
saved me grief and kept me from causing others grief. Dare to Lead is for everyone, not just professional leaders, because everything in this book applies to families and other groups. As Brené states, “I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.” In fact, Dare to Lead would be a wonderful resource or curriculum for a required high school class. There is SO much incredible insight, wisdom, and advice that my brain is tired, and it’s been havoc on my tear ducts multiple times. We all belong to groups, whether it’s at work, in social and community groups or clubs, etc., as members or leaders. And while this book is primarily aimed at leaders in the workplace, any group member would benefit from this knowledge and advice. Over the years, my groups have included my family of origin, my family from marriage, educational groups, event groups, competitive groups, etc. I have always been a good worker, boss, teacher, and leader of different groups. But “good” leaves a lot of leeway for the fact that a few times I have really screwed up in the very ways that Brené discusses. I look back and there were times that my perfectionism, my black-and-white rule-following, and my tendency to sometimes rush to judgement really hurt people. Not to mention, my shame affected my leadership. As I read Dare to Lead, I kept flashing to situations in my past and a couple of people I would really like to go back apologize to, one lady in particular. (Well, really, I want to travel back in time and not screw up to begin with, but sadly that’s just a fantasy.) A bit of background: I was raised in a very abusive family, physically and emotionally. My family of origin’s modus operandi was to judge, criticize, and belittle each member constantly. Mistakes and weaknesses were never forgiven, but held up, mocked, and laughed about over and over, on top of physical and emotional abuse. Armed with self-help books (yes, my family mocks my reliance on self-help books) and therapy, I determined to leave all that behind and become a “normal” person very different from my parents. But sometimes that background messes with my current life. (As Brené says: “What’s perhaps most insidious in power over dynamics is that those who are powerless typically repeat the same behavior when the tables are turned and they are promoted into power.” I would add, sometimes against our best intentions.) There was a time that my insecurity in running a large group led me to take a friend’s reported actions as betrayal. The resulting emotional backlash caused me to handle the situation so badly that I ended up being judgmental and majorly unkind to my friend to such a degree that the title “friend” no longer applies. I should have known better; I should have acted better...
Short Excerpt Teaser
The Moment and the Myths
the moment the universe put the Roosevelt quote in front of me, three lessons came into sharp focus. The first one is what I call "the physics of vulnerability." It's pretty simple: If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall. Daring is not saying "I'm willing to risk failure." Daring is saying "I know I will eventually fail, and I'm still all in." I've never met a brave person who hasn't known disappointment, failure, even heartbreak.
Second, the Roosevelt quote captures everything I've learned about vulnerability. The definition of vulnerability as the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure first emerged in my work two decades ago, and has been validated by every study I've done since, including this research on leadership. Vulnerability is not winning or losing. It's having the courage to show up when you can't control the outcome.
We've asked thousands of people to describe vulnerability to us over the years, and these are a few of the answers that directly pierce the emotion: the first date after my divorce, talking about race with my team, trying to get pregnant after my second miscarriage, starting my own business, watching my child leave for college, apologizing to a colleague about how I spoke to him in a meeting, sending my son to orchestra practice knowing how badly he wants to make first chair and knowing there's a really good chance he will not make the orchestra at all, waiting for the doctor to call back, giving feedback, getting feedback, getting fired, firing someone.
Across all of our data there's not a shred of empirical evidence that vulnerability is weakness.
Are vulnerable experiences easy? No.
Can they make us feel anxious and uncertain? Yes.
Do they make us want to self-protect? Always.
Does showing up for these experiences with a whole heart and no armor require courage? Absolutely.
The third thing I learned has turned into a mandate by which I live: If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I'm not interested in or open to your feedback. There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their lives but who will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgment at those who dare greatly. Their only contributions are criticism, cynicism, and fearmongering. If you're criticizing from a place where you're not also putting yourself on the line, I'm not interested in what you have to say.
We have to avoid the cheap-seats feedback and stay armor-free. The research participants who do both of those well have one hack in common: Get clear on whose opinions of you matter.
We need to seek feedback from those people. And even if it's really hard to hear, we must bring it in and hold it until we learn from it. This is what the research taught me:
Don't grab hurtful comments and pull them close to you by rereading them and ruminating on them. Don't play with them by rehearsing your badass comeback. And whatever you do, don't pull hatefulness close to your heart.
Let what's unproductive and hurtful drop at the feet of your unarmored self. And no matter how much your self-doubt wants to scoop up the criticism and snuggle with the negativity so it can confirm its worst fears, or how eager the shame gremlins are to use the hurt to fortify your armor, take a deep breath and find the strength to leave what's mean-spirited on the ground. You don't even need to stomp it or kick it away. Cruelty is cheap, easy, and chickenshit. It doesn't deserve your energy or engagement. Just step over the comments and keep daring, always remembering that armor is too heavy a price to pay to engage with cheap-seat feedback.
Again, if we shield ourselves from all feedback, we stop growing. If we engage with all feedback, regardless of the quality and intention, it hurts too much, and we will ultimately armor up by pretending it doesn't hurt, or, worse yet, we'll disconnect from vulnerability and emotion so fully that we stop feeling hurt. When we get to the place that the armor is so thick that we no longer feel anything, we experience a real death. We've paid for self-protection by sealing off our heart from everyone, and from everything-not just hurt, but love.
No one captures the consequences of choosing that level of self-protection over love better than C. S. Lewis:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all ent...
the moment the universe put the Roosevelt quote in front of me, three lessons came into sharp focus. The first one is what I call "the physics of vulnerability." It's pretty simple: If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall. Daring is not saying "I'm willing to risk failure." Daring is saying "I know I will eventually fail, and I'm still all in." I've never met a brave person who hasn't known disappointment, failure, even heartbreak.
Second, the Roosevelt quote captures everything I've learned about vulnerability. The definition of vulnerability as the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure first emerged in my work two decades ago, and has been validated by every study I've done since, including this research on leadership. Vulnerability is not winning or losing. It's having the courage to show up when you can't control the outcome.
We've asked thousands of people to describe vulnerability to us over the years, and these are a few of the answers that directly pierce the emotion: the first date after my divorce, talking about race with my team, trying to get pregnant after my second miscarriage, starting my own business, watching my child leave for college, apologizing to a colleague about how I spoke to him in a meeting, sending my son to orchestra practice knowing how badly he wants to make first chair and knowing there's a really good chance he will not make the orchestra at all, waiting for the doctor to call back, giving feedback, getting feedback, getting fired, firing someone.
Across all of our data there's not a shred of empirical evidence that vulnerability is weakness.
Are vulnerable experiences easy? No.
Can they make us feel anxious and uncertain? Yes.
Do they make us want to self-protect? Always.
Does showing up for these experiences with a whole heart and no armor require courage? Absolutely.
The third thing I learned has turned into a mandate by which I live: If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I'm not interested in or open to your feedback. There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their lives but who will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgment at those who dare greatly. Their only contributions are criticism, cynicism, and fearmongering. If you're criticizing from a place where you're not also putting yourself on the line, I'm not interested in what you have to say.
We have to avoid the cheap-seats feedback and stay armor-free. The research participants who do both of those well have one hack in common: Get clear on whose opinions of you matter.
We need to seek feedback from those people. And even if it's really hard to hear, we must bring it in and hold it until we learn from it. This is what the research taught me:
Don't grab hurtful comments and pull them close to you by rereading them and ruminating on them. Don't play with them by rehearsing your badass comeback. And whatever you do, don't pull hatefulness close to your heart.
Let what's unproductive and hurtful drop at the feet of your unarmored self. And no matter how much your self-doubt wants to scoop up the criticism and snuggle with the negativity so it can confirm its worst fears, or how eager the shame gremlins are to use the hurt to fortify your armor, take a deep breath and find the strength to leave what's mean-spirited on the ground. You don't even need to stomp it or kick it away. Cruelty is cheap, easy, and chickenshit. It doesn't deserve your energy or engagement. Just step over the comments and keep daring, always remembering that armor is too heavy a price to pay to engage with cheap-seat feedback.
Again, if we shield ourselves from all feedback, we stop growing. If we engage with all feedback, regardless of the quality and intention, it hurts too much, and we will ultimately armor up by pretending it doesn't hurt, or, worse yet, we'll disconnect from vulnerability and emotion so fully that we stop feeling hurt. When we get to the place that the armor is so thick that we no longer feel anything, we experience a real death. We've paid for self-protection by sealing off our heart from everyone, and from everything-not just hurt, but love.
No one captures the consequences of choosing that level of self-protection over love better than C. S. Lewis:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all ent...
