THE HEART OF DARING LEADERSHIP
As many of you know, Monique and I co-lead Dare To Lead™, an experiential workshop based on the work of renowned shame and vulnerability researcher and professor at the University of Texas, Austin, Brené Brown. One of the reasons we find this work so compelling is that it de-mystifies and humanizes leadership and the role of leaders in organizations like yours. Because, if you’re like me, you were raised to believe that a leader is:
The one who calls the shots.
The one with all the power.
The one with the best answers.
The one who metes out justice.
The one with the title and position.
In other words, I grew up learning that the role of “leader” is bestowed upon a chosen few and they could make life awesome or awful for the rest of us. That it’s the role of the follower to make the leader look good and be successful. Does any of this sound familiar?
When I look at that list, I think of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi when he confronts his nephew-turned-Sith-Lord Kylo Ren. In that scene Ren tells Luke, “The Resistance is dead, the war is over, and when I kill you, I will have killed the last Jedi!” To which Luke replies, “Amazing. Every word of what you just said…is wrong.” I had to unlearn a lot of what I learned and had gotten wrong about leadership.
In the teams and organizations we work with, the most effective leaders are the ones who distribute decision-making to those most knowledgable and capable of making the best decisions, regardless of their position or title. They practice “power-with” as opposed to “power-over”, freeing up their people to flex fully into their potential, take risks, learn from their mistakes, and then support their people to take the next risk. The most effective leaders have the best questions, not the best answers. And they choose courageous accountability over petty retribution.
In fact, the most effective leaders we work with are ones who take responsibility for their world. Who, as Brené offers, “…see the potential in people and processes and who take the responsibility for developing that potential…who step into that arena at work and put themselves out there to make a difference”. You might be surprised to hear that a lot of these leaders are individual contributors, and not leaders by position or title. But leaders they are (says Yoda). Or you might not be surprised, because that might be you. The point is, when we step away from our traditional perspective on what makes a leader, the mantle of “leader” is available to anyone in the organization.
Stepping into and taking responsibility for one’s own leadership takes a tremendous amount of courage. It’s scary to be a Daring Leader, to speak truth to power, to enroll others into an idea, to ask for help (you’d be surprised at how many of us demur at that notion), to choose what’s right over what’s easy or comfortable. Here’s the good news - Brené’s research uncovered that courage is set of skills that are observable, measurable, and teachable, not some innate quality you either have or don’t have. This is what Brené refers to as “Daring Leadership".
We’ll cover the four skills of courage in the next post. For now, let’s explore the foundation of those skills, the Heart of Daring Leadership. At the Heart of Daring Leadership are three tenets that Brené uncovered in her research for Dare To Lead:
You can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. Embrace the suck.
The thing about courage is that it does not exist without fear. Think about the last conflict you were in with someone, one in which you felt exposed or vulnerable, with a heightened sense of “uh-oh”. Did you self-protect with behaviors that helped you “win” while making things worse? Or did you lean into the tough conversation (i.e. “rumble”) with an open mind and heart (i.e. with “vulnerability”)? No judgment here, we’ve all done one or the other. In fact I did both just last week. Details around those situations notwithstanding, I had a helluva lot of cleanup to do with the former, and it took more time and energy than it should have to regain trust and connection. The latter felt really awkward (i.e. “the suck) but we solved our issue and in the process created more trust and connection between us. Vulnerability is not supposed to feel good, but it offers us the fastest, most straightforward way to mutual understanding, respect, and resolution.Self-Awareness and Self-Love Matter. Who we are is how we lead.
As Brené discovered, “a lot of crappy leadership happens outside our awareness.” When we’re in conflict or when things get challenging, our lizard brain, aka our Limbic System, takes over. From there our reactions are limited to four categories - fight, flight, freeze, or appease. These reactions are automatic and instantaneous and in their efforts to protect us, we become oblivious - sometimes willfully - to the impact we created. This is where it becomes super important to start seeing our patterned reactions to conflict to help us consciously choose a more creative, and helpful, response. That’s the self-awareness part of this tenet, and how we become “response-able” for our world. Does that mean we won’t explode or withdraw or freeze up from time to time? No way! That’s a part of being human. But we can learn to cut ourselves some slack, and practice self-compassion. That’s the self-love part of this tenet. And as we become more conscious, aware leaders, we start to lead differently. It becomes part of who we are.Courage is contagious. To scale daring leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to cultivate a culture in which brave work, tough conversations, and whole hearts are the expectations, and armor is not necessary or rewarded.
Leadership is an inside-out game. It starts with us making the choice to lead courageously and wholeheartedly and scales by moving to “we”, creating team and organizational cultures of belonging, safety, respect, and contribution. Brené research revealed that care and connection are “irreducible requirements for wholehearted, productive relationships between leaders and team members.” Everything we do, everything we achieve, we do and achieve through others. Therefore, the extent to which our relationships are healthy and thriving is the biggest predictor of the success or failure of all our endeavors. In our team coaching work, we have found that the most productive teams are the ones where respect, positive mutual regard, and psychological safety are the norms. Does this mean there is no conflict? Absolutely not! What it means is that those teams know how to have productive conflict. They serve as exemplars of problem-solving in their companies. Or as Brené puts it, “it only takes a critical few showing up differently to transform a culture.”
I’ll be the first one to admit that this stuff is hard - in fact it’s the hardest work I’ve ever done, and I know most of our clients feel the same way. People are messy. Emotions are awkward. So, we try to engineer the messiness and awkwardness out of our work interactions with processes, tools, and technologies. I can tell you from experience that that approach leads to more messiness and awkwardness. The Heart of Daring Leadership is an arduous path, and is often a “cave we fear to enter”. But the treasures along the path are less stress, more connection, greater fulfillment, and elevated engagement.
Back to Luke and Kylo Ren. Ren is the embodiment of “armored leadership”; the opposite of Daring Leadership. You can’t help but have a little compassion for the dude - he’s filled with fear and anger and that’s what’s running his show. And while Luke is not a perfect example of Daring Leadership, he finally confronted his fear and went for the tough conversation (which ended up killing him but he became a force ghost, so there’s that), became aware of his fear and failure and forgave himself, and passed on what he learned about all this to Rey, to rebuild the Jedi culture. Daring Leadership zigs and zags, kinda like Luke. The tenets at the Heart of Daring Leadership give us a powerful North Star, and are at the core of every hero’s journey.
