The skills every leader needs now

JEFF BERMAN: Hi, folks. This week on the show, Reid Hoffman’s conversation with bestselling author and researcher, the phenomenal Brené Brown. She joined us on stage last week at Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, where Brené and Reid had an inspiring and action-oriented conversation about courageous leadership. I hope you enjoy it.

Copy LinkBrené Brown on courageous leadership

BRENÉ BROWN: Hi.

REID HOFFMAN: Clearly you have some fans here already.

BROWN: I like it. Howdy.

HOFFMAN: You have a new book out—

BROWN: I do.

HOFFMAN:  … called Strong Ground, which explores many aspects of what you call and what should be called courageous leadership. So what is courageous leadership?

BROWN: Well, I heard the word humility during the introduction, and to me, courageous leadership is a combination of a deep awareness of who you are and leading with discipline and accountability and humility. It’s about understanding that to lead is to serve others and not be served, and I think it’s probably rooted in, above everything else, self-awareness about who you are and how you’re showing up probably undergirds all of it.

HOFFMAN: And what are some habits, principles, ways that you help people understand? Are they exhibiting it? What kinds of ways to build into it? Because obviously it’s the right aspiration for everyone to get to courageous leadership, but it isn’t just a slogan. It’s actually a way of being.

BROWN: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think the biggest finding possibly of my career has been that courage is teachable, measurable, and observable. It’s a skill set that’s made up of four things. The ability to be very clear about your values and to assess whether you’re behaving in a way that’s aligned with them. It’s one thing to have values, it’s another thing to operationalize them and then hold yourself and your organization accountable for them.

The second is the ability to stay in your integrity and vulnerability. Vulnerability is very simply uncertainty, risk, and exposure. So all of us are in it every day, all day. And the ability to know when you’re in it and to not reach for armor. I hypothesized early on that the biggest barrier to courageous leadership was fear. And when we went back to some of the leaders we were studying, they literally said some version of this to us, “If you’re going to make a list of brave leaders who are never afraid, don’t put me on the list. I’m afraid every day.” And I was like, “Well, if it’s not fear, what gets in the way of courage?” Armor. It’s how we self-protect when we’re afraid. It’s usually out of our awareness. So one of the things we do with leaders is: what’s your go-to armor? Mine is terrible. Mine is perfectionism, micromanagement. I also get super decisive. That’s my armor.

HOFFMAN: Well, interesting.

BROWN: I’ll be in a meeting. Yeah, I won’t get paralyzed. I’ll be in a meeting and I’ll be like, “Shut it down. No, move the team. Change the money. We’re not doing this.” And then I’ll look up, and I’ll be like, “Oh, shit, I don’t know that these are good decisions.” And literally the last time I did that, my team looked back at me and said, “We never write anything down when you’re acting like this.” I was like, “Wait, what?” They’re like, “This is your armor.” That is my armor. I get overly decisive. And so for us to be courageous, we have to know the very human ways that we self-protect when we’re afraid.

HOFFMAN: What’s some of the ways to discover that armor and learn how to disarmor yourself?

BROWN: I think most of us know. I mean, if you want to ask someone — I wouldn’t ask someone that works for you, because there’s a power differential there that could make it super cringey for that person to describe exactly how you’re an asshole.  What form of asshole-ness do I default to when I’m afraid? Because they’ll be able to tell you for sure.

HOFFMAN: They could tell you.

BROWN: Right. But they may smartly say, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”

HOFFMAN: It’s one you’re too perfectionistic.

BROWN: Oh yeah. Oh no, not the perfectionism. What’s your weakness? Perfectionism. Everything I do is very good. And that’s not how it shows up for me. Perfectionism is maybe a month ago, I gave the packing parachutes speech. “We’re packing parachutes, 100% matters. Do you want to jump out of a plane with a parachute that was packed at 90% excellence? People die.” And I think we were talking about a font choice.

HOFFMAN: A parachute font coming soon to you.

BROWN: A parachute font. “Don’t get this wrong. People will die.” This is all like a founder problem, but I have a therapist and a coach. I’m working on it. But I think you probably know. Raise your hand if you could think about how you self-protect when you’re in fear or uncertainty. I think you know, and I don’t think you normally have to ask other people. And if you don’t have the insight or the courage to think about it, I question the sanity of you leading people, to be honest with you, because who we are is how we lead. And if you’re not willing to have the humility to look into, can I get scary when I’m scared? And I think a lot of us can. I can.

HOFFMAN: Yeah. No, it’s classic.

BROWN: It’s classic.

HOFFMAN: Yes.

BROWN: I’m a legend.

Copy LinkThe difference between cognitive empathy and affective empathy

HOFFMAN: Yes. So you do intense research. You meet a lot of great CEOs, probably meet a lot of not great CEOs. I’d say probably over the last decade or two, there was more generally saying, “Hey, you should be more empathetic.” And it seems to be going somewhat the other direction now. Now, sometimes people might describe that accurately as testosterone poisoning, which we have a certain amount of. What are you seeing in this pattern of what kind of environments are CEOs operating in, and what’s the way to maintain a true north for themselves, their organizations, their culture? What are the forces that are acting against it and what are the ways to navigate it?

BROWN: Yeah, I feel really lucky because I actually go to work every day. I spend probably 90% of my time working with C-suite and the level of direct reports under the C-suite. I’m so optimistic in many ways because when you stop scrolling and you turn off the news, and you’re just sitting with people in a room, you see a lot of great people who wake up every day and are committed to doing the next right thing regardless of what’s in the zeitgeist right now. And I feel like that makes me very optimistic.

I think in terms of the cultural push against empathy, I have two thoughts on that. One is just honest. Look, if my leadership plan includes hurting people, especially vulnerable populations, I’m going to be against empathy. I’m going to diminish and devalue empathy if part of my plan is to be hurtful because I don’t need your pushback and your resistance. So that’s one.

The second thing is empathy is very nuanced, and so it’s easy to grab the parts of empathy that are actually not very helpful. So there are two types of empathy. There’s cognitive empathy and affective empathy. So if you call me and you’re like, “Hey, Brené, I’m really having a hard time.” And I say, “Tell me what’s going on.” And you tell me what’s going on, and I reflect back and say, “God, that sounds incredibly disappointing.” And we have a conversation, and you feel seen and heard and believed. That empathy, that cognitive empathy is not only the source code for relationships, it’s the source code of democracy, period.

Affective empathy is, you call me and I say, “What’s going on?” And you describe what’s going on, and then I feel it with you. That’s not helpful. That leads to burnout. It actually minimizes compassion. So I think we have to get really clear on what’s healthy empathy and what is not. But large sweeping statements about empathy as the end of Western civilization by people who don’t understand it and are also doing really dangerous shit to groups of people don’t mean anything to me personally.

HOFFMAN: 100%.

BROWN: Yeah. I get why it would be convenient if I stopped caring. Not going to happen.

HOFFMAN: Yeah, exactly. And a lot of how you describe cognitive empathy for me is how I think about compassion. So how do you think about the difference between cognitive empathy and compassion?

BROWN: Oh God, it’s so interesting from a research perspective. Compassion is so brave. Compassion is the willingness to walk through the world and accept that there’s going to be suffering and that when you see it, you’re willing to do something about it. That’s compassion. That I am going to move through the world and accept that there’s suffering, mine and yours, and when I see it, I’ll be moved to do something about it. Empathy is a tool of compassion. It’s a teachable tool. It’s a hard thing to teach.

I’ve taught in a graduate college of social work for two decades, and when we teach empathy, it’s like role plays and you’re like, “Oh, Mr. Smith, you must be feeling super betrayed.” Right? Yeah. And then Mr. Smith inevitably will say, “No, not really.” Okay. Sad? It’s hard because really good empathy requires emotional granularity. It requires the ability to have a pretty robust emotional lexicon, which is hard because our research shows that adults in this country can name and accurately identify about three emotions, happy, sad, and pissed off. And we think there are about 85 to 90 that are important for emotional granularity.

HOFFMAN: I’ll say, “That’s sad,” but—

BROWN: Yeah, yeah. That’s sad. It’s pissing me off.

HOFFMAN: Yes, exactly.

BROWN: But imagine—

HOFFMAN: I’m not happy about it.

BROWN: But you’re not happy. You get three buckets, pick one. But imagine reducing everything that we experience in life to three buckets, and neurolinguistics would tell us that the ability to access language that accurately reflects what we’re feeling is so important to the human experience, which is why three buckets are not enough, because it doesn’t include awe, wonder, disappointment, grief, anguish, things that really define the human spirit.

BERMAN: More from Reid’s conversation with Brené Brown in just a minute. 

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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

Copy LinkBuilding resilience in high-performing teams

HOFFMAN: In your classwork and the students, do you actually run through the entire emotional gamut? Because I could see that being stunningly important in leadership education to just say, “Let’s actually expand your experience of emotional vocabulary.” Because actually, in fact, if you don’t have that kind of sensibility, you can’t be compassionate, you can’t have cognitive empathy, et cetera. And the ability to understand, I have regret. Do you run through the—

BROWN:  We do, and they pick two or three that they want to learn about that they think would make them stronger leaders in their organization. Again, I’m usually at the C-suite level, so they’re often picking emotions that are preventing their team from getting back on their feet after failure, disappointment, and setback. Because one of the things that you see, especially among CEOs today, is not if, but when there’s a failure and a setback and a disappointment, I need everybody on my team to be responsible for their own bounce. I need everybody to get back up on their own because I cannot both correct what’s happening and remind you of your value. I need everybody up on their own. And so in order to get back up, we have to understand the whole collection of emotions that we’re feeling.

HOFFMAN: Yeah, no, exactly. There’s this concept within health things of cognitive reserve and emotion reserve. Emotion reserve actually strikes me as a really interesting thing to be building resilience in.

BROWN: Huge. I mean, I hate this because it rhymes, so it makes it seem less important. But there is something that therapists often say, which is “If you can’t name it, you can’t tame it.” If you can’t accurately name what you’re experiencing, it’s very difficult to move through it.

HOFFMAN: Yeah.

Copy LinkThe importance of systems thinking

BROWN: When we were doing Strong Ground research, we wanted to come up with, what does the future of leadership look like in terms of actionable skill sets? Emotional granularity ended up in the top five.

HOFFMAN: Yeah. And the other four?

BROWN: Self-awareness. One that I cannot believe has fallen to the wayside that I see less and less in senior leaders today: systems thinking. The ability to think in terms of systems, which is really scary because if you’re familiar with systems theory, you know the prerequisite for a healthy system is permeable boundaries where good data and feedback can flow in and out pretty freely, especially with AI. What’s interesting … Oh, you got the excited face.

What I think is interesting is when a team or an organization loses the permeability of the boundaries, they’re not bringing in external feedback or internal feedback consistently. Boundaries get closed. Two things happen to a system, whether we’re talking about a cell or a tech team. You become a self-referencing system. And so what you end up doing is, “Are we good?” “No, we’re great.” “Do we need to know more?” “No, we know everything.” The MIT Sloan research that just came out, investments in AI, 90% failure, no return on investment. And a lot of that is because of self-referencing systems. You have to have the courage to say in this environment, “I know very little.”

HOFFMAN: In times of disruption, people try to persuade themselves all under controls. There is an inherent risk. And it’s like, “No, no, we’re moving through times of disruption.”

BROWN: Right.

HOFFMAN: You need to have a different stance towards it, and not just you as an individual, but you as a leader, you as a team, et cetera. And that’s part of the reason why this resilience, because it’ll be bumpy.

BROWN: Oh, it’s so bumpy.

HOFFMAN: Yes.

BROWN: It’s so bumpy. And how many of you … I can’t see y’all, but how many of you have ever watched five-year-olds play football, soccer, sorry, soccer? I’m a big Liverpool fan, so I’ve converted to football, although it’s not going well for me right now. We have a midfield problem. But when five-year-olds play soccer and the ball comes in hard and fast head height, what a five-year-old does is put their foot up head height, and they try to kick the ball. And of course it goes off the pitch, into the pitch next door where someone’s sitting crisscross applesauce, making daisy chains. It’s great. Both my kids played at that young age.

As soccer players get more experience, what they end up doing when the ball comes in really high and fast is they take the ball into their chest, the ball drops to the ground. They put their foot on the ball to maintain possession because the game’s all about possession. They look down the pitch. They think about operationally, where is the ball? Not where is the striker right now, but where is the striker going to be? And they kick the ball to where the striker is going to be. And that set of skills is what’s missing right now.

You have CEOs and C-suite leaders kicking the ball at head height as hard as they can, not bringing the ball into their chest, settling the ball, taking a breath, looking strategically down the pitch. And the CEOs that I’m working with AI that are settling the ball, are coming out of their skin every day. They’re saying, “I’m trying to settle the ball. I’m trying to take a breath. I’m trying to make sure that my AI strategies align with my business strategy. And I’m trying to make sure that my budget line for bringing the humans along is also substantial, but I’m scared shitless because everyone else is moving so fast, that I don’t feel like I have time to settle the ball or look down the pitch.”

HOFFMAN: What do you say when you’re confronted with that? What’s the way to help them? Because obviously the game is moving very fast. AI is obviously on everyone’s minds.

BROWN: Right.

HOFFMAN: How it integrates their lives, their organization’s lives, their work’s lives, et cetera. What’s some of the work that you’ve been doing to say, “Hey, here are some principles to deal with this very chaotic, fast-moving game.”

Copy LinkThe deep thinking skills that leaders need today

BROWN: I think the first thing is, I so respect a leader who has a self-awareness to say, “I’m trying to pause and be strategic and thoughtful, and I’m coming out of my skin.” The first thing I would tell you is anyone that has the self-awareness to say that, immediately gains my confidence. Because so much of what’s happening in terms of the world today is happening outside of the awareness of very senior leaders.

I mean, this is a call that I had yesterday about relocating a supply chain because of tariffs. And the leader just kept saying, “We need to move fast. What we’re looking for…” And this is tricky, I’ll be curious about what you think about this. I want to see urgency. I want productive urgency. I want to see risk-taking. I want to see strategic risk-taking. It is the job of a leader today in this environment, given the political instability, technology, changing markets. I think the number one job outside of self-awareness of a leader today is to create time where none exists. Create time where none exists. And so to understand that better, I had to turn to sport.

There’s so many sports metaphors. Literally the question I got from The Wall Street Journal is, did you feel comfortable putting a chapter around John Keats next to a chapter called the tush push? And I was like, “Yeah, dude. Why? Do you like poetry?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Do you like football?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Shut it.” I’m like, “Yeah, we can do both.” But if you turn to sports and you look at really talented athletes, it looks like they’re slowing down the ball in play, but they’re actually not creating more time between a serve and a return or a kick.

What they’re doing, and I think this is the future of leadership, is a very complex skillset of anticipatory awareness, temporal awareness, and situational awareness. So the leaders today are understanding how to read what they can’t see. In football, we’d call it pocket presence. A quarterback gets a snap, breaks back, he has three seconds to figure out how to move the ball down. But it’s a very complex group of skills that he has with his team around being able to see, to be able to read a field you can’t see.

So the question I have for a lot of senior leaders is, “Where are you on anticipatory awareness? Where are you in systems thinking?” These are the deep thinking skills moving forward.

HOFFMAN: Yeah, I completely agree. And part of it is to realize that while it’s moving very fast and you cannot create more time, your fitness function is not response at speed. Your fitness function is intelligent response at speed. Right?

BROWN: That’s the difference between urgency and productive urgency, between risk-taking and strategic risk-taking. Every CEO is saying, “I need more risk-taking.” I was interviewing someone the other day, and she said, “No, I’m going to get shit done. I’m a GSD kind of person.” And I was like, “That I don’t need.” What I actually need is a GSSD. Get strategic shit done.

HOFFMAN: Yes.

BROWN: Because what you’re seeing right now, and I’m curious if you’re seeing this, you’re seeing action over impact.

HOFFMAN: Depending on the leader. It does definitely happen. And obviously we’ve introduced like five to seven questions that we could go on for the next 30 minutes.

BROWN: Oh, yeah.

HOFFMAN: But the clock just ran out.

BROWN: Oh, we’re out of time. It takes me 25 minutes to order a sandwich. So we did pretty good.

HOFFMAN: Yes. So as you can see, amazing. Thanks, Brené.

BROWN: Thank y’all so much. Thank you.

BERMAN: Thanks again to Brené Brown for joining us at the Masters of Scale Summit. Her new book is Strong Ground, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. And while I have you, just a deep, deep thanks to everyone who came to Summit, not just those who appeared on stage, but who were in community, in conversation, looking for ways to build a better future. We’re so grateful to all of you, and we’re excited to see you back in San Francisco next year.