ADI IGNATIUS: I am Adi Ignatius.
ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ADI IGNATIUS So today’s guest is the renowned researcher and author, Brené Brown. It’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’s 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 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.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I mean that sounds a lot like my recent conversation with Ranjay Gulati about how leaders find courage in uncertain times. And 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: And look, Brené 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. Where you have a brief moment to size up the risks, the size of 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.
ALISON BEARD: Wow, that is something I would love to learn. So I can’t wait to hear this conversation.
ADI IGNATIUS: I would also like to learn it. So it’s the type of argument that illuminates Brené 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.
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 in this period. What does good leadership look like when the ground seems to be shifting so dramatically?
BRENÉ BROWN: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. 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?
ADI IGNATIUS: I’m good, I’m good with that.
BRENÉ BROWN: Yeah, 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 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, thinking and 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. And more often right now I think we don’t have the skills we need.
ADI IGNATIUS: I think there’s one other thing, which is that in periods of hyper uncertainty, there is a school of thought that you have to be decisive. Don’t be a victim of this, so there’s a bias toward action. So I feel like one of the paradoxes is that, versus systems thinking is having this sort of comeback where the counter advice is, no–sort of what you were saying–slow it down, think holistically about how a decision will affect whatever it is, the entire company, the entire organization. How are you seeing those two imperatives play out?
BRENÉ BROWN: Well, as a big fan of systems theory–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. What’s interesting–and I’ll be curious about what you think about this, 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. 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. And so what ends up happening is that system becomes self-referencing. And in this climate, that’s losing.
ADI IGNATIUS: 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’s 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.
BRENÉ BROWN: It’s one of the things that I seem to in this book be taking 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. I feel like I’m taking a battery of pause adjectives and adding it to everything that people are feeling. So yes, we need to be urgent, but unproductive urgency is always action over impact. And I think when you look at that MIT study, people are 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: So on the topic of authenticity, whether we like that word or not. We’ve lived through this period where leaders were comfortable being… Or many leaders. The best leaders were comfortable being outspoken about their values. Values 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 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?
BRENÉ BROWN: I think we’re seeing fear. I don’t think of 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. They don’t get a break there. And it’s also a leader’s job not to abandon the values of the company. And so that is a very short-term game in a long-term world.
ADI IGNATIUS: 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.” 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 your company is so –
BRENÉ BROWN: Yeah and also if it was performative and you are not finding a way to move forward in your integrity, then don’t be shocked by the consumer backlash.
ADI IGNATIUS: Absolutely. 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?
BRENÉ BROWN: It starts with pickleball, of course. Of course. 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: I would do it, but I’m too young for pickleball.
BRENÉ BROWN: 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. Yeah, which was rude. But yeah, he actually had me take a test and he is 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.” And he said, “Your physical age is like 77.” I was like, “Oh my God.”
ADI IGNATIUS: A perfect 10 out of 22.
BRENÉ BROWN: 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 where 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. 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 a CEO, before talking to my own coach. 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.”
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. 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 tushpush, just the physics of the ground I think is what we need right now.
ADI IGNATIUS: For our very global audience. We will explain that tushpush is a play in the National Football League. But it’s a play that involves elaborate teamwork and is inordinately successful.
BRENÉ 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 impossible 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. 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: So we often ask leaders, “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 people have said it’s like watching game today. That’s kind what they get out of it. So you use this phrase, “Pocket presence,” for leaders. Which I love that because it kind of gets at this hyper uncertain, hyper volatile moment about how you have to execute, talk about pocket presence.
BRENÉ 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.” 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 1500 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.
If you break down those skills, it’s exactly the skills I talked about when we first started the podcast about settling the ball 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 is going to be in a second or two seconds based on their training.
Two, temporal awareness. We completely underestimate this skill set 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. 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: Part of this has to be pattern recognition too. You’re doing it over and over again. So my favorite quarterback, I’m a Washington Commanders fan. So Jayden Daniels, he is 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 kind of a VR set sort of thing. So all day long, even when he’s not on the field and he doesn’t have anybody else to play with, he’s basically experiencing everything you’re describing where you have a couple seconds, 1500 pounds of enemy is bearing down in you, and yet somehow you sort of see the whole field. And I’m interested, how do executives develop that kind of pattern recognition? I mean, you got to learn on the job, you can’t really do it pretend. But how do they develop that skill?
BRENÉ BROWN: 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. But 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. So 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? 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. 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 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.” 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. It 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. Because what you’re doing is you’re creating a mental file system that sharpens pattern recognition. If you want to increase pattern recognition, open conversations around hard learnings is key.
ADI IGNATIUS: 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 adolescent psychology, neurobiology. Breaking down the armor, the hero’s journey, all these things. But the armor comes back. We wrap ourselves in armor to feel safe. And I guess 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?
BRENÉ BROWN: Over the past six years, we’ve taken 150,000 leaders across 45 countries through the Dare to Lead programming around courageous leadership, the training. We had a lot of data from that because we collect data on everything. And it seems simple, but it’s also difficult and requires courage–you cannot effectively start peeling off your armor if you don’t know what it is and you don’t recognize the situations in which you use it or reach for it. It’s interesting that you mentioned the hero’s journey and adolescent psychology. I would say that the greatest developmental milestone of midlife is a moment where all of us say, “This no longer serves. This kept me safe as a kid growing up, it kept me safe in my 20s and 30s in my years of acquisition and acquirement and trying to figure out who I am, but it’s tight and it’s heavy. I don’t even know who’s under here anymore and it’s not working.”
And so I think one of the first things that we do as leaders is we take them through a process where you have to identify what it is. My armor, I have lots of armor. Intensity–I get super intense. And because I’m a founder and a CEO, when I get super intense the people around me get quiet and move away. The exact opposite of what I need to make good decisions. I micromanage. I go into the worst kind of founder mode you’ve ever seen. I will pick the font, I will check your email. And I get very perfectionistic and I get overly decisive, which is weird.
So a lot of people have analysis paralysis. I just sit in a meeting and go, “No, we’re not doing that move that change that. Oh no, we’re pivoting here. Don’t do that.” And then I’ll look up and say, “Oh crap, I think I’m in some fear. Let’s not do those things.” To which my team responds, “We don’t write anything down when you’re acting this way.” But I think if there’s someone that you really love and trust outside of work, it’s a brave question to ask, “What kind of behaviors do I engage in when I’m in fear and I’m armoring up?”
ADI IGNATIUS: So HBR has been around for more than a hundred years. You have been writing bestselling books on a lot of the topics we hold dear for decades. And there are millions of ideas coming from other sources that are good ideas and research based and they’re tested. And why are we still not very good at leadership and not very good at management? I mean, we can point to one or two examples of this person really nails it. But most of these examples are kind of counter indicators. Why are we not better at these things that you and I spend so much time researching, writing about, trying to share best practices, et cetera?
BRENÉ BROWN: Because who we are is how we lead. And I don’t care who the scholar is or what the approach is, if you don’t have a very significant level of self-awareness, emotional granularity, emotional awareness, systems thinking, I think it’s very, very tough to lead. I think we’d rather do pretty much anything other than figure out how we’re getting in our own way. And so to take a group of people with a very serious goal, a serious mission, a lot of pressure, a lot of external and internal complexity, and get this group of people to move in the same direction with power and purpose is an extraordinary thing to do over a long period of time and requires really understanding yourself and how human beings work. And I think you can squeeze good performance and growth, whatever your metric is on a short-term basis with power over fear, external reward. But if you want something long-term and meaningful, it’s got to be intrinsic and it’s got to be about self-awareness. And I think that’s hard.
ADI IGNATIUS: To people who are listening to this, who are thinking, “Yeah, although this sounds like quite a journey, if I want to make progress in these areas.” What are some things people can do can think about right now to become more effective leaders?
BRENÉ BROWN: I would start with this. I don’t think people are okay, Adi. I don’t think we’re okay right now. I think collectively we are dysregulated, distrustful and disconnected. I think that makes leading particularly difficult right now. I think a very immediate thing anyone that’s listening can do who’s leading a team is if I could wave a magic wand and change one skill set that leaders had, I would say figure out what it takes to create time where none exists. Figure out how to take a breath and challenge your own thinking or your behavior or how you’re showing up. When there’s a big decision or strategy being made, how do you take a deep breath and slow a room down to be thoughtful, to run a pre-mortem on what’s happening, to invite a red team in, to take a look at your decision-making? Settle yourself and take a deep breath and settle the people around you.
And I think that’s a challenge, but if you can start there, there’s no self-reflection, there’s no self-awareness, there’s no smart strategy, there’s no AI approach. There’s nothing without grounded thinking. So to take a deep breath and slow things down. And I’m talking about minutes, I’m not talking about months. And what really scares you, me the most–and this is to be honest with you, very ubiquitous with the companies I’m in right now. I’m in four different companies right now across different industries. One is US-based, three of them are global. And the thing that I hear over and over was, “I don’t have time to think about it.” I mean, dangerous.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yep. And do you feel you’re on strong ground now?
BRENÉ BROWN: All the time? No. Am I getting better at recognizing when I’m not and the cost of that to me personally and professionally? Yes. I am aware of when I’m on strong ground and I’m aware of when I’m not. It feels completely different – I was working with a football team about a month ago. And I asked a couple of the offensive linemen to come up. And I asked them to get on their tippy toes and then on one foot. And I said, “I’m going to push you.” And I pushed them into the shoulders and they fell over. And of course all their teammates were like, “Damn, she got you.”
Then I asked each of the players, “Tell me your values. What are your two big values?” And they told me what they were. And I said, “Plant your left foot in one value, plant your right foot in the other value.” And I said, “I want to see if I can move you.” And it was pushing into a concrete wall. And so we are again, dysregulated, distrusting and disconnected. And the first place we need to start regulating, trusting and reconnecting is ourself to something bigger than us that provides stability and agility at the same time.
ADI IGNATIUS: I’m going to bring you down to talk to my softball team in New London, Connecticut. You can tell us how to run to first base without pulling a hamstring every time.
BRENÉ BROWN: Oh God.
ADI IGNATIUS: Brené Brown, thank you for being our guest today on IdeaCast.
BRENÉ BROWN: What a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
ADI IGNATIUS: That was Brené Brown, researcher and author of Strong Ground, the Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the wisdom of the Human Spirit.
Next week, Alison explores the idea of corporate diplomacy and how to lead better in challenging political times around the globe. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe.
And thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, audio product manager, Ian Fox and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Adi Ignatius.
