About Dare to Lead (from Amazon):
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.
My Video Book Review:
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
It’s video book review time again, and this week we are looking at Dare to Lead by Brené Brown. This book is amazing if you are in a leadership position any kind of stuff, it’s definitely worth reading. I think that probably people take away different things from the book just based on your own personality, your own style.
For me here were three of my takeaways.
So one, there’s a section on armored leadership versus daring leadership. And reading through the comparison of the two helped me identify a few things that I could work on right away. So I think that was super helpful.
The second thing is. I love this idea. She talks about “paint done”. And I could never see myself actually using that phrase. So I have to come up with my own way of saying that. But the idea is a lot of times as leaders, we have, you know, this idea of like the end result that we want to accomplish. And so we may ask a team member to do a certain task that in our mind is like the kind of the first step to getting to that end result.
They bring it to us. And then we realize there are a million other things that have to get done to get to that end result, or it just doesn’t, it doesn’t bring us what we were looking for. And really, if we are you know, if we paint done for the team, it empowers them to help put together those pieces to get to the end result.
So I love the idea of that. Like I said, I just have to come up with my own way to say it, something that feels more natural.
And then the third thing is don’t be afraid of the rumble. So she talks a lot about rumbling through hard conversations. And, you know, we have a lot of opportunity at work for difficult conversations and often many of us like me try to avoid those conversations.
But don’t be afraid to have those hard conversations, whether it is taking feedback , you know, receiving feedback from somebody or giving feedback just, you know, talk through it and just be engaged in the conversation and don’t try to avoid it.
So, overall, I think this book is definitely worth reading if you were in any kind of leadership position, in a management role or aspire to be. It’s definitely an awesome book.