Okay, I’ll admit right away that I’m a big Brené Brown fan and avid listener of both her podcasts.
But when I heard her two-part solo episodes on armored versus daring leadership (part one here, part two here), I could barely get through five minutes of listening at a time without having to stop and take notes. It was that good.
Listening to her describe unhealthy versus healthy work cultures was fascinating and gave me fresh insights into what went wrong in problematic work cultures I’d experienced in the past.
What Is Armored Leadership and What Is Daring Leadership?
So, what is “armored leadership” versus “daring leadership,” according to Brené?
The armor she’s referring to is the behavior we engage in to protect ourselves when we feel anxious or backed into a corner. These behaviors are signs that we’re acting from a place of fear, scarcity, or lack rather than curiosity, compassion, and sense of self-worth.
Daring leadership, on the other hand, is when we show up courageously—open, curious, compassionate, and ready to try, fail, learn, innovate, and grow.
In these two episodes of the Dare to Lead podcast, Brené draws on data she and her team collected from research that has involved around 50,000 people over the years to describe different kinds of destructive or unhelpful armored behavior in organizations and teams.
Putting these warning signs next to their counterpart examples of daring leadership in action can inspire us all to become more self-aware and build positive work cultures, whether we’re in a position of leadership or not.
As Brené explains, none of us are either armored leaders or daring leaders; we’re all somewhere on the continuum between the two.
We all have different positive and negative habit grooves and are triggered by different situations, with different fears motivating us. It takes a lot of self-awareness to understand how you personally tend to armor up, and how to stay committed every day to taking that armor off and staying open and curious instead. It’s worth it, though.
Brené points out that we tend to play a lot of lip service to the idea of bringing our whole selves to work—it’s an easy slogan—but it’s a lot rarer for people to actually put this into action. People are afraid to allow room for vulnerability and emotional honesty because it can be messy and uncomfortable.
Recognizing and making space for our heart-centered, emotional selves at work allows us to foster cultures of empathy, building resilience and trust within our teams. These lessons in what it means to be a daring leader versus an armored leader can help us replace our armor with what Brené calls “grounded confidence.”
So, what are the warning signs that we have some fear-based armor going on, and how can we reverse the potentially toxic behavior to lean into daring leadership instead? In these two Dare to Lead podcast episodes, Brené shares seven common behaviors and their antidotes.
1. Embracing Learning Over Knowing
In some work cultures, not knowing the answers is perceived as a weakness, and knowing is perceived to be the sum of your value. This can also manifest as a reluctance to ask for help.
To counter this, leaders should model asking smart questions and reward and encourage it in others.
The best leaders, Brené says, are highly skilled question-askers: “That’s where their strategic thinking capacity is revealed, where their ability to break apart conceptually complex ideas shines.” She adds that “in daring leadership, asking for help is normalized and expected at all levels.”
Interestingly, Brené’s research found that the number one behavior that people engage in that makes leaders trust them more is asking for help—something to remember next time you feel shame about asking for help or admitting you don’t have the answer.
Other Quotes We Love:
“When I see people stand fully in their truth, or when I see someone fall down, get back up, and say, ‘Damn. That really hurt, but this is important to me and I’m going in again’—my gut reaction is, ‘What a badass.’”
2. Leaning Into Hard Conversations With Grace
Armored leaders often create a work culture where avoiding conflict in conversations around race, gender, class, and performance feedback is the norm. In a healthy work culture with daring leaders, discomfort is expected and embraced: “We onboard for discomfort and failure,” Brené says of her own team.
Furthermore, you can’t just expect people to know how to have hard conversations; you have to actively teach them how to do it. Learning new things inevitably involves messing up and making mistakes, and so daring leadership doesn’t avoid this reality but puts systems in place to deal with mistakes without shame.
Rather than falling for the myth that being kind and honest are mutually exclusive attributes, we need to believe that honest and clear feedback is inherently kind, and normalize feedback to the point that it’s expected and requested. Similarly, apologies need to be normalized and modeled by leaders when they mess up, as we all inevitably do.
Other Quotes We Love:
“Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language – it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning 'heart' – and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.”
“We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
3. Leading With Empathy and an Eye on Our Own Imperfect Selves
A perfectionist work culture is a clear sign that shame and blame are at work. Perfectionism is harmful because it’s outward-focused, dwelling on what other people think, rather than being inwardly focused on a healthy striving for excellence.
Where perfectionism is our armor of choice, creativity, innovation, and new ideas won’t be able to flourish, because those things require risk. As Brené puts it, “Shame and innovation are mutually exclusive.”
Instead, we need to hold each other accountable in a respectful way. We take thoughtful risks, learn from our mistakes, talk openly about them, and embed these habits in the culture. “We make mistakes because we’re human. We talk about it openly because we’re brave,” says Brené.
Other Quotes We Love:
“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”
"Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”
“I believe that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves. For that reason, regret can be the birthplace of empathy.”
4. Modeling That We Are Enough (Even in Our Imperfection)
You might have heard people talking about abundance versus scarcity mindsets, but what about the difference between an abundance versus scarcity culture at work? When our armor of choice involves fostering a scarcity-based culture, the whole team feels like there’s never enough—time, money, and resources.
No one ever feels safe, and this can lead to severe team-wide burnout. In a scarcity-based culture, we don’t acknowledge good work and small successes because we fear some people will slow down and stop working hard. In fact, research shows that acknowledging small wins regularly refuels and motivates us and actually increases productivity rather than decreasing it.
We need leaders to model and respect boundaries and self-care, rather than rewarding exhaustion and hustle as a status symbol. “Instead of using fear and uncertainty to drive productivity, when there’s actually collective fear or uncertainty (which is a reality in the world today), leaders acknowledge the fear and uncertainty, they name it, they normalize it, with the goal of not leveraging it or using it, but de-escalating it,” says Brené. “Big difference.”
Other Quotes We Love:
"Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal."
5. Creating a Fitting-In Culture (For Everybody)
It’s becoming common knowledge these days that diverse workplaces are more productive and creative, and all-around healthier.
Nurturing a culture of true belonging, Brené says, rather than a culture where everyone’s expected to fit in, is a key part of creating an equitable, diverse, and inclusive work culture.
“In a fitting-in culture, people are held to one narrow standard rather than acknowledged for their unique gifts and contributions…In a belonging culture, diverse perspectives are cultivated, valued, and prioritized,” Brené says. “We hire for them, we reward them, we frame sharing different opinions and life experiences as courageous and as value added to the company.”
Not only this, but Brené’s research has actually shown that good leaders feel connected to—and genuinely care for—the people that they manage. “It’s a big ask to have affection for the people we lead, but it’s a big job. If you can’t cultivate it, better to move that person to a leader who can offer that because that’s what the people we’re leading deserve.”
Other Quotes We Love:
“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day.”
6. Leading Strategically Over Reactively
Overreacting to stressful situations, a bias towards fast action-taking, a “Get it done now” mentality, and last-minute or random delegation are all warning signs that leadership is reactive rather than proactive. Leading in a strategic, proactive way is riskier because it requires innovation and forward-thinking, but it means that you can make better decisions as you have systems already in place to deal with problems.
Instead of saying “We need to fix this right now,” you can step back say, “Help me understand what’s happening.” It takes time and can be uncomfortable to sit with a problem rather than rushing to fix it, but it allows us to be more thoughtful and to learn more in the process so that mistakes aren’t repeated.
Brené suggests that we put courageous systems in place that we built in our strongest moments to help us avoid freezing up in hard situations.
Other Quotes We Love:
“Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.”
“A lot of cheap seats in the arena are filled with people who never venture onto the floor. They just hurl mean-spirited criticisms and put-downs from a safe distance. The problem is, when we stop caring what people think and stop feeling hurt by cruelty, we lose our ability to connect. But when we’re defined by what people think, we lose the courage to be vulnerable. Therefore, we need to be selective about the feedback we let into our lives. For me, if you’re not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.”
“Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending—to rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think, 'yes. This is what happened. And I will choose how the story ends.'”
7. Accepting the Necessity of Change
According to Brené, the biggest shame trigger at work is a fear of irrelevance.
Change can make us worry that we won’t be valuable or needed anymore, and it can provoke us to double down and resist change if we let ourselves put on that armor.
We need to resist this urge, though, because our fear of irrelevance can become a self-fulfilling prophecy; we shut down and refuse to learn and change. Daring leadership encourages people to double down on learning and skill-building instead of fearing change while maintaining confidence about our ability to contribute.
“Change and uncertainty lead us to become increasingly territorial, cynical or critical,” Brené says, “Versus [in situations of daring leadership], in the face of change, we’re open, collaborative, and curious about the future and what’s possible.”
At the end of her two-part exploration of daring leadership versus armored leadership, Brené invites her listeners to track their own tendencies. How do you armor up? What situations lead you to armor up?
Try noticing what happens to your body language when you armor up (Brené mentions crossing her arms and rolling her eyes).
We all have our patterns, and once we start growing in self-awareness, we can break those patterns and build some more positive habits that can have a radical impact on our work culture and even start to re-shape society to be a more empathetic, creative, and innovative place.
Other Quotes We Love:
“Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”
Want Even More?
If you want more, you're in luck! Some of Brené Brown's most famous books include Dare to Lead, The Gift of Imperfection, Atlas of the Heart, and Braving the Wilderness.
You can listen to her podcasts, Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us.
