Dare to Lead

Just finished the Brene Brown's book "Dare to Lead", I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Brene talks about feelings, emotions, empathy and vulnerability in a uniquely constructive and revolutionary way.

Here is the last paragraph of the book:

"As you think about your own path to daring leadership, remember Joseph Campbell's wisdom: "the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek".
Own the fear,
find the cave,
and write a new ending for yourself, 
for the people you're meant to serve and support, and for your culture.
Choose courage over comfort.
Choose whole hearts over armor.
And choose the great adventure of being brave and afraid.
At the exact same time".

 

Leadership and feelings

These days I am reading a very interesting book, a book that I found fascinating from the first page.
The title of the book is "dare to lead" and written by Brene Brown.

I am copying here an extract from the book talking about feelings.

"In the Air Force Manual 35-15, which was written in 1948, the seven leadership traits were discussed. One of these traits was Humanness.
The document was talking about emotions.
The pages were full of words and phrases like :
to belong,
a sense of belonging,
feeling, 
fear,
compassion, 
confidence,
kindness,
friendliness and
mercy.

This is a military document!
A document talking about leadership...
with mercy,
and kindness,
and belonging
and love!

Yes! The word love was in this 1948 military leadership manual!

This document used a language that speaks to the human experience when it was instructing leaders how to lead people.

And here the comparison with the current manual, the so called "Air Force Doctrine Document 1-1: Leadership and Force Development" (written in 2011).

The current manual does not have any of the words mentioned above.

The most current manual on leadership used phrases like
tactical leadership,
operational leadership,
strategic leadership.

In sanitizing our language, I think we have decreased our comfort with expressing those feelings and holding that same space for others".
 [...]

on the value of talking about feelings here is another extract

"Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior".

P.S. here is the TED talk of Brene Brown on vulnerability