Brené Brown & Reid Hoffman on the skills every leader needs now

Jeff Berman (0:00)

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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. Today, we are revisiting one of our favorite conversations from the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit, Reid Hoffman, in conversation with the iconic author Brené Brown. It's full of heart and smart. Two things you're sure to get a lot of when you join us at this year's event as well. It's coming up soon, October 20th to 22nd in San Francisco. Go to mastersofscale.com/summit to learn more.

Reid Hoffman (1:04)

Clearly, you have some fans here already.

Jeff Berman (1:05)

I like it. Howdy.

Reid Hoffman (1:09)

You have a new book out. I do. Called Strong Ground, which explores many aspects of what you call and what should be called courageous leadership. So what is courageous leadership?

Brené Brown (1:21)

Well, I heard the word humility during the introduction. 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 it's, I think it's probably rooted in every, in above everything else, self-awareness about who you are and how you're showing up.

Probably undergirds all of it.

Reid Hoffman (1:53)

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.

Brené Brown (2:10)

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. So I'll be in a meeting. And yeah, I won't get paralyzed. I'll be in a meeting. 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? And they're like, this isn't 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.

Reid Hoffman (4:07)

What's some of the ways to kind of discover that armor and learn how to disarmor yourself?

Brené Brown (4:14)

So 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 cringy 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.

Reid Hoffman (4:36)

They could tell you.

Brené Brown (4:38)

Right. But they may smartly say, I don't know.

Reid Hoffman (4:41)

I've never seen it. It's when you're too perfectionistic. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Brené Brown (4:44)

Oh, no. Not the perfectionism. Yes. What's your weakness? Perfectionism. Everything I do is very good.