Core Skills of Courageous Leadership
1. Rumbling with Vulnerability
Embrace uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Be willing to show up even when you can't control the outcome.
2. Living into Your Values
Identify 2-3 core values. Let them guide decisions. Be willing to be uncomfortable in service of what matters.
3. BRAVING Trust
Build trust through consistency, accountability, and transparency. The elements: Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, Vault (confidentiality), Integrity, Non-judgment, Generosity.
4. Learning to Rise
Recover from failure skillfully. The process: Reckoning (acknowledge emotion), Rumbling (investigate the story you're telling yourself), Revolution (commit to change based on what you learned).
Key Insights
Vulnerability is not weakness: It's the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.
Clear is kind: Avoiding difficult conversations is unkind to everyone involved.
Ground floor leadership: You have to earn the right to lead. Start by listening and learning.
When to Use This Framework
Dare to Lead is most valuable when you or your team are stuck in self-protective patterns: avoiding hard conversations, playing it safe with ideas, or struggling with trust. It is especially useful during organizational change, when building new teams, or when you sense that people are holding back in meetings.
The BRAVING Trust inventory works well as a diagnostic tool. If trust has eroded on your team, walk through each element to identify exactly where the breakdown occurred.
Common Mistakes
- Confusing vulnerability with oversharing: Vulnerability is about showing up honestly in the face of uncertainty, not dumping personal problems on your team.
- Listing values but not practicing them: If you claim "integrity" as a value but avoid giving honest feedback, people notice the gap immediately.
- Skipping the reckoning: When something goes wrong, rushing to fix it without first acknowledging the emotional impact creates unresolved tension.
- Using vulnerability as a tactic: If you are being vulnerable to manipulate a response, people will sense it and trust erodes faster.