Most academics don’t become global celebrities. But in 2010, Brené Brown, a longtime professor of social work at the University of Houston, gave a TEDx Talk about her research on shame, empathy and courage that made her almost instantly famous. The talk was called “The Power of Vulnerability,” and in it Brown makes the case for why people should get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Fifteen years later, “The Power of Vulnerability” is still one of the most-viewed TED Talks ever, and Brown has become a kind of guru for millions of people all over the world who devotedly follow her writing, podcasts and TV specials. As she and I discussed, that’s not always a role she’s comfortable in.
In recent years, Brown has turned her focus to corporate settings. She runs a consulting practice and works with C.E.O.s to promote what she calls “courageous leadership.” And now she has written a new book about the same thing, titled “Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit.” It’s about what Brown thinks makes a good leader, based on her research, but it’s also about this moment of intense technological and cultural upheaval we’re in at work, and how the ideas she has spent her career spreading, some of which seem to be falling out of favor, might be able to help us weather it.
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You are known for your work explaining human emotions, especially around shame and vulnerability. You’re also, though, a leadership consultant who brings those ideas to various workplaces, from the N.F.L. to the military to the Fortune 500. Can you tell me why corporate leadership became something you wanted to engage with? Because it’s not necessarily obvious how shame in your early work relates to leadership in Fortune 500 companies. When you study the intersection of emotion, behavior and thinking, you can apply it pretty much anywhere. After the TED Talk on vulnerability went viral, the first phone calls I started to get were from leaders saying: “We think there’s a lot of application in what you’re talking about in our work. Can you come talk to us?” So I started a leadership study, and that was all I needed. I was like, Wow, when you ask leaders who are doing really important work — corporate, nonprofit, military, sports — what’s getting in the way, the answer across every single industry is courage. We won’t have hard conversations. We don’t hold people accountable. We shame and blame them. I was like, Oh, I can do this. I know how to do this. In the end, at work, we’re just people.
I want to get to the heart of the matter, which is that this moment is different. Like a lot of people in every industry, I personally am feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change. Same.
In your new book, about halfway through, you quote Amy Webb, a C.E.O. and professor at N.Y.U. who studies the future, and she described this moment as a “supercycle” of unprecedented change. This massive disruption, all this new technology that companies have available to them, how they’re supposed to use it and then how to train people on it: What does that look like inside a workplace at this moment, when it just feels like everything is up in the air? It looks like a complete [expletive] show. What it looks like is scarcity. We’re not doing enough, we don’t know enough, we don’t have enough people trained, we’re not investing enough. This is what everyone’s doing and we’re behind. So it looks like fear and scarcity driving huge investments in A.I. that are not even aligned with business strategy.
So in this moment of profound change, what is a good leader? A good leader to me right now is a leader who understands urgency but is working from productive urgency. Not, like my grandma would say, “chicken with your head cut off” urgency — we’re seeing a lot of that — but productive, strategic urgency. Action over impact is so dangerous, and right now we’re seeing a ton of action over impact as companies try to integrate this technology. They’re not understanding how to bring people along, how to use it in smart ways, where it will work, where it will not work. Linda Hall — a Harvard Business School professor and researcher who studies digital transformation — will tell you the hardest thing about digital transformation is never the technology; it’s always the people. Then you add to that geopolitical instability around the world. Leaders wake up and, depending on the tariff fever dream of the night before by this administration, everything has changed. Next, you have radically shifting marketplaces because consumers are changing. I’m talking to economists who are mentioning mayonnaise jars again for the first time. Do you put your money in the market? Do you not put your money in the market? So there’s complete instability economically. And I’m not going to downplay the complexity of intergenerational workplaces.
Some of these forces are largely out of the control of leaders of companies. I would say the majority of them. But what is in your control? Have you ever watched 5- or 6-year-olds play soccer?
Sadly, yes. [Laughs.] When you watch little kids play soccer, a kick will come to a kid at chest level and they won’t settle the ball, look down the pitch and decide where it needs to go next. They’ll just raise their foot up over their head and try to kick that ball back. A good leader takes the incoming churn and instability, settles the ball, takes a breath, creates some space and time where none exists, looks down the pitch and makes a smart decision about where to kick the ball next.
How does that connect with your older ideas around compassion, empathy, vulnerability? Are those things still necessary? Because I get why it makes us better humans, but why does it make us better leaders? Because when you raise your foot up to shoulder height and kick a ball, you have no control where it goes. It’s not strategic; it’s reactionary. So the answer to your question is: I have my team working really hard toward a project, and I just found out from my boss it’s been deprioritized. I pull them together. And what does compassion in that moment look like? And what does vulnerability and humanity look like in that moment? I say: “I want to start by saying how grateful I am for the work you’ve been doing, and that it was important work and work we were asked to do and asked to do well. And I counted on you for that, and you delivered. I found out this morning that, due to the supply-chain issue or a change in strategic priority, we’re being asked to change direction. And I don’t want to just throw everything at you. I want to take a minute and acknowledge the amount of cognitive and emotional energy it takes to walk away from good work and start new work, and I want to check in with you about it.”
I’m listening to you and I’m nodding, and I’m going, Yeah, that sounds really good. But that kind of leadership seems to have fallen out of the zeitgeist. The companies that are some of the most valuable in this era aren’t exactly known for their people-centered leadership anymore. That doesn’t seem to be as popular in the era of the Elon Musk-style of leadership, where you can go in, fire a bunch of people and still have a productive company. Some would argue, even more productive. One: What’s in the zeitgeist and not in the zeitgeist is of very little interest to me personally. Democracy is not in the zeitgeist right now, either. I’m still a firm believer in it. Two: We collect data on everything we do. We see a very compelling, persuasive, strong correlation between courageous and daring leadership and performance, as measured by the way companies measure performance — whether that’s quarterly stock price, retention, engagement. I have zero doubt about that. Just because the world at large believes that you have to be a total [expletive] to get performance out of a team, there is actually very little evidence of that over a long period of time. Leading by fear as a catalyst can result in very quick performance metrics. They’re not sustainable for a really simple reason: Fear has a very short shelf life. And in order to maintain fear as a leadership tool, you have to demonstrate a capacity for cruelty at very regular intervals. So you can’t keep me afraid forever. But if periodically you can demonstrate cruelty and a capacity for it, that will rekindle my fear. I think people are becoming less and less tolerant of living that way. And I think we have a new generation of people who won’t work that way. The Gen Z-ers, you’re not going to lead them with fear for very long.
A specific example of the way culture has changed is we’ve seen companies across the spectrum get rid of their D.E.I. programs. They adopted them in response to another cultural moment, in 2020, and now because things have changed, they’ve apparently decided that it doesn’t help them anymore. And I guess I wonder if the embrace of a lot of management and leadership humanity trainings is only performative? That they are there simply to respond to forces outside of their control, but not really about doing the work that you say is necessary. Heck yes. Absolutely some are, and some are not. Did some companies adopt D.E.I. and exploit it, use it as a part of their brand, and then the minute they were told to get rid of it, they got rid of it without thinking twice? That’s for sure. Did I see D.E.I. programs function in meaningful ways? When done well, they were just meritocracy programs. That’s a good D.E.I. program. It’s a program to make sure that the invisible program of favoritism and bias was being checked. This is not an administration that’s a fan of meritocracy. Let’s say you’re the C.E.O. and you have the administration saying, “You’ll get rid of this or you’ll lose every contract that touches the government, any federal or state dollars,” and you know that means that you’ll need to lay off 35,000 people — I don’t know that people are choosing to get rid of their D.E.I. programs. I would be comfortable enough to say that any leader who folds on something that’s good for their people, and effective, and helps make their people feel more connected and seen and also drives performance, which is a leader’s job, is a pretty terrible leader.
You keep bringing something up, which are the generational differences we’re seeing in the workplace and how different generations view work. Can you expand on that a little, what you’ve seen and what your thinking around that is? I do think there is organizational complexity in intergenerational work. We’re different — we were raised differently, we have different ideas about what success is — and I think there’s something to learn from each generation. I get nervous talking about swaths of people like generations, but I also think there’s some truth to it, so I’ll try to balance that. I’m a Gen X person who raised two Gen Z folks. I think we did some good things and some not great things raising that generation. When people start really dogging on Gen Z, it makes me laugh because it’s usually the exact people who raised them. So, you know, self-indictment. But I think that we wanted to make sure that our kids didn’t have all of our experiences, the traumatic hard ones. And somewhere along the way, we confused trauma with adversity. And adversity’s really good for kids. And so I do think there’s a little bit of that.
What I’ve noticed about this generation: They’re not doing anything without the “why.” Why are we doing it that way? Why is that gonna be helpful? And people my age are looking for a little “Yes, chef” action. No, these kids are not interested. They want to know the why. I like it because when you give them the why through your gritted teeth, they’re like: “So let me play back what you’re saying. You want me to get this data for you by 3 o’clock this afternoon because you’re going to use it in a meeting with these people? Is that right?” And you’re like, “Yes, damn it.” And they’re like: “I think you’re asking for the wrong data. You need a whole different set of data if that’s what you’re trying to do at 5 o’clock.” And that’s helpful! So with the right skills, good task conflict leads to innovation and ideation and smart things. The problem is that without the right skills, task conflict becomes emotional conflict. And then people don’t like each other, they blame each other. They’re having meetings outside the meetings — all the stuff that just tears teams and organizations apart. It’s a lack of skill to straddle tension and stay in it and be productive with it that’s the problem; not the generations.
This brings me to one of the central themes in your work about work, which is communication — how we talk to each other. As a fellow communicator, I think about this a lot, because ultimately communication is about building trust, bringing people along. Why do you think we suck at it? [Laughs.] From the New York Times journalist! You know why we suck at it? Good communication is a skill that’s based in clarity, discipline and accountability. Good communication is vulnerable. It’s hard. You have to have a tolerance for discomfort if you want to communicate well and honestly. And that’s at every level in an organization, in a family. It doesn’t matter. A brave life is basically 15 fricking hard conversations a day. Then we talk about clarity: clarity of what we want to say, economy of words, using the right words to describe what we want to do, what we mean and what we need. Discipline: checking an email three times, picking up a phone instead of sending a text because tone is lost on text and it doesn’t work. Accountability: You say, “Wow, Brené, that was a really [expletive] thing to say.” And I say: “Yeah, that was my intention. I’m pissed.” Or: “God, that was not my intention. I apologize. I could see how it landed that way.” That’s accountability. And then I think behaviorally, no one’s taught how to do that. We don’t teach people how to communicate well.
I wanted to ask you a little about the changes that you’ve seen in the industry within which you work. You came up in 2010, and you have ridden this enormous boom in people looking for guidance in the way that they should live their lives and interact with other people. I don’t know how you feel about the label of “self-help” being applied to your work, but you are definitely one of the earliest practitioners of a very online strain of personal-improvement content that’s still very, very popular, though most people practicing it don’t have your credentials. How do you look at the evolution of that world in the last 15 years? I almost escaped this whole thing without having to go there. You get the A-plus in communication, Lulu. OK: I think there are a lot of well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-trained people in that space, and I think they make up about 30 percent of that space. I think there are 30 percent of the people who want to be in that space or are trying to be in that self-improvement, wellness space who are underqualified. Thoughtful, sometimes helpful, often benign. And I think there are 40 percent sheer grifters. Everything they say is predatory advice-giving. Depending on who you ask, people could put me in different categories depending on what they think about what I’m saying. I always tried to be very, very careful when I was in that space. There was a moment when I made a very specific, tactical “get the hell out of Dodge” decision to not be anywhere near that space.
When was that? When my sisters and I were caregiving for my mom with dementia. I found myself bombarded by posts that would say things like: “Caregiving for a parent with dementia? Starting to wonder about your own memory? A tablespoon of castor oil will change your life!” “Find yourself devastated by your own parents’ cognitive decline? Our four brain teasers will ensure this never happens to you.” And my first reaction to that was, “[expletive] you.” No, no, no — that was my second reaction. My first reaction was: “I’ll take it, I’ll buy it. What are you selling? Let me do it.” That was my first reaction. And I realized that I would see clips of myself come up on Instagram where the clip had been cut such that it was kind of provocative and advice-giving and conveyed a certainty, when the first half of my answer was like, “Look, I’m not sure,” or “I don’t study that area,” or “We can’t draw causal lines here.” But then the clip would be this. And I was like, I cannot be a part of this. I absolutely do not want to participate in overwhelming people who I don’t know with what they believe is advice that they should take.
So explain to me, practically speaking, what that shift means. What do you do differently that you might have not done before? I’m interested in different discussions. I’m interested in talking about leadership. I’m interested in talking about how organizations function. I’m interested in talking about more macro topics. I think I’m just figuring it out. I was walking with Adam Grant somewhere — he’s a good friend — and we were talking about our careers. We do the same kind of work in companies. And he said, “I don’t understand why you’re careful about walking down the street.” And I said, “I think my experience is different from yours.” We walked like four blocks through this conference area, and in that time, six people came up to me. Three of them were crying. And he’s like, “This is not my experience in my life.” He said, “When you get attacked for something you say, it doesn’t look and feel like the attacks [I get].” And he’s like, “We’ve got a big fat gender issue here.” He goes to the U.K., and it’s like: “Thought leader, researcher Adam Grant arrives to talk to people at Canary Wharf.” I think the headline when I got to the U.K. said: “The queen of self-help arrives in London.” I don’t see myself the way the world sees me.
I think it was during the pandemic, and I write about this in the book: Texas Monthly did a cover story on me, and there were a couple of things about it that were, for me, really hard. And I love Texas Monthly. But it said, “How Brené Brown became America’s therapist.” What? I’ve always been clear: I’m not a mental-health practitioner. I respect that work. I have a therapist. I’m not a therapist. And I don’t want to be your therapist, or anybody’s therapist. And so I’ve just drawn a very hard line around where I think I can make a contribution and where I can’t. That’s it.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
Source photograph for photo illustration above: Wynn Myers
Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a series focused on interviewing the world’s most fascinating people.
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