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- [00:00]
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- [00:39]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
From the new York Times, this is the interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. Most academics do not become global celebrities, but in 2010, Brene Brown, a longtime professor of social work at the University of Houston, gave a TEDx talk about her her research on shame, empathy and courage called the Power of Vulnerability. In it, she made the case for why people should get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and it turned her life upside down. Fifteen years later, that TED talk is still one of the most viewed ever. And Brown has become a kind of guru for millions of people all over the world who devotedly follow her writings, podcasts and TV specials. That's not always a role she's comfortable in. As she and I discussed. In recent years, Brown has turned her focus to corporate settings. She runs a consulting practice where she works with CEOs, and she's written a new book about leadership called Strong Ground. It's about what makes a good leader, but it's also about this moment of intense technological and cultural upheaval we're in and how the ideas she spent her career preaching about might be able to help us weather it. Here's my conversation with Brene Brown. Brene, you are known for your work sort of mapping, explaining human emotions and especially around shame, vulnerability. You're also, at this moment, though, a leadership consultant who brings those ideas to various workplaces, from the NFL to the military to the Fortune 500. And one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about today is the enormous amount of change that we're seeing politically at work in every way imaginable. We are in just these extraordinary times that are very unsettling for me and I think pretty much everybody, ooh, I.
- [02:57]
Brene Brown
Don'T trust a settled person right now.
- [02:59]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Tell me what that means.
- [03:00]
Brene Brown
Look, if you're, I mean, like, if you're not unsettled, you're not paying attention. That would be the first correlation as a researcher. Like, we work toward feeling grounded, but we're in a tempest right now. Like, this is a maelstrom of craziness and unpredictability and volatility and instability, and it's disorienting. And so I don't think that feeling unsettled or feeling disoriented means that there's something wrong with you. I think it means in very technical skills that you probably have some level of critical thinking skills, anticipatory thinking skills, emotional awareness. I think it's a good sign to feel unsettled right now. The question is, how do you get tethered?
- [03:52]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
I mean, you've written a new book. It's called Strong Ground. And that's basically the idea behind it, which is we need to center ourselves at a moment of great change. Can you tell me why that became something that you wanted to engage with? Corporate leadership? Because it's not necessarily obvious how Women in Shame in your early work relates to leadership and Fortune 500 companies.
- [04:18]
Brene Brown
When you study the intersection of emotion, behavior, and thinking, you can apply it pretty much anywhere. And so after the TED talk on vulnerability. This is weird. After the TED talk on vulnerability went viral.
- [04:33]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
This is in 2010, right?
- [04:35]
Brene Brown
And the first phone calls I started to get after it went viral 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? And 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. You know, like, I was like, oh, I can do this. I know how to do this. So for me, this whole crazy path makes a ton of sense. In the end, at work, we're just people. And if I was going to find an intervention point in which I think I can make the biggest difference in every area that I care about, this is it.
- [05:44]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Explain that to me. Why leaders are important, why talking to leaders is an important thing to do in a company, and why you've focused your work on that.
- [05:55]
Brene Brown
We spend more than half of our life at work. I've never met a content person who is working under a shitty leader. And.
- [06:11]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
I always give this advice to people, actually, when they come to me and I say, if they ask me whether they should take this job or that job, and I always say, who's gonna be your boss? Who's the leader? Cause that's gonna determine if you get promoted, if you're happy more than even the job title. The salary, what you're doing, Are you working for someone that you like and respect and will help you? Because if you're not, it doesn't matter how good the job is on paper, it's not going to make you happy and it's not going to get you to where you want to go. Is that kind of what you mean?
- [06:47]
Brene Brown
Like, I could almost cry to hear you say that. Do you know how rare it is to hear from someone you look up to what you just said? No one says it. You and me, party of two, like, and that's exactly what I'm talking about. That is exactly what I'm talking about. And let me tell you, I define a leader as anyone who holds themselves responsible for finding the potential in people and processes and has the courage to develop that potential. I have been in C suites of Fortune 100 companies and not seen a leader among them. And I have been on factory floors and been surrounded by leaders. So to me, leadership is about skills building. It's about self awareness, understanding who you are, because who you are is how you lead and then it's skill set. You know, just because you have experience and subject matter expertise, just because more likely you knew the right person doesn't mean you have the skills to lead.
- [08:04]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
So I want to get to the heart of the matter, which is that this moment is different. You know, like a lot of people in every industry, I personally am feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change. Same one of the things that I noticed in your new book about halfway through, you quote Amy Webb, a CEO and NYU professor who studies the future basically, and she described this moment as a super cycle of unprecedented change. What does that look like inside companies? Right? Because this massive disruption, all this new technology that companies have available to them, I mean, I imagine it's first of all how they're supposed to use it, right? And then how to train people on it. What does that look like inside a workplace at this moment where it just feels like everything is up in the air?
- [08:56]
Brene Brown
It looks like a complete shit 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 AI that are not even aligned with business strategy.
- [09:21]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
So in this moment of sort of profound change, what is a good leader then?
- [09:25]
Brene Brown
So a good leader to me right now is a leader who understands urgency but is working from Productive urgency. Who is not like my grandma would say, you know, this terrible saying, but chicken with your head cut off urgency. And we're seeing a lot of that, but productive strategic urgency. You know, 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. And right now, this month we are starting to see some devastating numbers around return on investment in terms of what companies are investing in AI because they're, they're coming in operationally and making decisions and not strategically. 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, Harvard Business School professor, researcher, studies digital transformation. Love this work. She's just brilliant. She will tell you the hardest thing about digital transformation. Never the technology, always the people. Then you add to that. You're talking about this super cycle, absolute 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. So geopolitics, then you have what we talked about. First, technology super cycles. Next, you have radically shifting marketplaces because consumers are changing, we're changing, we don't. I'm talking to people who are economists that 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, there's markets instability, technology, geopolitical instability. And I'm not going to downplay the complexity of intergenerational workplaces.
- [11:46]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
I mean, some of these forces are largely out of the control of leaders of companies.
- [11:53]
Brene Brown
Yeah, I mean, I would say the majority of them are out of the control. But what is in your control? Have you ever watched like 5 or 6 year olds play soccer?
- [12:06]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Sadly, yes.
- [12:10]
Brene Brown
I know for sure that you have by your answer. You know, like, like, you know, the ball leaves the field and like my daughter's sitting crisscross applesauce making daisy chains, you know, like one of the things that's really interesting is when you watch little kids play soccer, a kick will come into a kid at like 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 about that high. 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.
- [13:01]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
So how does that connect with your older ideas around compassion, empathy, vulnerability? I mean, are those things still necessary in those moments? Because I get why it makes us better humans, but why does it make us better leaders?
- [13:15]
Brene Brown
Because when you raise your foot up shoulder height and kick a ball, you have no control where it goes. It's not strategic, it's reactionary. It's not a response. 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? And 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 this initiative, due to whatever a supply chain issue, a change in strategic priority, has shifted and 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 I want to 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.
- [14:33]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
I'm listening to you and I'm nodding and I'm going, yeah, that sounds really good. But I also see that that kind of leadership seems to have fallen out of the zeitgeist. The companies that are some of the most valuable in this era are tech companies who aren't exactly known for their people centered leadership anymore. And that sort of shift away from appearing empathetic to trying to understand, you know, the other side of people's experience that doesn't seem to be as popular anymore in the era of the Elon Musk style of leadership, where you can go in, you can fire a bunch of people, and you can still have a productive company, some would argue even more productive.
- [15:26]
Brene Brown
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. Number 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, whether that's retention, whether that's engagement. I have zero doubt that just because the world at large believes that you have to be a total dick to get performance out of a team, there is actually very little evidence of that over a long period of time. 0 One of the things I think is interesting is leading by fear as a catalyst can really result in very quick performance metrics. They're not sustainable for a really easy reason. I think a simple reason. Fear has a very short shelf life. And in order to maintain fear as a leadership tool or power over rather than power with and power to Mary Parker Follett's work social worker, early management scholar. You know, she talks about power, power over, power with power to power within. In order to lead from power over using fear, humiliation, you have to demonstrate a capacity for cruelty at very regular intervals because of the short shelf life that fear has in people. 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.
- [18:09]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Well, that's interesting because there is a responsiveness, I think, to culture and the zeitgeist. And a specific example, I think, of the way culture has changed is we've seen companies across the spectrum, for example, get rid of their DEI programs that were meant to be about inclusivity, belonging. They adopted them in response to another cultural moment right 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 these management and leadership humanity trainings are only performative, that they are there simply to respond to forces outside of their control. But they're not really about doing the work that you say is necessary.
- [19:02]
Brene Brown
Heck, yes. Yes, absolutely. Some are and some are not. If we want to talk about DEI programs specifically, it's an example, though I.
- [19:13]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Think one that people have noted.
- [19:15]
Brene Brown
It's an example, but it's an important example. Did some companies adopt DEI 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 and without thinking twice about it? I think that's for sure. Did I see DEI programs function in meaningful way? DEI programs are not. They were developed and when done well, they were just meritocracy programs. That's what a good DEI program is, just a meritocracy program. It's just a program to make sure that the invisible program of favoritism and bias was being checked. This is not administration that's a fan of meritocracy. So the two things I think we have to recognize about the zeitgeist is when you have an administration, let's say you're the CEO and you have an 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 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 DEI programs. I would be comfortable enough to say that any leader that props up or folds something that's good for their people and helps make their people feel more connected and seen and also drives performance, which is a leader's job, whether they're in an NGO or nonprofit or a for profit or government military, sport doesn't matter. Is a pretty terrible leader.
- [21:26]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
After the break, I asked Renee about the online self help ecosystem.
- [21:31]
Brene Brown
Shit, I almost escaped this whole thing without having to go here.
- [21:48]
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- [22:18]
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- [22:39]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
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- [23:21]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
So I'm listening to you talk and it is this very difficult moment. You keep on bringing something up though, that I do think is really interesting, which are the generational differences that we're seeing in the workplace and how different generations view work and what work is supposed to do and what work isn't supposed to do. Can you just expand on that a little? What you've seen and what your thinking around that is.
- [23:48]
Brene Brown
I do think there is complexity, organizational complexity in intergenerational work. I think we're different. I think that we know we were raised differently, we have different ideas about what success is and I think there's something to learn from each generation. I think each generation has real strengths in a workplace and possibly some deficits. I do get nervous talking about swathes 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's raised two Gen Z folks. I think we did some good things. I think we did some not great things raising that gen. I mean like it's like when people like start, you know, really dogging on Gen Z, it makes me laugh because it's usually the exact people who raise them. So I think I always like it's a good point, 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 confuse trauma with adversity and adversity is really good for kids and trauma is not good for us. And so I do think there's a little bit of that. So let's be clear about that. I think what I've noticed about this generation is that they're not doing anything without the why. This is like the generation, my generation that was grown up, we grew up with like. Cause I said so. Getting really frustrated with a generation that said I don't. Why are we doing it that way? What is that? Why is that going to be helpful? And you know, people my age are looking for a little yes Chef action. Like got it. On it. 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 let me. So let me play back what you're saying. Lulu, you want me to get this data for you by 3 o' clock this afternoon? Cause you're gonna use it in a meeting with these people, Is that right? And you're like yes, dammit. And they're like I think you're asking for the wrong data, dude. You need bruh. You need a whole different set of data if that's what you're trying to do at Five o'.
- [26:12]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Clock.
- [26:12]
Brene Brown
And then that's helpful, you know. And so with the right skills, what would be really good? Task conflict. That leads to innovation and ideation and smart things. With the right skills, it's amazing. The problem is, 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. You know, all the stuff that just tears teams and organizations apart. It's the lack of skill to straddle tension and stay in it and be productive with it. That's the problem, not the generations.
- [26:55]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Well, I mean, this brings me to, I think, one of the central themes in your work, about work, which is communication, right? How we talk to each other, what are we doing when we're having these discussions? And 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?
- [27:20]
Brene Brown
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.
- [27:36]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
I'm thinking about those three words. Clarity, discipline, and accountability.
- [27:40]
Brene Brown
Yes, walk me through them. Okay, so first of all, 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. So it's vulnerable and scary. And so that's part of it. 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 and what we want, what we mean, 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, Brene, that was a really shitty thing to say. And I said, 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, you know, and then I think behaviorally, you know, the behavior. No one's taught how to do that. We don't teach people how to communicate well. I mean, we operate from an axiom, clear as kind, unclear, unkind. So I think communication has never been more important than it is right now.
- [29:19]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
We have only a little bit of time left. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about the changes that you've seen in the industry within which you work. Because as I was thinking about your career, you know, you came up in 2010 and you have sort of ridden this enormous boom in people looking for guidance and help in the way that they should live their lives and interact with other people. And I don't know how you feel about the label of self help being applied to your work, but you are definitely sort of 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?
- [30:10]
Brene Brown
I almost escaped this whole thing without having to go here.
- [30:12]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Almost.
- [30:14]
Brene Brown
You really are. You get the A in communication, Lulu. Okay. I think that there are a lot of well meaning, well intentioned, well trained people in that space and I think they make up about 30% of that space. I think there are 30% of the people who want to be in that space are trying to be in that kind of self improvement wellness space who are under qualified, thoughtful, sometimes helpful, often benign. And I think there are 40% sheer grifters. And everything they say is, it's predatory advice giving. I think depending on who you'd ask, who you ask, people could put me in different categories there, depending on what they think about what I'm saying. I've always been tried to be very, very careful. When I was in that space, there was a moment when I made a very, very specific, tactical get the hell out of dodge decision to not be anywhere near that space.
- [31:57]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
When was that?
- [31:58]
Brene Brown
And that was when my sisters and I were caregiving for my mom with dementia. And when 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 fuck you. No, no, no. That was my second reaction. My first reaction is 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 that the first half of my answer was like, look, I'm not sure or I don' that area or, you know, we can't draw causal lines here. But then the clip would be this. And I was like, I can't be a part of this. Like, I cannot be a part of this. And 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. I just don't think it's. I don't think it's. That's not who I am.
- [33:50]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
So explain to me, practically speaking, what that shift then means. I mean, what do you do differently that you might have not done before as you were coming into this?
- [34:02]
Brene Brown
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 with Adam Grant somewhere, and he's a good friend, and we were talking about our careers, and they're very much the same. Would you think a little bit, or would you say, like, we do the same kind of work in companies?
- [34:34]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
Yeah.
- [34:35]
Brene Brown
And he said, I don't understand, like, why you're careful about walking down the street or going into this thing. And I said, I think my experience is different than yours. And 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. And he said, and when you get attacked for something, you say, it doesn't look and feel like the attacks. And I said, what are you saying? And he's like, we got a big fat gender issue here. And I said, you think so? And he goes, yeah. He's like, this is. And so I think that's still really at play. He goes to the UK and it's like, thought leader, you know? Researcher Adam Grant arrives to talk to people at Canary Wharf. I think the headline when I got to the UK said, the Queen of self help arrives in London. It's just I don't see myself the way the world sees me. You know, I think it was during the pandemic. Texas Monthly. I write about this in the book Texas Monthly, you know, I mean, the New York Times is the same way they can interview. You have no control over what the headline is or anything else like that. And you're always like, oh, shit, what's gonna happen? And of course, the COVID it was a cover story on me. And there was a couple things about it that were, like, just for me, really hard. And I love Texas Monthly, but it said how Brene Brown became America's therapist. And I'm like, what? I don't think I've ever been. I've been always clear I'm not a mental health practitioner. I respect that work, admire 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 think I've just drawn a very hard line around where I think I can make a contribution and where I can't. And yeah, that's it.
- [36:49]
Lulu Garcia Navarro
That's Brene Brown. Strongground will be out September 23rd. To watch this interview and many others, you can subscribe subscribe to our YouTube channel@YouTube.comblethe interview podcast this conversation was produced by Wyatt Orem. It was edited by Alison Benedict, mixing by Sonia Herrero, original music by Rowan Nimisto, Dan Powell and Marion Lozano. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew and Seth Kelly is our senior producer. Annabelle Bacon is our senior editor. Video of this interview was produced by Paola Neudorf and Felice Leon. Cinematography by Zebadiah Smith. It was edited by Amy Marino. Brooke Minters is the executive producer of Podcast Video. Special thanks to Feim Shapiro, Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Matty Masiello, Jake Silberstein, Paula Schumann and Sam Dolnick. Next week, David talks with Cameron Crowe ahead of his new memoir, which is about his early days as a teenage music journal analyst. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro and this is the interview from the New York Times.
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