Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.
Why Perpetual recommends it
Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead extends her research on vulnerability and shame directly into leadership, making the case that courage and vulnerability are not opposites of strength but the precondition for it. Brown’s core argument, backed by years of qualitative and quantitative research, is that leaders who armour up against vulnerability — perfectionism, cynicism, knowing it all — end up leading teams that are guarded, disengaged and afraid to tell the truth.
The book is organised around four skill sets that Brown argues are teachable rather than innate: rumbling with vulnerability, living into your values, braving trust, and learning to rise after setbacks. She’s particularly sharp on the difference between armoured leadership, which looks strong but is brittle, and daring leadership, which looks softer but is far more resilient under real pressure.
We recommend this book alongside our psychological safety and culture work because Brown gives leaders concrete, teachable language for something that can otherwise feel too soft to operationalise. Naming the armour is often the first step to a team being willing to take it off.
Brown tells the story of a CEO who, instead of pretending to have all the answers during a major restructuring, told his leadership team directly that he was scared and didn’t have it fully figured out. Rather than losing credibility, he found his team leaned in harder, because his honesty gave them permission to stop performing a certainty they didn’t feel either.
- Vulnerability is the birthplace of courage, not the opposite of it
- Armoured leadership looks strong but is brittle under real pressure
- Trust is built (and broken) in small, specific behavioural moments, not grand gestures
- Daring leadership skills — rumbling, values, trust, rising — can be taught and practised
A useful starting point for teams is naming the ‘armour’ openly — perfectionism, cynicism, always needing to be right — and asking which ones show up most in your own leadership under pressure.
We give this book four and a half out of five stars.
