Dare to Lead

Dare to Lead — Summary

Forty of them were tired, fifteen were lonely

Colonel DeDe Halfhill was in her first year of command, standing in the middle of a room in front of about forty airmen. Nothing unusual had happened on the base that day. Then one young airman asked the question everyone was already carrying: when is the pace going to slow down, because we are really tired.

Halfhill asked everyone who was tired to raise a hand. Almost every hand went up.

So far, an entirely ordinary scene. Then the colonel remembered an article she had read not long before. In companies where people report crushing exhaustion, exhaustion often isn't the real problem at all. Loneliness is. Loneliness disguises itself as fatigue. So she asked one more question, the kind nobody asks on a military base. She asked who in the room was lonely.

At least fifteen of the forty raised their hands.

Halfhill is not a therapist. By her own admission, she had no idea what to do with that. She was standing in front of a group of airmen who had just admitted they were lonely, and she had no ready answer. She didn't fake one. She told them she didn't know the solution either, and then they spent an hour talking about what they were missing from each other. She has since told that story thirty or forty times to different units. The reaction is always the same: somewhere in the room, one person starts to nod slowly, and then another.

This scene is one of the most precise moments in Brené Brown's book. Not because a colonel talked about feelings. Because it exposed something most organizations systematically misdiagnose. Your team is often flattened by something other than what you assume. And you won't find out until you ask the uncomfortable question.