San Francisco — Brené Brown says tech leaders now have more cover than ever to act like bad bosses. In a blunt warning delivered this month on the sidelines of a leadership conference in San Francisco, she said strong-man politics are giving some executives permission to keep behaving badly.
“If you are an asshole leader, you have never had more cover than you have right now to continue that behavior, because of the strong-man authoritarianism we're seeing,” Brown said, adding that she had “the behavior of a lot of tech leaders right now” in mind. She said courageous leaders do not change with the political climate. “They don't look to see, ‘Oh, empathy's not in style today, I think I'll have less of that,’” she said.
The comments came during an interview at a hotel in San Francisco this month on the sidelines of Uplift, a leadership conference hosted by BetterUp. Brown’s warning lands with unusual force because she is hardly a fringe critic of corporate culture. Sixteen years ago, her TED talk on shame and vulnerability went viral; it now has nearly 100 million views. Since then, she has built a leadership curriculum that was acquired by BetterUp, become executive chair of the Center for Daring Leadership, and embedded herself inside organizations such as Eaton and Lumen Technologies.
Her argument is that the pressures on executives have changed, but the obligation has not. Brown said even successful businesses are standing atop crumbling mountains as AI, shifting markets and geopolitics force leaders to think about the next peak. “If you want to play to win, you're going to have to look out at the next peak and make a jump,” she said. “And not only do you have to go, you have to bring everyone with you.”
That message cuts against the mood in many boardrooms now. Companies have spent months laying off workers, tightening control over remaining teams, tracking keystrokes, pushing hard on AI and, in many cases, losing patience after years of trying to nudge employees toward different behavior. Brown said that reality does not excuse leaders from the standard she has spent years promoting. Asked whether presidents set a tone that makes scrutiny sharper, she said yes. “Does that bring a level of scrutiny to leaders when the president of the United States — or the president of whatever country they're operating from — predominantly has a different perspective? Yeah, it does. It really does. But zero excuses.”
For Brown, the point is not that corporate leaders have less room to maneuver. It is that they have less moral room to hide. The question now is whether the executives who borrowed her language of vulnerability when it was fashionable will keep using it when pressure rises, or whether they will follow the standard she is putting back on the table today.
