Brené Brown & DeDe Halfhill - Dare to Lead (With Vulnerability)

Aug 22, 2024

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Summary: Since Brené Brown wrote "Dare to Lead," the Air Force has revised its "leadership manual." I believe it now aligns more closely with the original AF35-15 introduced by DeDe Halfhill. Do you consider this update sufficient?

I mentioned on LinkedIn that I just started listening to the Book Dare to Lead. About 2 hours or 65 pages in (I discovered thanks to an excerpt provided by Air Combat Command) Brené Brown discusses the Air Force Colonel DeDe Halfhill's discovery of the original Air Force manual on Leadership, AFM 35-15 from 1948 and how it changed to remove the leadership attribute humaneness in then current AF Doctrine Document 1-1.

Table with 4 columns for the 4 changes made to the Air Force's leadership manual. The first column, AFM 35-15 lists an attribute of "humaneness" which is traced to the final column, AFDD 1-1, core value of "Excellence in all we do" — Excerpt from AFDD 1-1 showing the described changes

In my understanding, Halfhill and Brown use this as a means to show how leaders are/were becoming more uncomfortable with being vulnerable, expressing feelings, and in holding space for others, ie being human.

Page scan from AF 35-15's table of contents that shows the six attributes of a leader are: 1) integrity of character; 2) sense of responsibility; 3) Professional Ability; 4) Energy; 5) Emotional Stability, and; 6) Humaneness — Scan of 1948 AFM 35-15 Showing 6 Attributes of a Leader

As I was reading the document, I was struck by how much emotion I was feeling from the words on the page. So I started to pay more attention, The pages were full of words and phrases like: to belong, a sense of belonging, feeling, fear, compassion, confidence, kindness, friendliness, and mercy. I was amazed.

Here's this military document that's talking about leadership with mercy, and kindness, and belonging, and love. Yes, the word love... A discussion of feeling--how men would feel--was referred to 147 times...Love--what it means as a leader to love your men--was brought up 13 times...

I went back to our current manual on leadership and searched for the same words. Unfortunately, such words weren't used. (Col Halfhill, in Brown's Dare to Lead)

Since that time, the AFDD has been updated to "Volume 2, Leadership" in roughly 2015 (not positive, as that's what's showing as the last update), and then to "Air Force Handbook 1, Airman," the latter being a 564-page document that I didn't read in my 3 years of service after it was published in 2021. In Volume 2, leadership in the Air Force was defined as being:

"comprised of two main components: institutional competencies and leadership actions. These are intrinsic to all Airmen, building on the foundation laid by the core values. Leaders apply these components at all three leadership levels: tactical expertise, operational competence, and strategic vision."

Institutional competencies are vaguely described as changing and becoming more complex as airmen progress through ranks as personal, people/team, and organizational; leadership actions are a bit better defined:

Air Force leaders act in a decisive manner to influence their subordinates through techniques that include communication, motivation, inclusive collaboration, and setting of standards. The result is a unit able to effectively perform a mission. Air Force leaders also improve their unit’s abilities through development via education, training, experience, and mentoring. The result is an enhanced ability to accomplish the unit’s assigned missions. Leaders influence and improve their units in order to accomplish their military mission.

The current manual for leadership, released in 2021 was quite a bit harder to find, I believe similar to how Col Halfhill describes her attempts to find a copy of the AFM35-15. This is largely because it no longer falls under our doctrine and I could find no reference to the document being superseded in current doctrine (Note, typically military policy and doctrine will provide information on predeceased and superseded documents within the new document). My Google searches for "Air Force Volume 2 superseded/successor/current" all came up empty, and the closest thing I could find within the AF's current doctrine was AFDP 1-1, Mission Command.

Infographic on mission command with concentric circles and stars. From the outside in: Mission Command Culture is driven by the "Five C's" (character, cohesion, competence, capacity, and capability); these build the capacity of airmen to operate according to MC (mission command) principles. MC principles make up the 5 points of a star (Use MTOs, Create shared understanding, exercise disciplined initiative, build mutual trust, and accept prudent risk). Thes guide application of the philosophy and conduct of USAF operations. At the center, "provide clear commander's intent" surrounds a circle containing "Centralized Command(CC)-Distributed Control(DC)-Decentralized Execution(DE)." These are said to allow continued operations in uncertain, complex, and rapidly changing environments — Infographic found in AFDP 1-1

While clearly not written under the same intent as the previous leadership manuals, I believe this infographic reflects a return to themes more in line with the original AFM from 1948.

Finally, I found a link to AF Doctrines FAQs, and thinking about how popular this book was, I thought there might be some reference to the aforementioned documents.

FAQ question "What happened to Volumes 1 and 2?" Longer answer, but key point is that most of the leadership information from Vol 2 was put into AFH 1, the Airman's Handbook — Screenshot from the FAQ page

Screenshot of AFH1's table of contents with "Section 13D-Leadership" highlighted — Finally!

While it may be buried within 564 pages, the 7 page section on leadership delivers on a return to the roots of AF leadership found in the 1948 manual. In fact, compare the table below with the count of key words Halfhill previously identified with "0" found in the AFDD.

Belong/Belonging	6
Feeling	11
Fear	28
Compassion	7
Confidence	22
Kindness	0
Friendliness	1
Mercy	0

Further, the Handbook delineates qualities that facilitate follower ship and ensure credibility and mutual respect as self-awareness, cultural awareness, and empathy. and lists leadership attributes as:

Leading by example
Involvement
Learning from failure
Transparency
Flexibility
Resilience
Accountability
Positive attitude
Values
Competence
Character
Charisma
Compassion
Courage
Credibility

While not one-for-one, all of these appear to trace back to the original attributes, instead of summarizing them under our Core Values. It seems like maybe the Air Force leadership at the time of the update may have learned a thing or two from Brené and DeDe.

Learn more about

Brené Brown

DeDe Halfhill

DeDe's full interview can be found on CBS News (requires Paramount+)