I tell this story a lot to people in my day-to-day life. If you’re one of those, please feel free to skip ahead until after the puppy picture. If you aren’t one of those people, or if you just want to hear it again: stick around. Not only will you get a story, there’s gonna be a mystery picture at the end! What could it be?!
When I was in college, one of the classes I had to take for my Business Administration minor was a Management class. The general premise was that we’d learn about … well, management I guess. I’m actually not sure what all I took from that class. If nothing else, it certainly pales in comparison to anything I’ve learned in the workplace.
What I do remember is that one of our first assignments was to demonstrate leadership, specifically when it comes to motivating others. The challenge was this: We were grouped up into teams of 5-6 people and given a small Dixie cup full of buttermilk. One person in each group was randomly designated the “leader” and their job was to get the rest of the group to agree to drink at least some of the buttermilk from the cup. (This was like a decade before COVID, sharing a drinking cup with half a dozen strangers was totally fine then.)
Basically any method was on the table except force and coercion. Actually, I’m not sure those were off the table so much as they were criminally insane behavior during a meaningless assignment, but I assumed they were off the table. Which was just as well for me. I’m not exactly the forceful, coercive type. If this were Ocean’s 11, I’d be the nervous IT guy who hacks the phone system. If this were The Godfather, I’d be the horse.
Anyway: I was randomly assigned to be the leader, and I immediately solved the challenge. How?
I simply said: If everyone agrees to taste at least a little bit of the buttermilk, I will pound the rest. Like a small beer or a large shot.
This plan, as best I could tell then and I still agree, was perfect. Think about it:
My professor liked it because it met the stated goals of the assignment
I liked it because it gave me an oversized share of the unpleasantness in exchange for everyone’s support and cooperation, not to mention it worked almost immediately
My teammates liked it because they only had to taste a tiny bit of the buttermilk and they got to watch me humiliatingly chug the rest
My stomach … well, my stomach didn’t like it, and neither did my senses. Especially since I washed the taste out of my mouth with a Dr. Pepper. Somehow, not even in the top five most insane things I consumed in college. But my stomach wasn’t on the team, baby!
I mention this because it’s always left me wondering: Am I a good leader?
I don’t remember how I came across this test, but researcher slash storyteller Brené Brown has something called the Daring Leadership Assessment on her website and I could never remember to take it. That’s what happens when I find something on my phone that I’m not ready to deal with yet: I just leave the tab open in Safari and come back to it later. I do this a LOT and I’ve been doing it for a loooong time. Unrelated, but does anyone know if we ever got that Kony guy? I’d love to close the tab.
As for the test, here’s what it promises:
Daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are teachable, observable, and measurable: Rumbling with Vulnerability, Living into our Values, Braving Trust, and Learning to Rise.
The Daring Leadership Assessment will help you gauge your strengths and your opportunities for growth as a daring leader. On average, the assessment takes less than ten minutes, and you will be able to print or email the results to yourself.
Sweet! Less than ten minutes? Will tell me how good a leader I am and where my opportunities lie? This is perfect.
Having taken the test already, I can also tell you that the four skills are graded out of 10 points and stratified into three bands. Here’s a helpful picture that explains it:
So basically: Definitely hoping for higher than fives on everything, and ideally higher than eights. Going into it, I would have guessed I’d score highest on the Rumbling with Vulnerability skill and lowest on the Braving Trust skill. I’d have also guessed that I’d hit at least fives on everything, but probably no eights. Was I right? See for yourselves!
There you have it! I was only sort of right, and above all I’m surprised. That’s a fun feeling for tests like this! Let’s dig deeper.
For starters, that aggregates to a 29.2 out of 40. That’s a 73%, which tells me I’m sort of a C- leader right now. Is that fair? No, not at all. But math is math, and that’s what the math says.
My highest score was the 8.2 on Learning to Rise. What does that mean?
The Learning to Rise process is about getting up from our falls, overcoming our mistakes, and facing setbacks in a way that brings more learning and strength. As tough as it is, the payoff is huge: When we have the courage to walk into our hard experiences of failure and disappointment, and own those stories, we get to write the ending. And when we don’t own our stories of failure, setbacks, and hurt—they own us.
Okay, that’s fair. It’s sort of a long-winded way of describing emotional resilience. If I’d taken this test in the past, I doubt my score would have been this strong. Just as importantly, within the context of the test, it’s above an eight — it’s a legit, full-on strength of mine. Emotional resilience is something that I’ve had to really work to cultivate, especially within recovery. Happy to hear that, at least by this measure, it’s been working!
My lowest score was the 6.4 on Living Into Your Values. What does that mean?
A value is a way of being or believing that we hold most important. Living into your values requires a clear understanding of your core values, having a strong sense of the behaviors that are in alignment with those values, recognizing when your behavior is out of alignment, and course-correcting as needed … Living into our values means that we do more than profess our values, we practice them.
This one is a little trickier for me to pin down. I suppose this is, essentially, my convictions and how willing I am to stand behind them. It raises two essential questions:
What even are my values?
How do I practice them in my day-to-day life?
I think there’s probably more to come on the first one, but I suppose the real takeaway here is that I’m not bad at this, per se, just that I’ve got some real room to improve. How? If I’m being honest, I’ve always lived my life sort of like a politician or a peacekeeper. Why bother expressing myself and my opinions until I know what others stand for? No need to make waves or create unnecessary conflict. I’m sort of like Aaron Burr’s character in Hamilton: I’ll wait here and see which way the wind will blow. It’s a cautious approach, maybe even a politically crafty one … but certainly not a daring one. It also leads to a lot of difficult introspection around things like “What even are my values?” It implies that I don’t really know myself. If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?
The last two skills, Braving Trust and Rumbling with Vulnerability, are pretty straightforward to me. Essentially, they are how open I am to trusting people and being vulnerable, respectively. I mean, I’m writing about my recovery and my lack of a sense of self on Substack. Anyone can come read about my struggles and the harrowing details of my worst moments. I’d say I feel alright in those areas.
So … I guess I’m not a great leader at the moment, but I’m not a terrible one — and I have the ability to become a great one in time. That’s exciting! Who’d have thought a Dixie cup full of buttermilk would one day set me on a long, strange path of self-discovery, partially culminating in describing the results of a Brené Brown test in an online essay? Me. I did. I saw all of that coming, down to the smallest detail. I’m a genius!