What does *good* leadership vulnerability actually look like?
I’ve learned a lot about Emotional Intelligence in Leadership since becoming a leadership coach. With each new thing I learn, I find myself wishing I'd known that back when I was a leader myself. One example of this is that I wish I'd known what good leadership vulnerability actually looks like.
Brené Brown is the undisputed Queen of Vulnerability. When she gave her famous TED Talk in 2011 she singlehandedly turned Vulnerability from a “don’t” into a “do.” But this big idea of hers is often misunderstood. People seem to think it means they should bare all at all times.
She tried to correct that misunderstanding in her book Dare to Lead, from 2018. There’s a section where Brown talks about “Six Misguided Myths” that persist about Vulnerability. Number 6 on this list is: Vulnerability is disclosure. She goes on to say:
If that's what we don't want, what do we want? Back when I was leading teams, I really could have used a framework for leadership vulnerability to keep in mind. So, based on what I know now, I developed one to share with you here. It’s a two by two:
The y axis is simply whether what you’re sharing is genuine or fake. The x axis is about where the act of vulnerability puts the focus:
• On you, yourself?
• Or on what you’re trying to do together as a team?
Let’s start with the lower left of the chart. If what you’re sharing isn’t true, and you’re sharing it to benefit you and not the team, then you’re doing exploitative vulnerability.
This is the territory of sociopaths. That may sound glib, but there's a serious point here: It turns out emotional intelligence is a set of skills that those with bad intentions can use just as well as those with good ones. There’s a great article by Adam Grant in The Atlantic about this called “The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence”.
But back to our grid. In the lower right, there’s performative vulnerability.
This is where you pretend to be vulnerable in some way. To be clear, in this case your intentions may well be good.
I’ll give you an example. Once a Leader I was working with (not a coaching client, fwiw) was getting ready for a team offsite and was telling me what he was planning to say in his introduction. He said “First I’ll say this, then I’ll say that and then I’ll say something vulnerable…” I stopped him and asked what he meant. He told me he wanted to make his team feel comfortable opening up. He thought a good way to do this was pretending to be insecure about something.
I applaud his intentions: He was trying to help the team, after all. But I can’t recommend faking insecurity. All the good you might do would be entirely undone if people catch a whiff of insincerity. They could easily become more guarded rather than more open.
Back to our grid. In the upper left hand corner is self focused vulnerability.
This is the quadrant that well meaning leaders are most likely to stray into, accidentally.
I'll illustrate what this might look like with a story. I know a design leader named "Anisha" (names and other details have been changed to protect the innnocent). Anisha is one of six Heads of Design at a large bank. Every Monday at 9 a.m. their boss “Micky” gets them together for a leadership team meeting.
One Monday, the group gathers to start the meeting, but Micky isn’t there yet. Anisha and the others chat about their weekends. When Micky shows up almost ten minutes later, he looks embarrassed, and apologises for being late. And then they get on with the meeting.
The following Monday Micky is missing at the start of the meeting, again. After a few minutes of chat, the Heads of Design decide to get going solving a problem with their performance framework. They dive in, talk it through, and are getting close to a consensus, when Micky arrives.
His shoulders are slumped, his face is dripping with guilt, and he says “I’ve let you all down.” Someone says “Don’t worry..” and tells Micky about the work they’ve been doing, and how they’re close to solving it.
But Micky won’t hear it. “No, this is the second time I’ve done this in two weeks. I’m a terrible role model.” Everyone jumps in to console Micky, reassuring him that he's a great boss. Meanwhile Anisha is feeling frustrated. They were close to solving a problem that had vexed them for weeks! And now everyone is distracted. She was thinking “Can we just get back to work, please?”
A much more famous example of "self focused vulnerability" is Braden Wallake, the CEO of HyperSocial, who shared a pic of himself crying, here on LinkedIn, when he laid off/made redundant two members of staff. Remember this?
I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that his tears were real - his team has vouched for the fact that he’s a very emotional guy, which is why I’ve put him in the upper half. But the focus on him and what he was feeling was front and center. Whatever his employees were feeling took a back seat. Even with the best possible interpretation, his behaviour was a major distraction away from his team.
Moving on to the upper right of the grid, we have team focused vulnerability.
This is where you as a leader allow yourself to be vulnerable, but in service to the team. You'll have guessed by now that this is where you want to be. But what does it look and feel like? What kind of behaviours exist here?
Here are some great examples of Team Focussed Vulnerability:
• Giving your team the benefit of your candor, rather than telling them what you think they want to hear. Giving your team an honest assessment of where things stand, helps your team. Even if this means admitting that you don’t know certain things or can’t talk about others.
• Sharing your development path with your team: being open about the results from your 360 degree feedback, for example, and telling them what actions you’re going to take to do better.
• Those actions may include Trying new things. Doing this in front of your team helps them realise that we’re all still learning. So they can still be learning too.
• Asking for help - when you role model this, it helps create a culture of mutual support.
All of these examples are genuinely vulnerable, and all support the team’s work together. None of them involve oversharing, indiscriminate disclosure, or vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake.
So the next time you're wondering whether to share a vulnerability with your team, ask yourself two simple questions:
Is it genuine?
Does it help our teamwork?