Vulnerability Can Hurt Leaders, Unless They Do This

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

1:58Have you ever heard the phrase, vulnerability is a currency? I heard it a bunch in the last year. I think it's kind of floating around. The point of it is that vulnerability gets you something, that when you show vulnerability to colleagues, to potential work partners, that they respond with greater understanding, with more vulnerability themselves, with bonds, with better communication, that showing vulnerability gets you places, that it is good leadership, that it is good partner building. That's the idea. And I'll be honest, I've found this to be mostly true for my own work. I show vulnerability in my writing where I talk about things that didn't work for me.

2:46And as a leader, I will talk about things that I don't know or that I'm concerned about. And I've generally been rewarded for doing so. But I was recently talking with a leadership expert who did a lot of work to understand exactly how vulnerability plays in our relationships and how it impacts people's perception of leadership. And what he found is an incredibly important nuance that we really need to think about and that largely gets overlooked, that in fact, gets kind of wiped away with the idea of vulnerability as a currency. And to understand it, let's just take it from the top. So I interviewed 100 CEOs.

3:34I surveyed 14 ,000 employees. And the big question that I had is, is vulnerability in your personal life the same as it is at work? And if you're a leader at a company, is vulnerability for you the same as it is for everybody else? This is Jacob. My name is Jacob Morgan. I am the author of five bestselling books, including the one that was created out of the research that he's talking about on today's episode. It is called Leading with Vulnerability. Jacob also hosts a podcast called Great Leadership. And just for fun, he's also a professionally trained futurist, which is a real thing. But anyway, let's get back to the surveying that he was doing, the research he was doing on vulnerability.

4:15And when he was asking those leaders, as you lead your company, is vulnerability for you the same as it is for everyone else. And the big theme walking away from this is you should not be vulnerable at work. Purely being vulnerable at work can actually cause you far more harm than it can good. And you might hear that and think, but wait a second, how is that possible? Because what about everyone talking about vulnerability as a currency? And what about any good experiences that you or I had showing vulnerability and being rewarded for it? Well, the answer lies in that very specific word that Jacob used a second ago.

4:54Did you catch it? He said, purely being vulnerable at work. Purely. The word there is purely because what Jacob has found is that vulnerability is useful, just not when it's by itself. There's something else, something very, very important that leaders need to do when they show vulnerability. And that is what we're going to talk about today on Problem Solvers. Coming up after the break. I lost my job in 2008, right before my wedding, actually. Getting let go would turn out to be my first step toward passive income, a fluid and dynamic way of earning income while changing lives at the same time.

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6:26All right, we're back talking with Jacob Morgan, author of the book, Leading with Vulnerability, about this important distinction that he has identified in how great leaders can be vulnerable. And to start, we have to just pick apart the difference between being vulnerable and leading with vulnerability, which Jacob says are two very different things. So the way that I like to think about the difference between vulnerability versus leading with vulnerability is that vulnerability is essentially about exposing the gaps that you might have. Gaps in knowledge, gaps in information, whether you're talking about making a mistake, whether you're talking about not knowing how to do something, whether you're talking about, you know, I'm going through a tough time, whatever it is, you're exposing a gap in some area of your life.

7:14And when we think about this in our personal lives, you can see why this makes a lot of sense, right? You're talking about, or you're talking with friends and family members. When you talk about and expose those gaps, it creates that bond, that connection, that relationship. But we have to remember that work is a different dynamic. And at work, you have a boss, you might have employees, you have a hierarchy, you're being paid, you have deadlines, you have customers, you have projects. It's a different dynamic. And so what happens is if you show up to work every single day and all you do is you talk about the gaps that you have, eventually people are going to turn to you and they're going to say, hey, wait a minute, maybe this isn't the right fit, right?

7:50Because you keep talking about the gaps that you have. Leading with vulnerability, on the other hand, is not just talking about the gaps that you have, but demonstrating what you're actually trying to do to close those gaps. So a very simple example might be, we're working on a team and you give me a project that you need me to do and I make a mistake. And being vulnerable would mean that I come to you and I say, hey, Jason, I'm so sorry. I know you gave me this project to do. I tried really hard to do it. I screwed it up and I feel terrible about it. Now that's vulnerable. But at the end of the day, you as my leader, you don't just want to know that I made a mistake.

8:24You want to know, okay, and what? So leading with vulnerability is, Jason, I'm so sorry I made this mistake. I screwed up. I know how important it was. Here's what I learned from the mistake that I made. Here are three things that I'm going to do going forward to make sure that that mistake does not happen again. So I'm not just exposing the gap that I have, but I'm demonstrating what I'm trying to do to close the gap. And too often inside of our organizations, especially, we focus on just exposing our gaps. and we don't talk about what we're trying to do to close the gap. Now, we surveyed 14 ,000 employees around the world.

8:56I did this in a partnership with DDI, which is a leadership research firm. And we asked employees, what's the number one thing that's keeping you from being vulnerable at work? And the number one response was, I don't want to be perceived as being weak or incompetent. Well, how do you avoid having that perception of being weak or incompetent? Well, you add the competence to the vulnerability. In other words, you don't just talk about the gap. You demonstrate what you're trying to do to close the gap. And if you do that, the perception that people will have of you will change. Because now all of a sudden it's not, oh, Jacob talked about another mistake again.

9:33Jacob screwed this up, blah, blah, blah. It's, oh, wow, Jacob's putting in initiative. Jacob's putting in the time. Jacob's trying to get better. Jacob's trying to learn and grow. The perception that people will have of me will change. And so that is why it's so important not just to focus on vulnerability, which creates connection, but to also focus on leadership, which is about competence. Demonstrate competence. There's no substitute for being good at your job or demonstrating that you're trying to get good at your job. This reminds me of a moment that I has, not exactly a leadership in a company moment, but I feel like it applies and I want to tell you the story to see what you make of it.

10:10So early in my speaking career, I back, I'm sure you remember back in the days where before you could get paid to do keynotes, you just did a bazillion panels just to get really comfortable with being on stage. So I was on some panel and I was talking at some point about being fired from an old job and about how hard that was and about what I learned as a result. And afterwards, this woman from the audience comes up to me and she says, I just wanted you to know I really appreciated how vulnerable you were when you told that story. And I don't hear stuff like that very often and it made me feel better about some tough things that I had gone through.

11:01And so I just, I really appreciated it. And what I told her, which just kind of popped out of my mouth, but I think was true, was I said to her, you know, it wasn't very brave of me to do that because I knew that you would like it. Because when I am up in front of you and I tell a story of something that happened to me that was challenging, I know that someone in the audience relates to it and they appreciate it. And therefore, me doing this wasn't really me putting myself out at all, but rather just me knowing that I'm bringing you to me and that if you do something like this too, someone else will come up to you and they will thank you.

11:42That's what I said. Now, as I'm listening to you, I'm realizing I should have said an additional thing to her, which I had done, but I hadn't articulated. I mean, it's the thing that I think that you're really driving people towards here, which is that I should have pointed out to her that I didn't just sit up there and talk about how this bad thing happened to me. I was controlling a narrative. And in this narrative, a bad thing happened to me and then I learned from it and I overcame, I went through a hero's journey. And that, I think, is the thing that I have always really intuited about how to share my vulnerability with people is that you do it in a way in which nobody's uncomfortable by your vulnerability because you are in control of the narrative.

12:27You're giving them something that they ultimately feel good about. It's uncomfortable when someone comes up to you and just starts telling you about all the crap that happened in their lives. But if they come and they tell you about some crappy thing that happened and then they put it into a context for you where now you can celebrate them for some other thing that they did as a result where they feel like where you feel like they're in control of their story and they're bringing you along a great journey that you want to be a part of. That's exciting. And that I feel like is the distinction that you're that you're pointing out here, which is it's the difference between just unloading on people and using a bad experience as a way to bring them in and create a human connection and then make sure that you tell the rest of that story.

13:09Am I right? It's similar. Yeah. So in your situation, the difference is there that this person wasn't working for you and you didn't have that work dynamic. That's right. So the way that I define what it means to be a vulnerable leader is a leader who intentionally opens themselves up to the potential of emotional harm. That's vulnerability. But while demonstrating that they're taking action when possible to create that positive outcome. So a very typical example that we see is, and actually, well, let me give you one story from an actual CEO, and then we can translate this into, you know, first time managers.

13:40Great. So one of the stories that I have in the book is from the former CEO of Continental Airlines. His name was Hollis Harris. And during the 80s and 90s, late 80s, early 90s, the airline was really struggling. And so he was asked to write a memo to be sent out to his entire workforce to basically talk about some of the stuff that's going on in the business. And so he sends out this memo. He talks about the challenges. He talks about the struggles. And he ends his memo by saying that the best thing that you as an employee could do is to pray for the future of the company. Now, in that memo, what Hollis Harris did was very vulnerable.

14:14Like he exposed the challenges, the struggles. He asked employees to pray for the future of the company. But the next day he was fired. And if you think about that story, if Hollis Harris was a junior employee in accounting and he showed up to work and he talked about these challenges and struggles and said, we should all pray for the future of the company, somebody would have turned to him and said, hey, it seems like you're having a tough day. Why don't we go out for lunch? Why don't you relax, take a couple hours, come back tomorrow, you'll be fine. But because he was the leader of this organization, and because he was purely vulnerable and didn't demonstrate anything beyond that, it created panic.

14:48It created turmoil and to the point that he was let go. Now, I interviewed a lot of CEOs. I mentioned over 100 of them. Another one is Fleetwood Grobbler. He's the CEO of a South African energy company called Sasol. When he took over as CEO, the company was$13 billion in debt. The banks were about to come in and repossess it. First time CEO, he too was asked to address his entire workforce in a town hall. And he started off his message in a very similar tone. And he said, I acknowledge the challenges, the struggles that the business is going through. He said, I'm not sure the exact path that we need to take going forward.

15:22Again, he was vulnerable. And then he added the leadership piece. But he said, I have a vision of where I think this business can go. I know we have an amazing group of employees. And I know that if we can rebuild trust in the eyes of our customers and in our employees, we can turn this business around and become successful. So go with me on this journey. Help me figure out the steps that we need to take to get to that vision and help me turn things around. And that's exactly what they did. So he was vulnerable, but then he also added the leadership piece. So the two pillars here are competence and connection.

15:54Connection is where vulnerability comes from. Competence is where leadership comes from. You can imagine this, for example, an employee inside of an organization, they just get promoted to being a leader for the first time. And think about when an employee in this position has to address, and I actually just got an email about this a couple of days ago from somebody who was asking me something similar. This person was just promoted into a leadership role for the first time, and she was asked to address the employees. And she was saying, what do I say? And a lot of times what people say is, hey, I'm Jacob.

16:25I'm a first-time leader here. I'm so excited to be a part of the team and the company. I know we're going to do amazing things together. And again, I know I've never done this before. My door's always open. We'll do amazing things together. Yeah. Now, on the surface, it doesn't sound like a terrible message, but it also doesn't do anything to demonstrate that you're trying to close that gap and that you're trying to be that better leader. So a far more effective message would be something along the lines of, hey, I'm Jacob. I know I'm a first-time leader here. I'm very excited to be part of the team.

16:53Here's what I'm going to do to make sure that I can be the best leader that you've ever had. I've actually asked one of the executives at this company to mentor and oversee some of my work over the next six months. I have an executive coach that I'm going to be checking in with once a week. And here are three leadership books that I'm reading. I encourage you to read along to help make sure that I'm constantly trying to learn and grow and be the leader that you need me to be. Now, again, I was vulnerable in there and acknowledged that this is my first time being a leader, but I'm also demonstrating to you that I'm trying to close the gap.

17:25Steve Bilt, he's the CEO of a company called Smile Brands, and he gave me a great analogy for this. He says, if you're in sixth grade, and if you keep showing up every day asking about fourth grade math, eventually your teacher and your peers are gonna look at you and they're gonna say, hey, this is sixth grade and you keep asking about fourth grade math. Maybe you shouldn't be here. But if instead you keep doing that and now you have a tutor, Now you're staying after school to get help from the teacher. Now you're solving 10 homework problems a night instead of five. You're demonstrating that you're closing the gap.

17:56And so the key thing here is, again, what a lot of people forget is you need to bring together competence and connection, leadership and vulnerability. Because if you only focus on the gaps that you have, that's what people are gonna see. And there's a concept in psychology called the Pratt-Fall effect, which you might be familiar with, which basically states that If you are, let's say you're not good at your job, or let's start off with you are good at your job. Let's say you are really good at your job. And now you're vulnerable. Yeah. Let's say you're the best podcast host in the whole world, best author, best speaker, best editor-in-chief at a magazine.

18:34If you're really good at your job, and then you demonstrate vulnerability, people are going to look at you, and you're going to get that added boost. Because people are going to say, oh, wow, Jason's really good at all these things. And now he's demonstrated that he's human. Now he's more likable. Now he seems more talented and more capable. But the flip side of that is, let's say you were not good at your job. You weren't a good author. You weren't a good podcast host. And now you were constantly being vulnerable. Then what would happen is people would look at you and they would say, yeah, I get why Jason is mediocre because he keeps talking about all the problems and challenges that he has.

19:10So the key is that if you're good at your job and you're vulnerable, you get the boost. if you're not good at your job and you're vulnerable, it reinforces your mediocrity. And it solidifies in other people's minds why you are the way that you are, why you're mediocre, why you're not able to grow and succeed. This is, again, why it's so crucial for you to demonstrate that you're trying to close that gap whenever you can. So that was revelatory, that answer, in many different ways. But also, I bet a little terrifying for some people because they might think to themselves, you know, I like to be open and vulnerable with people, but do they think I'm good at my job?

19:52Am I good at my job? How should people evaluate whether or not they have earned that ability to be vulnerable or whether they're using it properly? Because what you're laying out is a minefield in which vulnerability can be a really useful way to create human connection, so long as you, as you say, have a plan of action to marry to it. But you're also saying that people's existing perception of you is going to color how they perceive the vulnerability that you're showing. Yeah. It's complicated. How should people know what to do? Yeah, even if you're not, right, because the question becomes, well, I'm a new employee.

20:37I just started working here. Does this mean I'm not allowed to be vulnerable? Well, no, you could still be vulnerable, but again, demonstrate what you're trying to do to close the gap. So for example, when it comes to making a mistake, right, does this mean that if you're a new employee at a company, you can never say that you made a mistake? No, you could say, hey, I'm really sorry I made a mistake. But again, demonstrate what did I learn? What am I going to do going forward to make sure that mistake doesn't happen again? If you need help. So for example, I have a small team of people that I work with, And sometimes they'll come to me and they'll say, hey, Jacob, I need help.

21:08And I'll say, great, I'm happy to help you. But going forward, what are you going to do to make sure that you can help yourself? What are you going to do to make sure that you can answer a similar question in the future? And so again, what you want to do is to demonstrate that you are trying to be accountable, that you are trying to be the problem solver, that you are trying to close the gaps that you have. Even if you are making mistakes, even if you're falling flat on your face, it's okay. but don't just talk about, oh man, I made a mistake again. Oh man, I need help. Because people, and again, this isn't a work dynamic, right?

21:42You're being paid to do a job. You have a team, you have a hierarchy, boss, employees. In that kind of environment, people want to know that you are doing something to close that gap. So it doesn't mean that you have to already have that level of competence, but you want to demonstrate to people that you're trying to get there. You're trying to become that better version of yourself. And I think that's a very crucial distinction that we oftentimes forget. And to your point about vulnerability being a minefield, yeah, it's tricky. And there are a couple of frameworks that I have in the book. One of them is called the vulnerability wheel.

22:11And I won't go through the whole wheel, but at the very center of that wheel is intention. And that is understanding why is it that you are wanting to be vulnerable to begin with? Are you just trying to unload on somebody? Are you just trying to look for somebody to make you feel better? Like, what is the intention for it? And from the 100 CEOs I interviewed, it became a very consistent trend and pattern that when these executives are vulnerable, they do so with the intention. Regardless of what the intention is, they think through it. So some executives that I've interviewed, one of them told me a story about a time when they were doing icebreakers with a bunch of other executives on the team and everybody was going around and they were seeing these really boring icebreakers, like my favorite food and like just boring mundane corporate stuff that nobody was interested in.

22:56And then it came time for this CEO to speak. And he shared that his daughter was suffering from a very debilitating disease called B-PAN, that she was in her mid to late 20s. She's never spoken in her life. She's probably going to pass away at a young age and doesn't have many years left to live. And he shared this very deeply moving story about his daughter. And everybody was just like, whoa, we didn't expect the CEO to share that. And I asked him, I said, why would you share something like this with your employees? And he said, you know, I thought through it. And the reason why I wanted to share this with my employees is because I wanted them to see me as a human being and not just as an executive.

23:34I wanted to know that they can come to me with the challenges that they have. I wanted to know that we create a corporate culture here where employees are viewed as human beings and not just as workers. So he did, and he shared that story, but he did so with intention, not because he wanted people to say, oh, that's too bad. Oh, I feel sorry for you. Oh, is everything okay? He thought through why he wanted to do that. And I have several stories like that in the book. But again, the important thing is to understand the intention. Why is it that you're sharing what it is that you want to share? What is the outcome that you're hoping to get?

24:07And thinking through that makes a big difference. What have you found that leaders are doing when they make the decision to be vulnerable? You gave one example there, and that was a very intentional decision that that leader had made. And as you've been talking, I've been thinking about the origin of these conversations about vulnerability and this instinct that leaders and workers have now to be vulnerable. And my hypothesis, maybe you have something more well-informed. My hypothesis is that it comes in reaction to a previous belief that good leadership was to build trust. And to build trust meant to show that you have no doubts and that you are on it.