“Vulnerability is merely a fact.” That's Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson, who is ranked the most influential management thinker in the world. And yet for many, vulnerability feels like a bad thing when it comes to leadership. We fear paying a price when we’re vulnerable at work, especially if we talk about our mental health. But modern leadership is hard and taxing and full of anxious, scary moments. So where do all the difficult feelings go? Many leaders save them for safe spaces, like therapy, coaching, or peer groups. That’s healthy for the leader, but can often leave a team feeling unsettled. Many leaders keep feelings inside, act them out in unhealthy ways, or try to tamp them down. We know how that usually turns out. What if leaders simply shared anxious feelings?

Leaders must let go of the fantasy that they need to be emotionally perfect -- and embrace vulnerability as a leadership superpower. Being vulnerable builds trust and closeness, and nothing establishes trust more effectively than the connection fostered through empathy and shared humanity. Leaders who model strength and vulnerability earn the confidence of their teams and create the environment of psychological safety that employees and organizations need to thrive.

But vulnerability is also a tricky thing and there’s such a thing as too much. There is a way for leaders to show vulnerability that increases credibility and strength.

Yesterday I joined Amy Edmondson, Megan Reitz and Peter Sims to talk about why speaking up about vulnerable personal issues and leadership. Check out this short video, with examples of how leaders can be effectively vulnerable.

Want to know more? Here’s a way to get vulnerable, effectively, from psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt:

Whenever you talk about mental health, personal boundaries come into play. Boundaries are the limits and rules we set for ourselves in relationships. When we cross our own or another's' personal boundaries, things can feel uncomfortable, emotionally draining, and just not right. Managers fear becoming their employees’ go to resource for mental health challenges because instinctively we know that our boundaries will be crossed, which will zap our own energy and mood. This might lead us to avoid having vulnerable conversations with members of our team.

There is a way to have these conversations and protect your boundaries, says Anhalt. Boundaries are crucial in creating a warm and safe environment for conversations at work: “because we are humans and we bring to work our whole emotional messy selves, we need to know how to create safe containers around that for people. This is what makes people excited to spend a third of their lives or more in these spaces.

When you’re deciding how much of yourself to share in a work setting, Anhalt suggests using “boundaried vulnerability”: sharing enough of yourself with others that you invite connection, without sharing so much that you wake up with an emotional hangover or require others to clean up your emotional mess. The idea, Anhalt says, is that “there's a spectrum from too tight to too leaky. Too tight is when we don't let ourselves show up as humans at work. When we're going through a really tough time and someone asks how we're doing and we say ‘I’m good, everything's fine. I don't know what you're talking about.’” This doesn't work well because people are perceptive and then they don't really feel like you're open to any kind of connection. Too leaky is when people “evacuate so much of their emotional stuff at work that it puts other people in a position of being their therapist or fixing something they don't have the responsibility to fix.”

When it comes to hitting the right balance between too tight and too leaky, there are a few litmus test questions that Anhalt suggests. If you tend to be too tight, ask yourself, could sharing it this way invite any kind of connection? And if the answer is no, then maybe they challenge yourself to lean into the vulnerability part a little bit.

Read more on HBR: https://hbr.org/2022/11/how-to-respond-when-an-employee-shares-a-mental-health-challenge

Morra

P.S.: Check out all 4 of the May Thinkers50 and Silicon Guild "Mind Matters" broadcasts here: https://thinkers50.com/blog/