Transforming vulnerability from weakness to superpower

Welcome to (un)leaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. In this episode, host Barbara Iverson talks about leaders being vulnerable with their teams, companies, and even peers. She tells stories of her experiences with leaders who refused to be vulnerable and how that hindered their relationships with their team members. She also links vulnerability to delegation, one of the trickiest parts of managing a team. 

Barbara tells stories from her life and looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. Every week she offers a challenge or task for listeners, to prompt reflection or growth. This podcast is the perfect listen for someone who feels like they don't quite fit to the typical leadership profile. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

That their life isn't all bonbons, rainbows, and unicorns farting glitter. Hello, and welcome to Unleaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. My name is Barbara Iverson. I'm your host. Today we're talking about vulnerability, specifically vulnerability in leaders and what that does or doesn't do to their relationships with their team members. I'm just gonna start out by saying I think that this topic is a lot easier for women to handle than men. And I don't think it's necessarily men's fault. I think it's, let's all say it together, one, two, three, the patriarchy. And it really is, it's a trap of the patriarchy. But today I'm gonna talk a bit about some of the places I've seen this show up and some of the ways that I've seen vulnerability really lead to improvements in relationships. And then talk about also what this looks like on teams and in organizations. So this came to mind when I started watching episodes of the TV show NYPD Blue. And I say watch and not re-watch because I didn't watch it when it came out. I knew about it, of course. I knew it was a cop show. I hadn't watched, I mean, I'd watched like I'm really gonna date myself now, like Cagney and Lacey, and I remember Hill Street Blues, but these were like kind of slow-moving and certainly not gritty shows. I guess Hill Street Blues kind of. But NYPD Blue really became known very quickly for its super gritty style and for the relationships between the characters on the show. So I don't need to go into a whole thing about the show itself, but one of the most important characters, and certainly one of the characters who stays on the show the longest, is played by the actor Dennis Franz. And he plays Andy Sipowitz, who is a New York cop with a Chicago accent, which love that. And he he's kind of the main heartbeat. Well, maybe not the heartbeat, but he's kind of the main detective in this squad in Manhattan in New York City. And over the years, he's got a bunch of different partners, anywhere from uh a character played by Jimmy Smith to a character played by Ricky Schroeder. So it's fun to watch. Plus, there are so many actors that went on to be in different shows. An episode I saw recently had Taylor Dosey from Gilmore Girls. So it's really fun to watch for that alone. But it's also, you know, in the 90s, that was a whole, that was a really different world. Like how the women are spoken to and how gays are spoken to and talked about, and transgender people, like it is, it is so different, really. If you want to know how far we've come as a culture, certainly as an American culture, watch NYPD Blue the first seasons, and you'll realize, wow, okay. It's it's not like it was. I guess the first season was like 94, 95, maybe 93. I don't even know. Whatever it was, it was maybe 93. So it's it's pretty old. It's over 30 years old. Okay, so watching this show though, the thing that really struck me, and I'd been wanting to do an episode about vulnerability, but this these episodes really struck me because one of the things that these male detectives, when they're talking about not really so much in the workplace, not on their jobs, because you would expect an element of not being vulnerable then, but really specifically Dennis Franz, he does not want to be vulnerable in any area of his life. He certainly not in his private life, I mean, even less than his work life as a cop, but he sees men as needing to show not a not any vulnerability anywhere ever. That vulnerability is seen as weakness. And it made me really think about this. And I I re- I definitely don't agree. I don't think that vulnerability is actually weakness. I think that's patriarchal systems that put that correlation, let's call it, into our heads that says vulnerability is something that shows that you're weak as a person, as a leader, and you don't want to ever seem weak. Whereas to me, vulnerability is more something that we choose to show. I don't think many people choose to show their weaknesses. Weaknesses are often things that people see in us that we may or may not see in ourselves. And it's one reason that we give feedback to show to point out to people a place of weakness or something that happened outside of their intentions. Vulnerability is different from weakness in that vulnerability is something you choose to offer to someone as a way of connecting with them. So there was a time in my life, specifically when I was living in Prague a number of years ago, where I was part of a bunch of different women's groups. Whether it was groups where we would get together for dinner or maybe a book club or some sort of support group. Living in Prague as an immigrant in the 90s and 2000s was not easy. And so a lot of women who were also immigrants, like we tended to get together a lot. And it wasn't just immigrants, it was also Czechs. And it tended to be specifically, I remember several Czech friends who had lived overseas in England or in the States or somewhere else, and they'd come back and they felt themselves a little bit foreign. So they were part of those groups as well. But I remember times when those groups were kind of new and everybody was just kind of getting to know each other, and it was always just women. But those friendships maybe hadn't really developed, or the trust hadn't really developed. And it happened several times that I something went really wrong in my world. And I came into the group, and instead of pretending that everything was fine, I was I got super honest and said, I've had a really, really rough time recently. Here's why. Let me tell you about it. And whether it was relationships or work or something else, family, specifically my family in the States, whatever it was, there was something actually very magical about doing that because one person, and it just happened to be me in several situations. It could have been anybody, but I remember it really well because it was me. But having shared something that was very vulnerable, it was very real, it was very authentic. I didn't see these things as showing weakness on my part. They, they really, many of them weren't exactly weaknesses on my part. It was simply something that was going on that was really hard. Whether it was maybe something I'd done wrong or not. But anyway, it was I felt like I wanted to share with these women what was really going on with me. And so I would. And the interesting thing is I never really felt like it was awkward. I never really felt like there was a question in people's minds going, oh my goodness, why is she sharing this? I never really felt like there was a question of, should you be telling us this? I don't think this is the right time or space. None of that was ever present. What I remember is women who reached out, took a step toward me after I shared that thing, and told me that they understood or shared something that was going on in their lives as well. And it didn't have to have anything to do with, you know, if mine was about a relationship, it didn't, theirs didn't have to be about a relationship. It was just something that was on their minds that there was, it was causing them stress or causing them worry or causing them pain or whatever it was. And these these groups of women grew very, very close over time. And if you look at, if you could look at like the trajectory of how those relationships developed, there was definitely a tipping point when like on that day when I shared something really vulnerable with the group. It opened the doors for others to do the same. And they did. And I'm not saying that our times together were like some sort of weird, weepy no, but we felt like we had space and the capacity to be really honest with each other and tell each other what was really going on. And that built more trust. And we opened up about things that I don't think we could have gotten to. We could have been friendly, we could have been harmonious, we could have been whatever. Again, it's similar to a team development stage that we covered in a previous episode, where me sharing something vulnerable was a very sort of gentle version of storming in the sense that it broke down some of those walls and gave people space to be really honest and share something of themselves that they might not already or otherwise have done. I also have an example of a time when that didn't happen. I worked for an organization that did leadership development with specifically teenagers and young adults around Europe. And we would have um training meetings about every quarter, and everybody who could, which was basically everybody who worked around Europe or different regions in Europe, would get together and there would be a lot of sort of impulses, some content. But a lot of that time, because the work we were doing was pretty intense. We were stepping into spaces not as parents, but as caring adults for teenagers who were going through stuff, generally speaking. So we were giving a lot of ourselves. That was always true. So these times that we would come together for trainings, as valuable as they were for the content, they were even more valuable for us to build those relationships with each other. We were in rooms that were safe, where people could share what was going on and be honest about what was going well and what was not going well, and where we could laugh together and do fun things together. And we just had a really good time. I looked forward to these training times every year. Those were really formative events for me. But I remember one, and we were at a place outside of Prague. I was already living in Berlin, and people came from all over Germany and Czech and different places in Europe. I don't remember, I don't remember all the places people were from. But it wasn't a huge group, and it wasn't a tiny group either. Instead of having a lot of content that time, our director, who lived in Germany, decided that what he wanted to spend the most time doing was really giving every single person space to catch the group up on what they were doing, what was going well, what they wanted to celebrate, and what was going not as well that they they really needed a place to share it, to sort of unburden themselves. So that was what we did over this, I get think it was a three-day period or something. And you know what? One after another, and this was men, women, different ages, people in their late 20s through 40s. It was somewhat diverse. But we were all working for the same organization. One after another, though, people got up and talked about what was going on with them. And to a person, they were having difficulties. And many of them described this as the most difficult times in their lives. Whether it was relationship problems or people who were trying to get pregnant and were not able to, people who were having a lot of difficulty with their work, people who were having difficulty within their teams, people having difficulties with their families back in the States or wherever they were. People were just having a really hard time. And there were a lot of tears shed. And there was a lot of kindness in the room and a lot of empathy. And our regional director stood up. Now, I was pretty close to him and his wife and knew his family quite well. And I knew that he was also going through a very difficult time. And this regional director, this man, had been doing this work in Europe for a long time. He was well liked, he was funny, and he was a real visionary. When I thought about him as a leader, the term that often came to my mind was visionary. He had a vision and he loved to talk about it. And he could talk, he could talk. He could talk a lot. So he could really talk you into being excited about the vision that he had about doing this leadership development with these teenagers. He really cared about the work, he cared about the young people, and I think he cared about his team, meaning us as well. But I don't think he really knew how to lead people. He knew how to take a vision and talk about it and get people on board. But he was not great at the people management. He did things like not showing up to meetings, whether they were usually the online meetings, but there were plenty of times that I traveled to his home to spend time with him to really talk about some of the things that were going on that I needed his advice and his guidance and his support on. And over I'd be there for a weekend and I would get maybe 30 minutes of his time right before I left. The rest of the time I'd be spending with other coworkers from that area or his family, because, like I said, I was I was close to them too. So he wasn't a super manager, and he wasn't a great leader of people. He was a visionary, truly, kind of start to finish. That was his thing. But he because he was able to talk, he really was able to convince a lot of people that he was the right person for the position that he was in. And so he was. But in this training time where everyone was having a really, really rough time, because I knew him and he was also having a really hard time. There were some things happening in his life that had made things difficult for his kids, difficult for his wife, difficult for their family dynamic. It just wasn't easy. And I wish I could tell you that as all of his subordinates, all the people working for him, all the people on his team stood up and one after another talked about what a difficult time they were having. I wish I could tell you that he stood up and said the same. But he didn't. Instead, he stood up and said, Yeah, I I have to say things are going pretty well right now. And I think my family and I are in a good place and the work is good. I mean, he spoke in vague generalities, and I wasn't the only person in the room who knew him well enough to know that this was not actually the case. But it's also pretty hard, especially with the boss, to be like, hey, um, I don't think that's true. I think maybe, maybe sit down for five minutes and then I want you to stand up and try again. Because we know that this isn't the case. And I'll tell you what, I have become so much more of a troublemaker now than I was then. And I really wish that my past self had been a bit braver to say exactly what I just said. Hey, why don't you sit down for a second and um we're gonna take a little break. Let's go all get some coffee, get a glass of water, go pee, come back. I want you to try this again because you and I know this is not your reality, so let's let's try this again. I really wish I had said that. And not for my own benefit, but for his. Because his unwillingness to be vulnerable, it it it it it sort of put the brakes on the whole experience for those few days. Because suddenly everybody else in the room felt like they had been extraordinarily vulnerable, and our leader had specifically chosen not to be. And again, not everybody knew what was going on with him, but enough of us did that we knew that he had not been not only had he not been vulnerable with us, he hadn't really been honest with us. We knew that there were things going on, and several of us even talked about it to say, I wish that he had chosen vulnerability with us. Because if he had chosen to be vulnerable, he would have allowed us to support and encourage and empathize with him the way we had with each other. And he would have been part of the community. Instead, his unwillingness to share closed him off and kept him out of this community. Did we look at him like he was a better leader because he wasn't share is showing any weakness? Um, no. Nobody was looking at him going, wow, I'm I think it's so great that he didn't show us any weakness at all or share that he's going through some of the same things that we are and can really relate. Like, I'm just so glad I have a leader who doesn't have any weakness. What? What? No, that is not what happened. We all felt let down. We all felt a sense of frustration because even those who didn't really know, they could feel that there was something off. And to be honest, I remember calling a friend, and there were other things that happened during those few days that I found really frustrating, but this was sort of the foundation of all of it. And I remember calling a friend who was not part of this training thing, and I remember saying to her, I I just want to quit. I don't I don't want to work for this man anymore. I can't. This is insane. How could he be so detached and unwilling to be part of what's happening here and the community that exists here? Because that's what his lack of vulnerability did. It pulled him out of it. So I've been thinking about this a lot. I mean. That experience happened more than 10 years ago. But as you can hear, I still remember it and I still feel that deep sense of frustration. And I want to say for anyone leading a team or an organization, showing vulnerability is not the same as showing weakness. Showing vulnerability, showing people that you feel something, that you don't have all the answers, that you need the expertise and advice of other people, showing, showing a community that you can't do things alone actually opens the door for people to take a step toward you and offer you encouragement, offer you advice, offer you their expertise. If you're closed off and everybody thinks you can do it all on your own, they don't have an opportunity to come alongside you or to come close to you to offer what it is that they can. And people want to offer their expertise. They want to offer their support and encouragement. And when we as leaders refuse to show or talk about the ways that we need other people, we're actually doing ourselves a huge disservice and we're creating a community that lacks that element of trust, that lacks that element of authenticity and care and empathy. And if you've worked for a manager or someone leading a team who has shown you vulnerability, you know that it has endeared them to you and made you, I'm gonna use this as Americans do, but love them more than you otherwise would have. A lot of Europeans don't talk about loving their bosses, which is fine. But I mean love in that sense of you feel some sort of connection to them, you feel loyal to them, you feel respected by them, and you ref feel respect for them. And you feel like you're in it together. You really feel like a team. And I'll go back again to those team development stages. If you haven't listened to that episode, go back and do it. It'll help you know what I'm talking about. But essentially, it's that being vulnerable that will also get you into storming so that you can move forward as a team. Because the big thing is getting through the difficult conversations or the difficult information, you know, you could you could be leading, sorry, I didn't finish that sentence, but you could you can get through that to the other side to the high performance, high trust, high care, high, I am using my skills team functions. If as a leader, you are being honest about the numbers aren't where we want them to be. Our product launch didn't go as well as we had hoped. We have lost an audience, or we, you know, whatever it is, we've lost a market. I don't know. You it could be any number of things, but going toward vulnerability to tell people, to be transparent, to say what's really going on allows people to care, to trust you, and to feel that their expertise might be helpful in getting to the other side of whatever the problem is, which is really the idea, is it not? As a company, you want people pulling together to use their brains. And and maybe you think, well, we're just gonna have marketing focus on this. Why? Couldn't couldn't other ideas come from any somewhere else? But but when you show vulnerability, when you are admitting or telling what's really going on, being transparent, being authentic, allowing other people to step in, you really allow people to be their best and to come around you and say, okay, this hasn't been going well. Fine, what are we gonna do about it? And what are we gonna do about it as a team? And I think this is a really underutilized, and I don't even want to call it a technique, but but it but think of it as a technique if you need to. Think of vulnerability as a technique, that it's an underutilized technique to build teams, to build culture, to build safety within an organization. Think of it as a technique. Great, but you still need to have the authenticity and the truthfulness and the transparency behind it. But vulnerability can be a technique to make sure that people feel that they're not alone, that they sense that what they are going through, the things that make them human, the crises that they have, the way that their life isn't all bonbons, rainbows, and unicorns farting glitter. It's not just that, that that everybody has difficulties. And giving people the space to take a step toward you allows for that teamwork to become more significant and deeper and for people to really rally to say, we're gonna work together to get through this. Another aspect of vulnerability I think might be surprising for some people, and that is I think vulnerability is also connected to delegation. So hear me out on this. We often think of delegation as just someone taking a bunch of tasks, handing them out, and checking in to see who needs what, how's it going, or micromanaging, standing over people, making sure they're doing stuff. As I've talked with managers who struggled with delegation, one of the things they've really struggled with is having people on their teams who aren't able to do the work as fast as they themselves, as the manager, might be able to. So often this happens when you have a manager who was and obviously still is an expert in a field, but they've just been promoted to manager. So now they have a team of experts working for them. So they have done that work before. And now they're in a position where they're not doing the work themselves anymore, but they are managing people who do. And I've talked with a bunch of managers who have expressed how difficult it really is to be able to let go and take a step back and say, I was the one who was doing this before, and I know that I could just blaze through these assignments and these tasks, and it could be done. But I have a team of people and they need to, they need to essentially learn to be able to do it. They need to learn the jobs, they need to learn the skills, or they need to learn the details. What whatever it is, there's something for the people on their team still to learn. And I think the connection, like this, I'm still really playing with this, but I wanted to talk about today because I think it's really interesting that it's vulnerable actually for a manager to say, okay, we have these tasks to do, to accomplish as a team. I could do it myself, but that's not I'm not supposed to. That's not what a good manager does. I need to delegate these things to you. And it's gonna take, I have to trust you in order to do that. And that stepping out in trust is vulnerable. I think there's an element of vulnerability there. And I think someone who refuses to delegate, someone who refuses to let their team step in and take over tasks or roles or assignments that honestly the manager cannot do it all. The manager can't do it all. But sometimes managers try to do too much because, again, they think that it's it would go faster if they do it, it would be better if they do it, but they're preventing their team from those learning experiences that they obviously had in order to become so good at it. Most people don't just slip into a job and they're automatically amazing at all aspects of it. There's always a learning curve. If there's not, you're actually probably in the wrong role. You need to have some challenge. There should be challenges in each role. So if you as a manager are taking all of the difficult assignments for yourself, you're actually slacking off somewhere else in your management duties because as a manager, you need to be taking care of your team. And if you're doing all the stuff that your team should also be doing, then something is not happening that you need to be doing. Okay. It takes vulnerability to allow someone else the space to learn how to do something without taking it over. And I oh, I've had so many experiences of this where I've been given a job, like not a job, but like a project at my job and been told, okay, you this is you need to figure this out. I'm not gonna talk in in generalities here. I'm gonna get specific. In my job at the university, we had this really special thing that was that each student had access to a faculty member as a mentor. And it was something that was really quite unique to the university, very, very hands-on. Unfortunately, I don't think that the people who'd originally organized it had really thought it through. I think the idea was as the student body numbers would grow, so would the number of faculty members. And it did, but it didn't grow that much. So there were, we were hitting problems in terms of scaling this as more and more students came in. And as students didn't finish in the three years that it was assumed they would, suddenly there were so many more students that needed mentors and not enough faculty members for it. So this problem, this project was handed to me. Hey, figure out mentoring. Oh my goodness. It was really, really difficult. And I tried to talk with a lot of faculty members and also with administration members because there were a lot of people in the admin part that could have done mentoring if them if the students really just needed support, someone to talk to, a sounding board, any of the administrative staff could do that too. But there were students who really wanted the academic support for, say, coding or design, that so they wanted a software development or software engineering, or they wanted an interactive design professor or teacher to help them to be their mentor. This became really tricky. And I remember this just went through not even so many iterations in actuality, but so many ideas, and we tossed them around. But the hardest part of that project for me was I came up with a solution. And it was a complicated one, but I came up with a solution, and the founders suddenly decided, you know what, we don't really like this solution, we're not gonna try it, and we're gonna take this project back. So I was not really set up for success. I wouldn't say I was really set up for failure. Had I known that the delegation wasn't really complete, I might not have taken it on because it was a super, super frustrating experience to have been given a big project, a very, very complicated one, and be trying to find solutions and actually have a solution. But then when there was a little bit of pushback, it was taken away from me. It it was this it was the messiest possible project because it kept shifting hands and nobody was really empowered to do it. But I think about this in connection to vulnerability because I think it would have been a vulnerable situation for one of the founders who had undoubtedly thought of this concept of having mentors for all the students. They didn't know how to scale it, but they also didn't really want to take their hands off of it. They did not trust that somebody else could do it. And honestly, it was gonna take multiple iterations to solve it because it was such a complicated problem. There were so many moving pieces, so many stakeholders. Everybody had an idea, but nobody really wanted to do anything with it. But to me, when I think about that now, there was a lot of vulnerability at stake. The founders and my boss did not want the vulnerability of saying this might not work and people might not be happy. They didn't want to look vulnerable in that situation. And that is a little bit different than the vulnerability I was talking about earlier. I realized that. The way I was talking about vulnerability at the start was very much sharing something of yourself that makes you vulnerable to people and gives them an opportunity to trust you, take a step toward you, all of those things. But vulnerability also shows up in how we appear. And that's where it can sometimes look like weakness. If we appear to be vulnerable, if we appear to be weak, and when I say weak, I really mean like that we simply just don't have all the answers. And that's where this delegation, this it's complicated and it's part, like it influences the other pieces. If we don't want to look vulnerable, if we don't want to look like we don't have the answers or know like how to scale or how to solve something with a lot of stakeholders that we just don't have a clear answer for, we can we can step away from the delegation and try to take something back. And that action creates a lot of mistrust within a team or an organization. Because from where I sat, when that was taken away from me, it felt like I wasn't trusted to actually be able to do my job, or it I wasn't trusted to actually fail. And it, I might have failed with the solution, the concept that I came up with. It might have gone terribly, but we never really had a chance to find out because the people who were making the decisions, which was not me, it was in this HR document that they had created there that decisions would be made at the lowest possible level. And I do recall reading that thinking, really? Because that's a big that's a big statement. That's a really big statement. To say that the dot that the decisions will be made at the lowest possible level means that you delegate responsibility, you make yourself as a manager, as a founder, very vulnerable because you are trusting your team to do something, whether or not you can do it as an expert or not. But you are creating this moment where they, that person on your team may succeed, but they may also fail. And I think we have to be willing to fail. I think we have to be willing to let our people fail. We have to be willing to let ourselves fail. It's part of delegating and it's part of leading. And the question becomes what do you do when your team member that you have delegated a task or responsibility to, what do you do when they're struggling or when it's failing? I think the the best leaders from my own life and the leadership qualities that I aspire to would be that as a leader, I stand behind them and I help them to iterate. I say, you did a great job. We tried, it didn't work. Let's figure out what went wrong and let's try again. Because to me, like that's that's what happens in life, isn't it? If we fail on the first try, are we just gonna walk away and say, well, guess, guess that wasn't the answer. Guess there isn't an answer. No, we try something else. We iterate, we make changes, and we say, okay, let's give this another go. I don't have to tell you, but I will, that all the best inventions and all the biggest progressive steps didn't happen on the first try. They happened after multiple tries. It took a lot of doing. You have to iterate, you have to change, you have to make small tweaks and see where you go. It's vulnerability on multiple sides of not having all the answers, not knowing exactly how it's going to go. And if you aren't a strong leader who's confident enough to say it's okay for me to be vulnerable, because I may not have the numbers or the checklists with all the things ticked and all the boxes checked and everything done. Like, I may not look like the best manager if this project doesn't go well, but I'm okay with that. Because I know that it's okay if we don't succeed on the first try. And my boss knows that too. We know that this is complicated and that it's not gonna work the first time around, but that's okay. Because at least we did something, and now we have something to iterate on. If we just sat here and talked about it, we wouldn't have any program that we could make changes to. It's interesting to me to connect those two. And I think there's a lot of other parts of leadership that you could connect vulnerability to. This is just one of many, and it's the one that I chose to talk about today. But for your challenge, today, I'd really like you to think about times that you or maybe someone else, maybe another leader that you've had, or maybe a peer in a group when someone has been vulnerable and it changed the atmosphere in the room. It changed the atmosphere on the team, it changed the atmosphere in the company, it changed the atmosphere in the group somehow. I want you to think about that. I want you to go back and remember and remember how the group responded and try to pinpoint what happened. And if you want to use the team development stages, forming, storming, norming, performing as a way for yourself to understand it, I think that's a great idea. But I think this is worth considering. And alongside that, I think it's worth considering how might you be vulnerable with your team in your organization? How might you show vulnerability? You don't have to go tomorrow and expose all your deepest, darkest secrets. That is not what I'm talking about. But think about areas that you've been protecting, that you've been shielding, that you just don't want people to know about, and consider what would happen if you were transparent about those things? What would happen if you showed some vulnerability and shared them? I don't have the answer for you, but I think it's worth you thinking it through and considering what you might get on the other side if you decided to be vulnerable. What would happen if you shared those things? What would happen if you gave your team or your Peers in a group a chance to take a step forward and to take a step toward you because you were vulnerable. I'm curious what would happen. If you'd like, let us know in the comments. Comments meaning you can leave a review. You can comment if you're watching or listening on YouTube. You can also find us on Instagram at unleaderly podcast. No parentheses, no punctuation, all one word. You can let us know there. You can also find us on LinkedIn. So thank you for joining me today. I hope you have a great week. As always, big thanks to Lilia Keys for our intro and outro music.