Leading with Vulnerability

5How Are You Feeling?

Good is not good enough.

Part of being vulnerable means being able to understand and express your own feelings. It also means you would benefit from making an effort to understand other people's emotions and allow other people to express their feelings.

It's important to remember that the context of the book is about leadership and work, which means acknowledging that leaders play a crucial role and they have a job to do. Actions such as performance, professionalism, serving customers, innovation, growth, profit, and stakeholder value are still relevant and important. You can be as vulnerable as you want, but at the end of the day if as a leader you aren't able to do what is expected of you, then you won't be in that role for very long. Leading with vulnerability will benefit you and everyone around you, if you understand how to do it.

Artie Starrs is the CEO of Topgolf, a modern golf entertainment company with more than 25,000 employees. He made this distinction of leadership very clear to me when we spoke: “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from David Gibbs, the current CEO of Yum! Brands. I was talking to him about leaders I admired and he said, ‘Every single person you admire has massive insecurities and has made huge mistakes.’ I never thought about that until it really hit me between the eyes! I then looked at all of these leaders with a new lens and thought ‘I can do this, too.’ Everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. For me, ...