Listen to the Insight

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A few years ago, I worked with a senior manager who was up for director. Smart, capable, well-regarded by peers. During a company-wide reorganization, she decided to be transparent with her team. In a staff meeting, she told them she was uncertain about the direction, overwhelmed by the ambiguity, and honestly not sure leadership had made the right call. She thought she was being real. What she was actually doing was borrowing emotional vocabulary she had picked up from a decade of leadership development culture that told her vulnerability builds trust.

Her team's performance dropped within six weeks. Two high performers began quietly exploring other roles. And when her promotion came up for review, a senior vice president described her as "not quite ready." She never understood why.

I did.

For the better part of ten years, the dominant message in leadership development has been some version of the same prescription: be vulnerable, be open, let people see you struggle. The research behind it is real. Its application has been a disaster.

What the original research actually found is that vulnerability in the presence of established trust deepens connection. What organizations heard instead is that vulnerability creates trust. Those are not the same finding, and the difference has cost a generation of aspiring leaders credibility they did not know they were spending.

Trust at the leadership level is not built through disclosure. It is built through conduct. Your team is not listening to what you share with them. They are watching how you behave when the pressure is highest, whether your integrity holds under uncertainty, and whether their confidence in you is something they can afford to keep. That is the track record that compounds. Narrating your uncertainty to the people who depend on you to reduce it does not make you relatable. It makes you a source of new uncertainty in a moment that already has enough of it.

The next time you feel the urge to be "open" with your team, ask yourself whether you are building their steadiness or relieving your own.

Be sure to tune into this month's YouTube series: "The Open Liability." https://bit.ly/harden-leadership

Take care.