Three years into my first executive role, I made a presentation to the board that went badly. Not “could have gone better” badly — wrong numbers, confused narrative, visible nervousness badly. The kind where you can feel the room’s confidence in you evaporating in real time.
The next morning, I had a choice. Pretend it didn’t happen and project confidence. Or walk into my team meeting and say: “Yesterday was rough. I wasn’t prepared enough, and it showed. Here’s what I’m going to do differently.”
I chose the second option, and something unexpected happened. My team didn’t lose confidence in me. They rallied. Two people offered to help with board prep going forward. One shared that they’d been struggling with a client presentation and had been too embarrassed to ask for help. The honesty was contagious.
That experience changed how I think about vulnerability in leadership. It’s not about oversharing or performing weakness. It’s about strategic honesty that builds the trust and psychological safety your team needs to do their best work.
Key Takeaways
- Vulnerability in leadership isn’t about sharing everything — it’s about honest acknowledgment of uncertainty, mistakes, and limitations when doing so serves the team
- Psychological safety (which requires leader vulnerability) is the strongest predictor of high-performing teams, according to Google’s Project Aristotle research
- The line between productive vulnerability and oversharing is clear: productive vulnerability serves the team, oversharing serves your emotional needs
- Vulnerable leadership is a practice that gets easier with specific, repeatable behaviors
What Vulnerability in Leadership Actually Means
Let me be precise about what I mean, because “vulnerable leadership” has become a buzzword that ranges from genuinely useful to cringe-inducing.
Vulnerability in leadership means honest acknowledgment of what you don’t know, what you got wrong, and what you’re struggling with — when that acknowledgment serves the team’s ability to work effectively.
It is not: sharing personal trauma in team meetings, crying during presentations to seem relatable, confessing every insecurity to direct reports, or performing humility while actually seeking reassurance.
The distinction matters because bad vulnerability is worse than no vulnerability. A leader who shares their anxiety about the company’s future without also sharing a plan creates panic, not trust. A leader who admits a mistake and explains what they’ll do differently creates safety.
The Research Behind Vulnerable Leadership
This isn’t just a feel-good concept. The evidence is substantial.
Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 teams over two years to identify what made teams effective. The single strongest predictor wasn’t talent, experience, or resources — it was psychological safety: the belief that you can take interpersonal risks without being punished. And psychological safety starts with leaders who model vulnerability.
Brené Brown’s research at the University of Houston, spanning over 400,000 data points, found that vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. Teams that can’t tolerate vulnerability can’t tolerate the uncertainty that creative problem-solving requires.
Amy Edmondson’s work at Harvard on psychological safety showed that hospital units with higher reported error rates actually had better patient outcomes — not because they made more errors, but because they reported them honestly, which meant they caught and fixed problems faster. The units with low reported errors were hiding mistakes, which compounded into worse outcomes.
The pattern across all this research: environments where people can be honest about uncertainty, mistakes, and limitations consistently outperform environments where they can’t.
Five Specific Vulnerability Practices
Vague advice like “be more vulnerable” isn’t actionable. Here are five specific behaviors I practice and teach:
1. The Honest Opener
Start meetings or conversations by stating what you don’t know or what you’re uncertain about, before diving into what you do know.
Instead of: “Here’s the plan for Q3.” (Projects certainty you may not feel)
Try: “I have a direction for Q3, but there are two areas where I’m genuinely uncertain and want your input.” (Invites collaboration from a position of honest authority)
This signals that questioning and contributing is welcome — that you’re not presenting a finished plan for rubber-stamping. I use this in nearly every strategic discussion, and the quality of input I receive improved dramatically once my team understood that uncertainty was a feature, not a failure.
2. The Real-Time Mistake Acknowledgment
When you realize you’ve made an error, name it immediately rather than hoping no one noticed.
Instead of: Quietly correcting yourself or deflecting
Try: “I just realized I gave you the wrong figure. Let me correct that — the actual number is X. Sorry for the confusion.”
The speed matters. Immediate acknowledgment signals integrity. Delayed acknowledgment — especially if someone else catches the error — signals that you prioritize image over accuracy.
3. The Struggle Share (With a Plan)
When you’re facing a challenge, share both the struggle and your approach to addressing it. This is where the line between productive vulnerability and oversharing matters most.
Productive: “I’m finding the timeline for this project genuinely tight. Here’s what I’m doing to address it, and here’s where I could use help.”
Oversharing: “I’m so stressed about this project I can barely sleep. I don’t know if I can handle it.”
The first version shares the challenge, demonstrates ownership, and invites specific support. The second version transfers anxiety to the team without direction. Both are honest. Only the first is useful.
4. The Learning Debrief
After a failure or setback, lead a structured debrief that starts with your own contribution to the problem.
The framework I use: “Here’s what happened. Here’s what I contributed to the problem. Here’s what I learned. Here’s what I’ll do differently. Now — what did you observe, and what should we change as a team?”
Starting with your own accountability gives everyone else permission to be honest without fear. If the leader is willing to examine their own role, the team understands that this is a learning exercise, not a blame session.
5. The “I Don’t Know” With Direction
Say “I don’t know” when you don’t know — but follow it with a commitment to find out or an invitation to figure it out together.
Instead of: Guessing or deflecting when asked a question you can’t answer
Try: “I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s a good question. Let me find out and get back to you by Thursday.”
Or: “I don’t know either. Does anyone on the team have insight here? If not, let’s figure out who does.”
“I don’t know” without direction creates anxiety. “I don’t know, and here’s how we’ll figure it out” creates confidence in your process, even in the absence of immediate answers.
Where Vulnerability Goes Wrong
Vulnerability as performance. Some leaders learned that vulnerability is “good” and now perform it: scripted stories of struggle, rehearsed moments of emotional openness, vulnerability that feels calculated rather than genuine. People detect this instantly, and it destroys trust faster than no vulnerability at all.
Vulnerability without competence. Vulnerability builds trust only when it sits alongside demonstrated competence. A leader who admits uncertainty while consistently delivering results earns deeper trust. A leader who admits uncertainty and never delivers results earns concern. Vulnerability is an accelerant for trust, not a substitute for capability.
Vulnerability with the wrong audience. What you share should be calibrated to the relationship. Your executive coach gets the full picture. Your direct reports get honest but bounded vulnerability. Your entire organization gets high-level acknowledgment without excessive detail. Vulnerability isn’t a volume dial you set to maximum for everyone.
Vulnerability as abdication. “I don’t know what to do” is vulnerable. It’s also insufficient if you’re the leader. “I don’t know what to do yet, but here’s how I’m thinking about it, and I need your help” is vulnerable and leaderly. The difference is ownership.
Building a Culture of Psychological Safety
Individual vulnerable moments matter, but the real impact comes from building a culture where honesty, mistake-sharing, and uncertainty are normalized at every level. That requires systemic changes, not just personal behavior:
Reward the behavior you want to see. When someone raises a concern that prevents a bigger problem, celebrate it publicly. When someone admits a mistake early enough to fix it, thank them explicitly. What gets rewarded gets repeated.
Punish nothing that honesty reveals. If people get penalized for the problems they surface, they’ll stop surfacing problems. This doesn’t mean no accountability — it means the person who hides a mistake faces worse consequences than the person who admits one.
Normalize “I changed my mind.” Leaders who never change their minds signal that certainty is valued over accuracy. Leaders who say “I’ve been thinking about this more, and I want to revise my position” signal that learning is valued over consistency for its own sake.
Ask questions you don’t know the answer to. In meetings, ask genuine questions — not Socratic tests where you already know the “right” answer. Genuine curiosity from a leader models the learning orientation that emotionally intelligent leadership requires.
The goal isn’t a workplace where everyone shares their feelings constantly. It’s a workplace where honesty is the default, where problems surface before they compound, and where people bring their full intelligence to work because they’re not wasting cognitive energy on self-protection.