Got Leadership Vertigo? Get Vulnerable

Continuing the month-long celebration of the release of my first leadership book (which will be available in bookstores and through online retailers), “Leadership Vertigo”, I’m delighted to welcome best-selling author, leadership researcher, and former Oracle executive Liz Wiseman. In this special guest piece written for this celebratory leadership series, Liz looks at how making ourselves vulnerable can help us to build our competency, which is the 2nd leadership principle found in the book.

Liz, thanks for sharing insights from your upcoming book with my readers. I’m truly grateful for all the support and guidance you gave me as I took my steps forward to join in among the ranks as a leadership author. It really means a lot and helped me greatly. (Thanks also, Liz, for the great idea for the next episode of my leadership podcast show, “Leadership Biz Cafe”, that will be released on my blog in three weeks. I’m sure my listeners are going to love it).

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Becoming a great leader requires us to understand how our best intentions can be received differently by the people we lead and often backfire. Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian said, “All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.” While leaders view their own leadership through the lens of their good intentions, their staff perceives that same behavior only by its consequences.

Max Brown and Tanveer Naseer refer to this gap as leadership vertigo. Understanding and closing this gap requires leaders to be willing to learn and understand how our natural tendencies can take us down the wrong path. And real learning only happens when leaders get vulnerable and open up.

Several years ago I was working with a management team in the United Arab Emirates, helping them becoming Multipliers – leaders who bring out the best ideas and work from their teams. We explored the idea that, despite having the very best of intentions, leaders can accidentally have a diminishing impact on the people they lead.

The group was delightfully engaged and enjoying the session. I asked each person to write down one way they might be accidentally diminishing. They did. I then asked them to share their insight with their colleagues at their table. They hesitated for a moment but then did. This was a huge relief because I suspected the exercise is challenging for a culture with such strong hierarchical norms. I was quietly relieved and sat down to gather a few thoughts.

A couple minutes later, I looked up and noticed that the exercise was not proceeding as planned. People were getting up, moving around. I saw a swirl of white kanduras (the flowing robes worn by Emirate men) as individuals moved to other tables. I assumed that they were opting out of the exercise and were conducting other business instead.

Concerned that I had committed a cultural blunder, I asked Khalid, a warm and articulate Emirate national, to help me understand what is happening. He responded, “We were sharing our own observations but then we realized we really should be asking our colleagues to tell us how we are accidentally diminishing. So we are moving into new groups so we can get feedback from the people we work with most closely.”

I watched in fascination as individuals moved around the room, scurrying to find a small group or partner who could give them honest feedback. Amid the movement I noticed the CEO scrambling trying desperately to find someone who wanted to be his partner. It can be lonely (and hard to eliminate vertigo) at the top!

This leadership team understood that self-awareness as a leader comes by understanding the perspectives of those we lead and serve. To become an intentional leader, we must understand how our best intentions can be translated and received differently by others.

The best leaders are learners. But, it goes far beyond self-learning – these leaders create an environment of discovery for their entire team. When leaders talk openly about their own mistakes, they enable others to take bigger risks, admit mistakes and learn from them. When it is OK to be vulnerable, staff members are quicker to step out of their comfort zone and take on difficult challenges.

For my most recent book “Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work“, my research team and I studied over 400 workplace scenarios comparing how inexperienced versus experienced professionals approach a particular type of work.

This research showed that being a rookie – facing a new problem or a challenge for the first time – can provoke top performance. Rookies are unencumbered with no resources to burden them and no track record to limit their thinking or aspirations. Certainly they bring an openness to the work, but more importantly, a desperation-based learning kicks in causing them to seek guidance and feedback and work smart.

In particular, we found that rookies are four times more likely than veterans to ask for help. Rookies, with little to lose and everything to gain, seek out expertise 40% more often and reach out to far more people than the experienced employees do – on average 5 times more! This multiple is the network effect of not knowing.

But, do these up-and-comers exhaust people with an onslaught of inquiries? It appears not. We find that not only do experienced staffers tolerate rookie requests for guidance; they welcome the requests and want to help these protégés. Perhaps a mentoring gene kicks in.

Brian Wong, CEO of a tech startup Kiip wrote, “Many people forget that the simple statement “I’d love to learn from you” opens more doors than anything you can imagine. It’s the ultimate statement of humility, respect, understanding, and curiosity. Through (numerical) aging, many of us forget to ask to learn. Maybe it’s because we think we know enough, or that we may be rejected, or that it sounds needy.”(i)

Brene Brown’s fascinating research on vulnerability shows that a willingness to be vulnerable is the single most important value held by people considered wholehearted.(ii)  Brene’s research findings are a reminder that vulnerability isn’t showing weakness; it is being open and courageous enough to ask for help. But many successful professionals are afraid to be vulnerable and seek the help of others.

This is why their leaders need to model the way. When leaders set the tone for vulnerability, they not only get people’s best work, they build engagement and create a work environment that people find deeply engaging.

If you’ve got a case of leadership vertigo, you might need to get vulnerable. Ask the honest question. Then be ready to listen and learn. Remember that our noble intentions can get distorted as they travel across an organization.

When we bring our intentions and other people’s realities in alignment, we build integrity as a leader and build organizations that operate with wholeheartedness. Instead of suffering from the perceptual distortion of vertigo, you’ll get the humming of an organization that is cycling in unison.

When leaders mindfully close this perception gap, they encourage their employees to bravely step out into the knowledge gap – the ever-increasing chasm between their current know-how and what they need to know to keep pace in fast times. As our work cycles spin faster, make sure your team’s learning cycles spin faster too.

(i) Wong, Brian. “The Folly of Age as a Number: How We Can All Be Young,” Linkedin, 19 Dec 2012.

(ii) Brown, C Brene. Daring Greatly: how the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. New York: Gotham Books (2012).

Liz Wiseman is a researcher, executive advisor, and speaker who teaches leaders around the world. She is the author of “Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work” as well as the bestselling book “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” and “The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools“. Liz is a former executive from Oracle Corporation. She has been listed on the Thinkers50 ranking and named as one of the top 10 leadership thinkers in the world.  To learn more about her work, visit her website at TheWisemanGroup.com.