Episode 169: How Balancing Vulnerability with Ability is the Secret to Great Leadership with Author, Jacob Morgan
In this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, host Melissa Perri is joined by Jacob Morgan, author of “Leading with Vulnerability.” Join them as they explore what it means to be a leader today. They discuss Jacob’s personal journey to vulnerability, balancing vulnerability and competency, the importance of being self aware and many actionables to be a better overall leader.
You’ll hear them talk about:
05:44 - Leading with vulnerability can be confusing for leaders and CEOs that are used to leading with a strong image of themselves. Especially as they also try to balance being vulnerable and approachable but also competent and high performing. Jacob shares that to effectively lead with vulnerability, you need to combine the two in what he calls the vulnerable leader equation: competence plus connection equals leading with vulnerability.
17:06 - Context matters when being vulnerable in a professional setting. Jacob uses his framework the “Vulnerability Wheel” which helps leaders be intentional with their vulnerability. Good leaders always have an intention to why they’re sharing their vulnerability such as theyI wanted to create more trust amongst the team or use it as a way to open up dialogue and drive innovation. Jacob notes that without an intention or missing the context of the situation, sharing can become a form of talk therapy that is not for the workplace.
26:48 - Jacob attempts to guide leaders through the many contemporary nuisances executive face every day with actionables and tips to best utilize vulnerability in a leadership role. The Vulnerability Wheel begins with intention, but then it’s also important to consider who you want to be vulnerable with and when? Plus, the tone of voice can change an interaction and there is a need for professionalism. A quality of self awareness helps in this role as having good judgment is key to effectively leading with vulnerability.
Episode Resources:
Other Resources:
Intro - 00:00:01: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Melissa - 00:00:37: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking podcast. Today, we're joined by Jacob Morgan, a 5x best-selling author and all-around expert in leadership, the employee experience, and the future of work. Starting a marketing strategy and SEO, his career has seen him in CMO and principal roles for the likes of HiRank and Chess Media Group. His most recent book, Leading with Vulnerability, is flying off the shelves with glittering reviews from peers and professionals across multiple industries. But before we start to talk to Jacob all about leading with vulnerability, first, it's time for Dear Melissa. Dear Melissa is our segment where you can ask me any of your product management questions, and I answer them every single week on the Product Thinking podcast. Go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what your questions are. Today, we're going to the phones for our caller.
Caller - 00:01:21: Hi, Melissa. I really love your podcast and I've learned so much. I'm listening to it over the last few months. I recently transitioned into more of a product manager role. My newest products that I'm looking at are basically a bunch of platforms. And one of the big questions I keep getting from my engineering teams is how do we manage data platforms as a product when the customer is kind of abstracted behind API layers and lots of other good stuff? I'm really curious what you're thinking on this as we start to really think about the product value and how we can maximize usage for that customer, even though they are an hour or two away from us. Thank you so much.
Melissa - 00:02:03: All right, so when you are managing a data platform, you are still thinking in product form. So when your customer is abstracted, you still want to understand what the value is that you provide to them from a front-end perspective. And then what you want to do from the back-end, the platform perspective, is figure out how to deliver that value better. So you're never going to do this in isolation. You're always going to do this by thinking through what are they using the data for on the front-end? What kind of value is it actually providing to them? What are those use cases? So if you are building just the back-end, and let's say there are people who are building the front-end applications that sit on top of your data platform, I would go to those product managers and first understand their roadmap, their strategy, what kind of value propositions they are providing to the customer. Then when you come back from a platform perspective, what you're doing is looking at the platform and saying, how can we enable that value at scale? How do we enable it so that it's easier for developers to do their work and actually come from this platform? How do we make it so the data is accessible throughout multiple applications? How do we design APIs so that they're extensible and so that they can be used across the application? There's all different considerations that you're doing in there. The goal really of this platform that underlies a lot of these applications here is to make it faster to deliver value to customers, is also to make it more streamlined throughout the organization, and also to provide higher power. When you have a platform capability with multiple services, what it allows you to do is access data across many applications.
That means that you can provide algorithms and different combinations of the data that you couldn't if they were all in standalone applications. So think about it that way. What does the customer get when they can start to leverage that data? What kind of value do they get when it's across applications, when you make it easier for these applications to actually talk to each other? That's how I would think about it. So even though you may be abstracted from your end customer at the end of the day, you still want to deeply understand what that value is. But then you want to set the context of what your platform performs for the company, right? What the purpose is for it, what the vision is for it. And that's to enable the applications that sit on top of it. So I'd work very closely with the other product managers who are on the application side and start to think through how do we combine this together so that it's a system that delivers value. When you work in a portfolio of products, even if it wasn't a backend product, those products all work together to deliver value to customers. And as a chief product officer, we start to think through, how do all of these applications come together? How do all these products come together to deliver value? You wanted to do the same thing with individual applications in a platform. That's how these all combine. And that's how you make it more valuable for your customers. So it's okay if you don't have just a standalone value proposition. You still want to think through how this all goes together and how it integrates into the whole to deliver value for your customers. So I hope that helps. And again, if you have any questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com and I will answer them on a future episode. Now it's time to talk to Jacob.
Advertisement - 00:05:06: Are you eager to dive into the world of angel investing? I was too, but I wasn't sure how to get started. I knew I could evaluate the early stage companies from a product standpoint, but I didn't know much about the financial side. This is why I joined Hustle Fund's Angel Squad. They don't just bring you opportunities to invest in early stage companies, they provide an entire education on how professional investors think about which companies to fund. Product leaders make fantastic angel investors. And if you're interested in joining me at Angel Squad, you can learn more at hustlefund.vc/mp. Find the link in our show notes. Welcome, Jacob. It's good to have you on the show.
Jacob - 00:05:42: Thank you for having me.
Melissa - 00:05:44: So you just released a new book called Leading with Vulnerability. Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write this book and how you wrote it, what you did to learn about this?
Jacob - 00:05:53: It came about from two ways. One was personal, one was business related. On the business side, when I was working on a previous book called The Future Leader, I was told by a lot of CEOs, they were talking about the power of emotional intelligence. They were talking a lot about vulnerability. But at the same time, they were talking about the fact that it's different at work versus how it is in your personal life. So in your personal life, being vulnerable makes sense, right? It's how you create connection with your spouse, your significant other, your family members, your friends. It's basically exposing yourself to a gap that you have. And when you share those gaps that you have with other people, it creates connection, it creates closeness, it creates support. And so doing that in your personal life makes sense. But at work, they were all acknowledging that we have a very different dynamic. You have employees, you have customers, you have leaders, you have projects, deadlines, you're being paid a salary. And so simply showing up to work all the time, talking about the gaps that you have, it's not really the same there because there's a lot more going into it and it's a different dynamic. And the second thing that a lot of these leaders were saying is that on the one hand, their employees wanted them to be vulnerable, to talk about their challenges, their feelings, their emotions, their problems, their failures. But at the same time, these employees wanted their leaders to be competent and strong and visionary. And so these CEOs were very confused. They're trying to figure out, well, what kind of a leader am I supposed to be? Am I supposed to be this visionary, competent leader? Or am I supposed to be this other kind of a leader who talks about feelings and challenges and struggles?
So that was a very big struggle that leaders were trying to figure out. And then on the personal side, I was raised by parents who came from the Republic of Georgia, so immigrant parents. And my mom tried to model emotional vulnerability and openness with me. But I grew up as a young boy watching my dad, who believed that you shouldn't talk about feelings or your emotions and you should always try to be number one. And so I was not modeled vulnerability on my dad's side, which is how I grew up. So I always thought vulnerability was stupid. It didn't make sense. I should never do it with anybody, let alone at work. And what happened is a few years ago, I had a series of panic attacks. And the panic attacks came about, as I learned from talking to a couple of therapists, because I had committed to writing a book about vulnerability when I didn't believe in it. And so I had kind of this personal journey towards it. And then I had this business journey towards it. So I surveyed 14,000 employees in partnership with a leadership firm called DDI. And I had the opportunity to interview over 100 CEOs at big companies around the world and ask them all sorts of personal and interesting questions about vulnerability as well, and that's what made the book.
Melissa - 00:08:21: Do you believe in vulnerability now?
Jacob - 00:08:23: Yes, I do. But it's interesting because I think there's a big difference, kind of what I alluded to earlier. There's a big difference between vulnerability versus leading with vulnerability. And vulnerability, as I mentioned, is this idea of exposing a gap that you have. So I made a mistake. I need help. I don't know how to do this. I'm having a tough time. And in the context of work, let's say you go to your leader at the time. Your leader gives you a project that you're supposed to be responsible for and something doesn't go well, right? You mess something up. And you go to your leader and say, I am so sorry I messed this up. I know how important this was. I screwed up. I'm really sorry. Now, your leader is not going to look at you and say, oh, thank you so much for telling me, right? Your leader is going to say, well, thanks for telling me, but the customer is still unhappy. The deadline still hasn't been met. The project is still not completed. In other words, well, now what, right? It's one thing to have the psychological safety to feel like you can talk about mistakes and failures and challenges, but how you actually go about doing that is a whole other thing. So vulnerability is simply saying something like, I'm sorry, I made a mistake.
Leading with vulnerability is about saying, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. Here's what I learned from the mistake that I made. And here are three things that I'm going to do going forward to make sure that mistake never happens again. In other words, you're combining two elements, connection and competence. And we've been very obsessed with the connection piece. And I feel like over the past few years, we forgot about the importance of competence as well. So you need to bring these two things together. It's what I call the vulnerable leader equation. Competence plus connection equals leading with vulnerability. Or leadership plus vulnerability equals leading with vulnerability. And that's the big distinction. Don't just talk about the gaps that you have, because I think that can hurt you far more than it can help you. But talk about the gaps you have and what you're trying to do to close those gaps. That's the big distinction.
Melissa - 00:10:06: I think that's a really nice way to start to frame it. And that's always been the issue that I've seen with a lot of people who've been preaching about leading with vulnerability or trying to be in tech. We have this word called servant leadership, where I think people are, as leaders, see themselves as in service for their team, but they take it to an extreme when it comes to vulnerability. And I've observed a lot of founders, but also product managers or product leaders, instead of approaching things with a plan or action, just kind of coming back to their teams and being like, here's all the challenges that we're experiencing, but there's nothing about what am I going to do about that? How are we going to go forward? And to me, I've seen that be a huge issue for people getting into product leadership for the first time, basically bringing all these challenges to people's attentions and then being asked to leave the company because they're not showing that competence piece. They're not actually doing the work to come up with a plan to solve those problems. So I really love how you balance these two things about you must have the competence to be able to lead with vulnerability. And this is what you show up with. How do you navigate it if you don't know the answer, right? Is there like a right time to come and bring up challenges or do you wait and have a plan? Like, how do you kind of pace those things out so that you're not just bringing up challenges all the time, even if you don't know what the answer is?
Jacob - 00:11:20: Well, even in that situation, even if you're bringing up challenges, you could talk about what you're trying to do to solve them. Regardless of where you are in your career, you're never going to know everything. You're at some point going to need help. At some point, you'll make a mistake. But there's a right way and a wrong way for how to talk about it. If you're somebody on a team and you keep coming to your leader talking about different challenges and why I can't do this and I don't have the budget and I'm not getting supportive and this and this is breaking. Eventually, somebody's going to look at you and say, you probably shouldn't be in this role. So even if you're faced with challenges, even if you don't know how to do something, the best thing that you can do is to always ask yourself, how do I sprinkle a little bit of competence, a little bit of leadership on whatever it is? So for example, it might be, hey, I'm really struggling trying to figure this out. In the future, here are some things I'm going to do to get help on this area, but can you give me a little bit of guidance right now? Or I made a mistake, but here's what I learned from the mistake. Whatever you need to do, demonstrate how you're trying to close the gap. Here's the challenge. Here's some ideas that I have for how we can solve this challenge. I'm not sure if they're the best ones or not. Can you give me some feedback on that? You're not just coming with problems. You're trying to identify solutions. Even if your solutions are wrong, the point is that you are trying to demonstrate that you're trying to solve your problem. And this is just as relevant in your personal life as it is in your work life. You probably have a lot of friends and family members. Maybe they're trying to eat healthier. They're trying to stop smoking. They're trying to exercise.
And what do we do when we always have friends that say, oh yeah, I'm trying to lose weight? Well, you say, okay, great. What are you doing? Just because somebody says, I'm trying to lose weight. I'm trying to stop smoking. I'm trying to be a better dad. I'm trying to be a better mom, whatever. It's great to say that, but ultimately you want to know what is the person actually doing to try to solve those things. Same thing is true at work. I need help. Great. What are you trying to do to solve your own problem? I have a challenge. Great. What are some of the solutions that you propose? Right? So that's really what we're talking about. How do you add that level of competence and leadership to everything that you're doing? It doesn't mean you need to have all the right answers. It doesn't mean you need to be perfect at everything that you do, but you need to ask yourself, how do I just avoid talking about all the gaps that I have? And show how I'm trying to close them in new leadership, which I know we'll talk to as well. It is a huge area where this appears.
Melissa - 00:13:24: So when you went out and surveyed all the employees and the CEOs, what did you find surprising about their answers that you didn't expect?
Jacob - 00:13:30: A few things. Number one is I was surprised to learn how often vulnerability can be used against you and can backfire. There are all sorts of crazy stories that I have in the book of some of the things that CEOs have done. One CEO is a large telecommunications company. And she told me the story of how she was a woman, her CEO at the time was another woman. And this was a big communications company, tens of thousands of employees. And she was one of the top executives there. And she used to sit right next to the CEO. And she noticed one day she went on vacation, she came back and all of a sudden her office was moved like three doors down. She couldn't figure out what was going on. Then all of a sudden she started to notice that a lot of her employees were being poached and moved onto other teams without her knowledge. Then she started to notice that she was being made fun of in meetings. Then she was given an executive coach to help her only to find out that that executive coach was reporting everything that she was saying back to the CEO. Then she was put on a performance improvement plan. And finally it got to the point where this lady, it was just like, I don't know, let's go. I'm out of here. And this all started because this female executive talked about her vulnerabilities to her CEO. She talked about how she struggled with competence. She talked about how she didn't go to a traditional university and she wasn't a traditional employee at the company. She opened up about all these different types of things and her CEO at the time weaponized all those vulnerabilities against her. And so there, I have all sorts of stories like that. So I was very surprised that even for CEOs, vulnerability at some point will be used against you.
Second thing that surprised me, is that when you're vulnerable, a lot of these CEOs shared very physiological reactions that they get. And you don't think of this for CEOs, but CEOs were telling me several of them had panic attacks. Several of them, when they were put in vulnerable situations, their heart started beating quickly, their palms got sweaty. They became very nervous. One CEO told me that his voice started to quiver because he was so uncomfortable and nervous in situations. These are people running multi-billion dollar companies with tens of hundreds of thousands of employees. And they're going through these very physiological, stress responses. So it just goes to show that it's not just an individual contributor or an entry-level employee thing. This is something that everybody struggles with. And so I really love those types of stories. I thought those were quite intriguing. And the other thing is, we alluded to this earlier, a lot of the CEOs acknowledge that vulnerability is a powerful thing, but they weren't sure how to approach it in a work context. And when we surveyed 14,000 employees, we asked them, what's the number one reason why you're not vulnerable at work? And the response to that was, I don't want to be perceived as being weak or incompetent. And so the solution to that is in the question. If you want to avoid being perceived as incompetent, then demonstrate some level of competence whenever vulnerability is there. So again, demonstrate how you're trying to close the gap. And this is really important because there's a concept in psychology called the Pratfall effect. And I interviewed the creator of this, Elliot Aronson, who is at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
And the idea of the Pratfall effect is that if you are highly competent, you're good at your job, and then you're vulnerable, what happens is you get an added boost, a higher perception in terms of your capability, your talent, your quality. Now you're perceived as being more human. However, the flip side of that is also true. If you're not competent at your job, and then you're vulnerable, what that does is it reinforces your mediocrity. In other words, people are going to look at you and they're going to say, yeah, I get why you haven't been promoted. Yeah, I get why you're stuck in that role. So there's a very strong and important relationship between competence and vulnerability. And I think that oftentimes we use vulnerability as a way to justify poor performance without realizing that it's actually hurting us far more than it's helping us.
Melissa - 00:17:06: That's really interesting to look at those stats from there. So when you are trying to be vulnerable, let's imagine a CEO of an organization. I know right now, for example, tech is going through this crazy downturn. We've had 282,000 people laid off since January 2020. I saw that stat the other day. A lot of businesses are worried they're not going to raise money, they're not going to continue. How much do you let people know what's going on? Because I also believe there's something with leadership where you want to be transparent, but if you're super transparent, people might get scared, right? So when you're trying to lead with vulnerability, when is vulnerability appropriate and when is it not?
Jacob - 00:17:46: Yeah, context matters a lot. And one of the frameworks that I have in the book is called the vulnerability wheel. And at the center of that wheel sits something called intention. So it's understanding why you're doing or sharing something. And I talked to Doug Parker. He's the former CEO of American Airlines. And during the pandemic, there were lots of news articles and publications. Everybody was talking about how American Airlines was going bankrupt. You know, they had to go in front of Congress. They had to get money. They had to get bailed out, as did a lot of other companies. But the organization was very much in trouble. American Airlines was really struggling. And Doug Parker had a choice. He could go in front of his entire company as well and say, oh, we're going bankrupt. I don't know what's going to happen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or he could not. And he told me that there were several times when he would actually sit in the parking lot in his car, pumping himself up, trying to talk positive to himself, trying to be optimistic before he stepped foot into the office. Because he knew that if he showed up to work every day with a doom and gloom and bankruptcy attitude, that that would be a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that would bankrupt and tank the company. So in that situation, Doug Parker did not show that level of vulnerability as far as the company going bankrupt, even though a part of him felt that that very well might be, you know, it could happen. And so context does matter. And I compare this to a story about Hollis Harris. He's the former CEO of Continental Airlines. And in the late 80s, early 90s, the airline was struggling. And Hollis Harris, too, was asked to address his workforce of around 32,000 employees. And he sent out a memo to his workforce.
He talked about the challenges of the company and the macro and microeconomic factors. And he ended his memo by telling his employees that the best thing that they could do is to pray for the future of the company. And the next day, he was fired. And, of course, Continental Airlines no longer exists. It was, I believe, absorbed and acquired by United Airlines. So these are two different airline CEOs. Both were in very difficult situations and spots. One of them was vulnerable to the point of, you know, not providing solutions and asking his employees to pray for the future of the company. And the other one, in the context of Doug Parker, chose to be less vulnerable and focus more on kind of the future, the optimism, instead of being so transparent and sharing everything. And, again, the intention there matters. Another CEO that I have in the book is the CEO of Sasol. His name is Fleetwood Grobler. It's a big South African energy company. Similar story. He took over. The company was in near bankruptcy. It was $13 billion in debt. And he had also give a memo to his entire workforce. And he started off similarly, saying, you know, I get the company's in a lot of trouble. I don't know exactly what the future is going to bring. I don't even know how we're going to get out of this mess. But I have a vision for what the future of the business can become. I know that we can turn things around. I know that we can rebuild trust in the eyes of our employees and our customers. And if you go with me on this journey, I know that we can become a successful business again. And that's exactly what they did. So in that situation, he acknowledged the challenges and the struggles of the business, but he provided that leadership, the vision, the plan, giving that level of optimism and positivity for the future, as opposed to telling everybody to pray for the future of the company.
So I don't necessarily think that acknowledging negative things is a bad thing. You know, I think it depends on how you do it. But I think being able to have that level of leadership there is important. Hey, the company's going through a tough time, but here's some ideas I have and some things that I want to try to help us pivot out of this. I know the company is going through a tough time. I'm optimistic about the future. This is just a blip. It's important to have that level of leadership there. But of course, if you just show up to work and say, hey, you know what? We're out of money. Company's going down. You basically just killed the company and that's all. So context makes a big difference.
Melissa - 00:21:25: When you talk about intention too, behind why people should be vulnerable in a certain situation or not. Tell me a little bit about how to decide if the intention is correct. Like in what scenarios were those CEOs who just basically said, hey we're in trouble, like good luck. Like what was the intention behind them doing that? And why was it wrong versus the people who did it with a plan?
Jacob - 00:21:48: The problem in those situations was there was no intention. That's the difference. And I've talked to CEOs who shared very personal things with their team members, who've acknowledged all sorts of personal things. And I always ask them, why did you do it? And there's always an intention behind it. I wanted to create more trust amongst my team. I wanted to be perceived as a human CEO where people can come to me with any of their challenges. I wanted to use it as a way to open up dialogue to drive innovation. I wanted to, whatever it is, create more engagement. There's always some reason for why these executives were saying or doing whatever it is, but whatever it is that they were saying or doing these things. The problem comes into play when you start being vulnerable without knowing why. It's kind of like talk therapy. And your organization is not a place for that. If you show up to work and, oh my God, this happened and that happened. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why are you sharing this with me? What is the outcome that you are hoping to get from what it is that you're sharing? And oftentimes people will say, I don't know. I just needed to tell somebody that's not intention. That's not leading with vulnerability. So you always should take a step back and ask yourself, okay, I have something. What is the intention for why I want to either act this way or say this thing or behave in a certain way? Well, I think it's going to do X, Y, Z, right? Does it have some sort of an outcome that's going to impact my team or the business or the organization? I think it does. Therefore, I'm going to be sharing these things. And so the intention is going to make a big difference. If you don't have it, chances are it's a good sign you shouldn't be sharing it.
Melissa - 00:23:17: I want to go back to one of the examples that you gave about the woman who was being replaced because she was vulnerable with her CEO. In those scenarios, was the problem that she didn't have the competence to back it up or was it just that she did everything right, but they just used it against her? How do you know if that's going to happen to you or how do you assess that situation?
Jacob - 00:23:37: She was competent. And she then left that company and became the CEO of a much larger organization herself. But it's basically just a fact of life, right? At some point, you're going to ask somebody out on a date. They're going to say no. You're going to ask somebody for more money. You're going to be told no. You're going to ask for a promotion. You're going to be told no. It's just a fact of life. You will be told no. Does that mean you're never going to try to go on a date with anybody else? Does that mean you're never going to try to get another promotion? Does that mean you're never going to ask for a raise? No. It's just, right? It's a fact of life. You will be told no. You will have vulnerability used against you at some point in your life. And the thing there is you just need to know what do you do when that happens? Now, if you're never vulnerable, you're basically acknowledging that you have no gaps. You don't need to learn. You don't need to grow. You don't need to get better. That's also not really an effective way to lead. But similarly, you also need to acknowledge that at times during your life and during your career, when you're vulnerable, you will have these things backfire. It's not going to happen nearly as often as you think, right? It will happen occasionally, but it will happen. And I think that's an important thing that people need to realize. You can't go through life leading with vulnerability, expecting that everybody out there has your best interest in mind, that nobody out there is going to try to use it against you. That's just not realistic.
Advertisement - 00:24:55: Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take? It's called Product Institute. Over the past seven years, I've been working with individuals, teams, and companies to upscale their product chops through my fully online school. We have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product dilemma. Visit productinstitute.com and learn to think like a great product manager. Use code THINKING to save $200 at checkout on our premier course, Product Management Foundations.
Melissa - 00:25:26: Are there any people that you shouldn't be vulnerable with? Like, is there a way to assess like, hey, vulnerability is not appropriate in this situation because this person is like X, Y, and Z? Are there characteristics of that?
Jacob - 00:25:38: Oh, there are certainly people that you should not be vulnerable with, it's not so much characteristics as much as it is your judgment, right? So, for example, if you're in a room with people who you know don't have your best interest in mind, you shouldn't be vulnerable with them. If you are with people who you do have that psychological safety with, who you do feel have your best interest in mind, then it's probably safe to be vulnerable with them. If you're around somebody who you know has a reputation for gossiping and for spreading the word about something throughout the entire company, probably shouldn't be vulnerable with them. So part of it is being self-aware enough, not just in yourself, but also being able to be a good judge of character and just observe who it is that you're engaging with and who you're acting with, right? I mean, yeah, there are certainly people like that. It's not like a set criteria or set of characteristics. It's more about the relationship that you have with other people. Do they have your best interest in mind? Are they the types of people that you can trust? If you do have high levels of trust with them, chances are you can be vulnerable with them. But if you don't trust them, or maybe you just trust them a little bit, you probably should be a little bit careful.
Melissa - 00:26:48: So when you think about actionable tips to like lead with vulnerability, we did go over one about always marry it with competence. What else should you be thinking about?
Jacob - 00:26:57: There are a few things. So there are eight attributes that I talk about in the book. We don't need to go through eight attributes, but maybe what I can do, it would be helpful to start with the wheel. And let me walk through the wheel first. And I think that'll give people some context. So we talked about intention, which is at the very beginning. And intention is really about why is it that you want to be vulnerable, right? What is it that you want to share? One level out from that is you need to be asking yourself, well, who do you want to be vulnerable with? Who is it that you're being vulnerable with? Is it somebody, again, that has your best interest in mind or is it somebody that wants to rip your head off, so to speak? And so the idea with this wheel is as you go outward, if you ever get to a situation where you're kind of like, I don't know, or maybe chances are you should stop and rethink your approach to vulnerability there. So again, we have intention, which is at the very beginning. Then we talked about this idea of knowing who you're going to be vulnerable with. If you don't know the people, right, if you're unsure of who the people are, they're strangers, you're at a party, you're not just going to start randomly opening up to them, right? It doesn't make sense. One layer out from that is when. So timing matters. Are you in an all-hands meeting? Are you having a one-on-one? Is somebody just about to get in the elevator before you share something with them? Or do you have time to actually have a conversation with them? If the timing is not appropriate, probably shouldn't do it. Next is your tone. Tone. Making sure how you are coming across. Because tone can make a big difference. For example, how you ask somebody for help. You could say, hey, I need help. Can you do this for me? Eh, not really vulnerable.
Or you could say, hey, I'm really struggling. I'm having a tough time. Can you help me with this? So how your tone comes across will also make a difference. And you want to make sure that your tone comes across in a way that's genuine, that's authentic, that's human, that's you. And the last layer of that wheel is professionalism. It is, doing or saying or acting in a way that is respected or expected of the role that you have. So, for example, if you go to a doctor's office and you have, God forbid, some sort of a sickness, you don't want your doctor looking at you saying, oh, my God, I've never seen this before. The doctor is like freaking out and crying and like, oh, no, I don't know. You don't want that. Doctors need to have a certain level of professionalism. Similarly, if you're a leader at a company and an employee gives a talk for the first time or gives a presentation for the first time as a leader, even if it was terrible, you're not going to look at that employee and say, who the hell let you into this building? That was the worst presentation I've ever heard in my life. Get out. You're not going to do that. It's just not professional. So I always encourage people to walk through this wheel. So make sure that you know the intention. Why are you being vulnerable with what it is that you're sharing or doing? Who are you being vulnerable with? Do they have your best interests in mind? When are you being vulnerable? Is it now the right time? Tone. Are you coming across in the right way that's authentic, that's connecting? And the last wheel is professionalism. Are you coming across in a way that is respected or expected of the role that you're in? If any of those things are no's, I don't know's, maybe's, stop. This is kind of like the five levels of green lights. You need green, green, green, green, green, and then you can go ahead and proceed. If you get roadblocks here, chances are you should take a step back and revisit.
Melissa - 00:30:05: That's a really good way to look at it. I've seen that piece in tech as well, where I think some people drop the professionalism in certain areas and they let a little too much out all the time. We kind of built these startup cultures where we wanted to lead with vulnerability and we wanted people to be open and wanted them to be comfortable. But some of it has been taken too far in certain cases. And then you see some bigger corporations where it's all professional whatsoever and you shall never hear about anybody's personal life or themselves at all. There's probably a fine line in between that. Have you discovered anything about that through your interviews about what's the best environment to help foster collaboration around that?
Jacob - 00:30:46: It depends on the leaders and the CEOs that are there and the culture that they create. I mean, if you are part of an organization that is very competitive, where everyone is rewarded individually, where you have a leader or leaders who are not vulnerable, who have that kind of mentality, then yeah, you're not going to create an environment where vulnerability takes place, which I think will hurt the team and the company in the long run. Because again, basically what you're saying is that there's no place here to acknowledge any gaps that you have. Therefore, there's no place here to acknowledge that there's any room for improvement. And the funny thing is, this is how a lot of leaders were brought up. This is how a lot of leaders were taught. I've interviewed many CEOs who actually said as they were growing up in the corporate world, their CEOs at the time told them, if you ever want to be CEO, don't talk about mistakes. Don't talk about your challenges or your emotions. Otherwise, no one's ever going to put you in a leadership role. So, you know, those are the types of cultures and environments that we've created. I don't. I don't think those are effective. And thankfully, we're challenging a lot of those stereotypes at work today. But if your leaders aren't going to be doing it, you know, then you're not going to be doing it either. At least you're not going to be being vulnerable to your leader. Maybe you will with your peers, but not to your leader.
Melissa - 00:32:01: So if you are a leader in an organization, how do you foster vulnerability within the rest? Part of it, I hear from you, is demonstrating. Is there anything else that you do to help encourage it?
Jacob - 00:32:12: I mean, demonstrating it is the best thing that you can do. I think that's number one. Number two is get to know your employees as human beings, not just as workers. This was a big push during the pandemic as everybody was working from home and everybody was struggling. And we got to know each other a little bit better. We talked about our families and how's everything going. And then post-COVID, I feel like maybe we've lost a little bit of that again. But getting to know your employees as human beings. John Wooden is the former coach of UCLA men's basketball team. He's considered to be one of the greatest coaches out of any sport in history. And one of the things that he did really well and why his team at UCLA was so successful is because he knew his ballplayers as human beings. He knew about their families. He knew about what they cared about, what they were passionate about. And he was able to bring that out when they were playing basketball. So similarly, when your employees are showing up, do you know what motivates them? Do you know what they care about? Do you know anything about their personal life? What their hopes and dreams and aspirations are? If you don't know those things, it becomes very hard to have that level of connection, to have that level of vulnerability with them because you just don't know them in that way. So lead by example, I think number one. Number two, get to know your employees as human beings and not just as workers.
Melissa - 00:33:21: How do you approach knowing your employees as human beings? I think this has always been a challenge, especially with the leaders that I've worked with where they say, I'd love to get to know my leaders. I'd love to get to know employees might be even easier. But how do you broach those conversations? And what types of techniques can you use so that you make sure that you're learning about them as a human?
Jacob - 00:33:42: I wish there was some sort of secret here. But again, I go back to this analogy of meeting somebody for the first time or going out on a date for the first time, right? I mean, it's casual. It's like, what do you care about? What do you do here? What are you working on? It's really just about being a human being, right? And just getting to know somebody for the first time or getting to know somebody a little bit better. I mean, obviously, you're not going to jump into the first question and say, tell me your deepest, darkest secrets. But you might start off a conversation like, oh, you know, what do you do for fun outside of work? You follow any sports? Do you have any kids? What do you do when you're not here? And slowly over time, you build those relationships. My wife and I, we moved into a new community in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. We relocated from the Bay Area here. And so we had to make a lot of new friends here. And so just like that, when we would meet people and we would be walking our dogs, it would be, hey, how's it going? Oh, where do you live? Oh, do you have kids? Right. And over time, you build that relationship. Now, of course, it does take time, but it also, you start off, it's like when you walk into a pool, right? You start off in the shallow end, and then over time, you can go a little bit deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper until you can talk about more personal and serious things. But I think for now, a lot of people should, if you're getting to know people for the first time, keep it light and then gauge how the other person is responding before you decide how you can proceed. I wish there was like a blueprint for that, but I think part of it is just be a human being and get to know people the way you would a friend or a spouse or a significant other.
Melissa - 00:35:05: I think that's good advice for people out there. You've studied how organizations who lead with vulnerability perform. Tell us about the benefits, like what do you get when you are an organization and you embrace this way of working?
Jacob - 00:35:17: There's a lot of ROI for this. I looked at the ROI on sort of a personal level and also a business level. I think on the personal level, it's very important because I think if you don't lead with vulnerability, you're not going to have much of a place in leadership going forward. Because the two most important things that any leader does is competence and connection. Those are the two most important things for anybody. Demonstrate that you're good at your job, being able to connect with those around you. If you can't do that, you can't lead effectively. So just selfishly on the personal side, if you want to be able to lead now and in the future, you're going to need to learn how to connect with people. And you're going to need to learn how to demonstrate that competence and bring that into the equation. On the ROI side, we looked at a couple of different metrics. And again, this is the survey that was done with DDI. And we looked in terms of innovation. And so inside organization, where leaders lead with vulnerability often or always when appropriate, the leaders in that organization are perceived to be much higher quality versus in organizations where leaders are not leading with vulnerability as often. So just a perception for you for high quality makes a big difference. These organizations create higher levels of trust. They're more equipped to create inclusive teams where people from different perspectives and backgrounds and opinions can come together and share ideas. They're more engaged. They're more productive, they drive innovation. You create higher levels of trust, which I believe I mentioned. So across the board, we see a lot of business sense for why this makes sense.
Melissa - 00:36:54: Yeah, those are really good metrics to look at that. So what I'm hearing is we get to foster more innovation, more trust, more collaboration. So all things that I think a lot of tech companies are out there or non-tech companies are out there trying to promote. And for product managers, I think that's incredibly important because we do talk about how the trust that you build with your leadership, but also with your development team, with your design teams is extremely important. For product managers too, we are in the situation where a lot of people who are individual contributors are still leading teams. They're leading developers, they're leading designers. So I'm taking away from what you were saying as well, a lot of really good tips for just those ICs to think about too. It's not just a management thing. Do you have any of that? Tell me about it.
Jacob - 00:37:35: Yeah, and I have some numbers here too. So when we were talking about innovation, I didn't remember all the numbers off the top of my head, so I just pulled them up. So in these types of organizations, employees are almost twice as likely to develop novel ideas or solutions, over five times more likely to trust their manager. Those were kind of the trust and innovation metrics. We talked about the high quality metric. As far as creating a more inclusive culture, it's four and a half times more likely, more than two times more likely to feel better prepared to operate in a highly ambiguous business environment, which is what we're in now. So if you lead with vulnerability, what that means is that in a world where you're not sure about the next steps, you feel much more prepared to lead and to work in that kind of environment when your leaders are leading with vulnerability. And also around almost two and a half times more likely to be prepared to manage a remote workforce. So these are, again, a lot of metrics that organizations care about. We're talking about hybrid work. We're talking about leading through change in uncertain times. So if you want to be able to do those things more effectively, leading with vulnerability appears to be a pretty good answer for that.
Melissa - 00:38:40: I'm sold. So one thing I was going to ask you about, we talked a lot about this in a leadership context from a people management standpoint. If you were a leader by proxy, let's say, a lot of individual contributor product managers here, they don't have people management over developers. They don't have people management over the designers they work with. They have to kind of lead their influence. Can you apply these same skills there? Would you recommend or does anything change in that scenario?
Jacob - 00:39:04: You can apply to anybody, anybody who is in a current or aspiring leadership role. Leading with vulnerability is crucial. You want to be able to connect with those around you and you want to be able to demonstrate that you are good at your job. Whether you're an individual contributor, whether you are leading a team, whether you are leading through influence, whatever it is. I don't think you need anybody's permission to do these things. These are just things that are in your best interest to do if you want to grow and excel in your career.
Melissa - 00:39:35: I think those are definitely good, helpful tips for all of our individual contributors listening out there too. If people want to get started with, you know, trying to lead with vulnerability a little bit, what's like a small actionable step you would recommend?
Jacob - 00:39:48: I have this framework in the book called The Vulnerability Mountain. And the idea is that if you've ever climbed a mountain or gone hiking, you know that when you first start, it's usually pretty easy. And then the higher up you get, the harder it becomes. But at the same time, the higher up you go, farther out you can see, the more clarity you have, the more beautiful the vistas are, the more people you meet on your journey. So the idea is pick something that is at base camp for you. So something that's pretty easy for you to do tomorrow. And pick something that is very scary for you, that you can't imagine doing, that sits at the very top. And once you understand what's at the very top of the mountain and what's at base camp, then what you do every day is you slowly take steps to go from base camp to what that mountain is. And there's a cool framework in the book with things that you can fill out to kind of walk you through what that is. But I think it's a very simple visual for people to have, right? We can all think of something that we can do tomorrow. And then we can all think of something that I can't imagine doing. Penny Pennington is the CEO of Edward Jones. And she told me that one of the things that she did, because she was very nervous about this, she would frequently get into elevators with employees.
And she didn't know what to say, like during the elevator ride. And it was just very uncomfortable. And she didn't know how to create that level of connection with her people. And so she had these kind of like canned things that she knew she would say when people would get into the elevator of like talking about her weekend and what she did, or maybe something she read and what she learned. And until it just became natural and second nature for her, she just had this kind of like scripted, she called it keeping an ace up her sleeve, so to speak. And that was something that she started, very small on day one. And now she's able to have these entire all hand Q&A meetings where people can ask her anything. She's happy to share about anything that's going on in the business and with her. And she can talk about decisions that she's making and why, and she could talk about challenges and struggles. This is stuff she didn't think that she'd previously be able to do, but all started with how she was able to talk to employees when they got into the elevator together.
Melissa - 00:41:43: That's a really great story right there. Thank you so much, Jacob, for being on the podcast. If people want to go buy your book, where can they find it?
Jacob - 00:41:50: Couple of different places. Well, first you can go to anywhere you like books, right? Barnes and Noble, Amazon. We made a special URL, which is leadwithvulnerability.com. And so you can click on there and there's a few different links. My email, I always like to give out if people have questions is jacob@thefutureorganization.com. And then I've been sharing some of the insights and research, some which didn't make it into the book on my Substack, which is greatleadership.substack.com.
Melissa - 00:42:17: Amazing. And we will put all of those links in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you again, Jacob, for being with us. And thank you to our listeners of the Product Thinking podcast. If you liked this episode, please like the podcast, save it, and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate that. We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.