What does it take to be a great CEO? There are the tangible skills, of course, such as financial acumen and operational management. Then there’s a short list of traits that corporate leaders can agree are prerequisites, including confidence, resilience, and versatility. But in hundreds of leadership conversations over many years, we’ve seen many CEOs grapple with how to adopt a set of softer skills.
Vulnerability, for example, can be vital to building trust and openness—but, along with skills like humility and selflessness, it can be trickier to master. In this excerpt from our new book, The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out (Portfolio, September 2024), we focus on why adding vulnerability to personal growth journeys can heighten leadership potential.
Back when many of today’s business leaders were starting their careers, the standard for CEOs was set by larger-than-life figures such as GE’s Jack Welch or Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca. Investors, boards, and the business press worshipped these tough-minded individuals, while their employees expected them to have all the answers.
A few short decades later, the C-suite is a different place—and the old CEO model doesn’t always motivate today’s workers. Millennials, in particular, want their leaders to share their human side, including their vulnerabilities. What they are seeking, in short, is authenticity.
And yet many of today’s CEOs aren’t sure about what makes them authentic and how to share those traits and characteristics. Those uncertainties emerged in our conversations with more than 500 global CEOs: based on our analysis, these otherwise talented executives often hadn’t taken the time to be vulnerable—that is, to reflect and connect authentically with themselves so they can connect more effectively with their teams.
Even more important, leaders must give themselves permission to pause in legitimate pursuit of understanding and honing their behavioral traits. When they do so, they become more human-centric, which amplifies their impact and increases their effectiveness as leaders. Many executives are not necessarily intuitively comfortable with this concept—they would rather focus on the work and moving things forward.
How do you, as a leader, become more vulnerable? In short, it involves making the switch from proving to improving yourself. It means having an open, rather than a fixed, mindset, reflecting the belief that you can always do better. It means focusing on personal growth rather than perception management. You must be willing to take risks, to invest in relationships that may or may not work out, and to act with no guarantees. Vulnerability is the willingness to be touched by others’ perspectives, while also allowing yourself to be seen fully by others—even if you fear being judged.
According to research, the number-one reason teams fail is a lack of trust. The ultimate purpose of being vulnerable is to give leaders permission to invite thoughts and insights from colleagues, advisers, and friends—which, in turn, builds trust. So if you want to be trusted as a leader, you need to show your vulnerability.
Of course, we’re not suggesting that leaders abandon their hard-nosed leadership skills—just that they should challenge themselves to balance those attributes with soft leadership skills that are sometimes the most difficult to muster.
When handled correctly, vulnerability is a sign of strength. It can be magnetic and powerful. Apple’s Steve Jobs, for one, was a dominant entrepreneur, yet later in his career he learned the importance of sharing his emotions with others. Jobs talked about his struggles with pancreatic cancer and his mortality in his famous 2005 Stanford University commencement speech: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
Vulnerability: Who needs it?
On a rainy day in Paris, the handful of CEOs gathered at a leadership forum were surprised by the depth of anguish coming from one of their peers. A highly successful leader of a family-owned global manufacturing company, he had a reputation for maintaining strong bonds with his board, his management team, and outside constituents.
“My problem,” he said to those around the table, “is that I can’t confront people.”
He explained that one of his relatives, who was on his leadership team, was strutting around the place like he owned it, which, in fact, he did in part. The relative was a negative influence, saying things like, “This person is an idiot, that one is useless, or that other one is undercutting me behind my back.” The CEO knew he had to confront this person, but he couldn’t gather the courage.
One of the CEOs at the table asked him why he felt that way.
It took some vulnerability on the CEO’s part to grapple with the answer: the CEO realized that he was raised in a way that made him want to please everyone. He recalled that when he approached his own mother with problems as a child, she would say: “Oh, this is not a problem. This will be resolved. Don’t worry.” The family never argued at dinner. They were polite and deferential to one another. He honed an ability to play ambassador, which helped him forge strong ties with his directors and his other constituents. Yet it also left him short of early opportunities to work through conflicts—such as confronting someone like the relative who was acting aggressively.
Once he realized the root causes for his behavior, he gained more confidence: although he learned from a young age to please everyone, he wasn’t bound by that. Returning to work, the CEO confronted his relative, telling him that, in the end, it might be better if he looked outside for a new opportunity. To the CEO’s relief, the person eventually left the company without making a fuss.
As we can see from this case, leaders may reflexively deal with challenges using often-unrecognized patterns shaped by parents, teachers, and early bosses. Leaders who allow themselves to be vulnerable to get in touch with their feelings can change the way they deal with these moments. As one seasoned CEO put it: “There is no deep learning without emotional involvement.”
Know yourself (and your triggers)
To unleash the power of vulnerability, leaders must learn to manage moments that cause them to respond emotionally—so-called triggers.
Triggers can be something someone says or does, or it could be a situation or a challenge—a team member constantly engaging in toxic behavior, an activist knocking at your door, a board member making a snarky comment about the latest quarterly results. While these moments aren’t inherently positive or negative, they do trigger fear.
If leaders do not identify their triggers, they get trapped by their own patterns, which can lead to negative behavior and poor performance. The danger is reacting quickly in the moment and reverting to old patterns that can make someone want to control the situation or defend their ego, rather than do what’s best for the business.
Fortunately, people can choose how they respond, whether positively or negatively. The best leaders recognize what is triggering them and then learn to respond in an open and positive way. This is where vulnerability comes into play: if something forces you to react negatively or defensively, and you’re able to realize it, you can change your behavior by asking yourself, or discussing with others, why you’re reacting in such a way. Sometimes this requires taking a deep look at yourself.
One new CEO found that whenever she was at a board meeting, she got triggered by a director who she felt didn’t know what she was talking about. Every time the CEO heard something she thought was wrong or naive, she would jump in to correct the director, making for awkward meetings. After some deep self-reflection, the CEO realized that the problem was her need to be seen as right all the time—reverting to her childhood pattern of being the kid who always had the answer. This created fear that had nothing to do with the present moment or what was good for the business.
Eventually, the CEO became self-aware enough to shift her attitude. As she put it, “If I’m triggered, I’m being defensive. I’m not being creative.” In future meetings, she held her tongue when the director spoke and used her energy to get the board to focus on the important business at hand.
Vulnerability in action
We have found that the more comfortable, open, truthful, and authentic someone is, the more people open up to them—and the more respect and valuable input they get from others.
Reeta Roy, the CEO of the philanthropic Mastercard Foundation, has found the right balance between speaking hard truths and being self-effacing.
In 2006, Mastercard created a Toronto-based foundation to advance education and financial inclusion. The board recruited Roy, then a divisional vice president at the global healthcare company Abbott, to set the new organization’s direction. Roy listened carefully to a chorus of outside voices, some urging her to focus globally, others suggesting she concentrate on Canada or India. Then she made what was, in the philanthropic world, a controversial choice: to focus on sub-Saharan Africa. That bucked critics, who argued that Africa had too little capacity, or too much corruption, to absorb large amounts of funding. “But I knew we had a real chance to have consequential impact in Africa,” she said.
After months of conversations across Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Senegal, Roy concluded that the continent’s young workforce would benefit from greater access to education and better financial tools and networks. With partners across Africa, the foundation built programs that enabled young people, especially young women, to secure their educations, and it supported microentrepreneurs by providing access to finance and markets. Later, it expanded its focus to addressing unemployment. By the end of 2023, about 6.6 million young people were working, and millions more had accessed skills training and financial services through the foundation’s programs.
Roy’s own road to success wasn’t easy. Growing up in Malaysia, her father passed away when she was 14, and her family was left with little money. Her mother mortgaged her only asset, the house, so that Roy could attend high school in North Carolina. “My mother told me, ‘I can get you there, but after that, you’ll need to find your way.’”
Roy won a scholarship to St. Andrews Presbyterian College (now St. Andrews University), and took various jobs, including working in the cafeteria, to earn money. “The first value for me,” she says, “has always been about humility, and that comes from my childhood. Any organization or any individual who has great wealth or great power needs to be self-aware and big enough to recognize that there’s so much they don’t know and need to learn. Think of it as enlightened self-interest.”
These perspectives helped her through challenges as she built the foundation. In its early days, a nongovernmental organization in one country proposed a microfinancing program that offered low-interest loans to aspiring young entrepreneurs. Six months into the program, not a single loan had been issued. Roy and her team visited the country and discovered that these young people did not want loans; they wanted savings accounts. It was an example of how preconceived assumptions had gotten in the way of providing the community with what it really needed. The program was changed, and the foundation enjoyed a stronger working relationship with the community because of its openness and willingness to admit mistakes.
Sometimes being vulnerable means having to put aside pride and apologize. On one occasion, Roy met with a partner organization to discuss its program and how it could be expanded. Things appeared to be going well for the 20 representatives seated in an intimate circle, until the leader of the partner organization interrupted: “The foundation has not treated us right. You make us feel like we have to beg for money, and that’s not right.” Roy and her team learned that someone at the foundation had been unresponsive to the partner’s inquiries about when they could begin the program. Without hesitation, Roy stood and apologized. “I said, ‘Thank you for being candid. You should expect better from us, and we will take action to change.’ And we did.”
Roy used such moments to engage her colleagues on how things can go wrong, how they can be righted—and how the foundation always needed to be visible in individual actions. “Periodically, we need to remind ourselves that to achieve significant impact, we need to develop trust-based and productive working relationships with our partners,” she says. “These are watershed moments.”
Will vulnerability make leaders … vulnerable?
Letting yourself be vulnerable does entail a risk. If not handled properly, it can diminish your influence in the eyes of some. In a world where hierarchies are fluid and leaders project humility and vulnerability, how can they also command respect? If, for example, you work in an open office layout, surrounded by employees, with everyone following the same dress code and workplace norms, it can become challenging to maintain stature, and you can start losing influence. Therefore it’s vital that you establish your presence as the leader.
“That’s a tough balancing act to pull off,” says former Novartis CEO Dan Vasella. “Leaders now gain respect by being both competent and honest. That doesn’t mean that you say everything you think, but you have to be authentic. If you have that and you know what you’re doing, people will see that you are in charge.”
Being transparent is essential to being an inspirational leader. But because your reports may now feel more comfortable confronting you and your ideas, it may be more uncomfortable for you. A lot is being projected on you, as if you were a movie screen onto which people place all their positive and negative past experiences with authority. It can be tough to endure all that scrutiny day after day.
Having been in that position throughout his career, Vasella has a helpful take. “You have to understand that all the criticism is not necessarily about you. It’s what you represent for them. It’s the institution or a past authority they’re taking aim at, not you as the person you are. The CEO is the office, not an individual.”
Instead of a ‘to do’ list, draw up a ‘to be’ list
When you’re the top dog, people expect you to be certain and determined. Leaders must make tough decisions on hiring, firing, budget allocation, promotions, and pay; you can’t give up your decision-making power. But you should open yourself up to others and be willing to get analytical and emotional feedback—ideally from people with multiple perspectives—before making those tough decisions.
To strike the right balance, most leaders have a to-do list that keeps them on track. But how many have a “to be” list—a reminder of who they are and how they want to behave when they show up at work every day? Are they egotistical or open to other points of view? Are they snappish or warm? Emotionally distant or vulnerable? Essentially, the to-be list is anchored in the human characteristics of a leadership style and is also linked to the core character traits.
Michael Fisher maintained that fine balance when he was running Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. When he was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and had to take a six-month leave, he struggled with how to share the news. He was a private person, and his instinct was to quietly go away and get treatment. He felt, however, that it was important for the employees and other stakeholders to know what was going on. So he created a series of communications: a letter to all employees and the community announcing that he was sick and explaining how long he thought he’d be away, followed by two videos. In the first video, he gave a progress report while he was in the middle of intense chemotherapy. In the last, he announced that he was in remission and would return to his job in a few weeks.
“It’s tough to balance being vulnerable with keeping your influence,” says Fisher, “but we’re human beings, and people want to work with real people who are transparent, authentic, and who role model the behaviors and values of the team and institution.”
Tapping into your own vulnerabilities, as a pathway toward openness and trust, may start with asking some basic questions. Do I have the courage to put myself out there? Am I willing to take the chance of failing? Am I seen as simply an executive who fills a given role—and if so, how can I change my behavior so that I’m seen as the person I am? Do I have a to-be list—a reminder of who I am and how I want to behave?
Vulnerability is not a weakness. Being vulnerable means being in touch with what engages your emotions and knowing how to direct those feelings into positive energy. It means being willing to be moved by others as you share hopes and concerns in a way that invites support. “Vulnerability is power,” as University of Houston professor and author Brené Brown puts it. The art lies in being thoughtful about when, where, and how to be vulnerable. And because life does not always go as planned, being vulnerable also means knowing how to deal with failure.
Excerpted from The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out by Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © McKinsey & Company, 2024.
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