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The strongest thing a leader does is admit it

Five things leaders are afraid to say out loud, and what saying each one gives back.

The Practical Power of Vulnerable Leadership
Vince Perryellis  ·  A PQ Unleashed book
DVFZ Training Consultancy Services, 2023  ·  14 chapters in 8 ideas

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POWER VULNERABLE THE SAME POSITION

01 The problem

No leader is invulnerable, and hiding it costs the most

The book starts from a flat statement: no human being is invulnerable. Not the refugee seeking asylum, not the person often called the leader of the free world. Vulnerability is simply being open to being harmed, and every leadership position is open to it.

The problem is not the exposure. The problem is the habit of covering it. A leader who never lets any doubt show never finds out what their own strengths and weaknesses actually are, and never hears what their followers are carrying either. The information stops arriving, and the next decision is made without it.

If leaders from all walks of life were not vulnerable at any point or stage of their leadership regime or tenure, they may never be self-aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and remain self-centered.The Practical Power of Vulnerable Leadership, Introduction
Doubtarrives You coverit up Nobodyspeaks up You decidewithout them looks safer no fear is named nothing gets back exposure grows The loop never breaks on its own. Something has to be said.
Concealment is a closed circuit. Each turn removes the information the next decision needed.

02 Power  ·  what it is made of

Power is six things you earn, not a chair you sit in

Perryellis takes his working definition of power from Rick Miller, writing in Forbes, and summarizes it as six points: influence, clarity, energy, impact, confidence, connecting. Read them in order and you can see that not one of them is granted with the job title.

Influence is earned by offering a helping hand. Clarity takes discipline. Energy is the result of personal and collective growth, so that later on the leader no longer needs much effort to move people. Impact frees the leader to use creativity and intuition. Confidence lets them hold a belief even at the risk of losing followers. Connecting closes the circuit back to the people.

The book calls the return path the ripple effect, borrowing Miller's phrase: it rubs off from one person to the other. Positive emotion inside a group spreads, and conflict risk falls with it.

Do this now

Offer one person a concrete helping hand this week and ask for nothing back. Influence sits first in the list because it is the one point of power that is only ever earned by being of service.

010203 040506 INFLUENCECLARITYENERGY IMPACTCONFIDENCECONNECTING earn it by serving needs discipline purpose, not noise values you hold less effort each time the ripple effect Six points, one circuit. Break any link and the power stops moving.
The six points feed each other in sequence, and connecting returns the gain to the people who supplied it.

03 Vulnerability  ·  the five elements

Five moves that look like weakness and return as trust

This is the spine of the book. Perryellis takes five key elements of vulnerable leadership from Mike Robbins and returns to them three times: to summarize them, to measure his own father against them, and at the end to ask you to reassess yourself against them.

Acknowledge your errors. Share your fears and insecurities. Do not take the role too seriously. Share the burden of leadership with others. Ask others for help. Every one of them exposes you first and pays you second, which is exactly why most leaders never get to the second part.

Fear and insecurity are inseparable from being human and being a leader.Mike Robbins, quoted in the book
Do this now

Apologize for one specific mistake, out loud, to the people it landed on. The book is direct about the return: apologizing to your followers is part of the gift of leadership, and in the eyes of others you gain credibility.

WHAT YOU DO HOW IT LOOKS WHAT COMES BACK Admit the error Name your fear Take it less seriously Share the burden Ask for help looks weak looks shaky looks casual looks like offloading looks like you cannot credibility they open up too resentment drops followers step up others gain power The cost is paid first and in public. The return is slower.
Robbins' five elements, each one read across: the move, the way it lands at first, and what the book says it gives back.

04 The three counters

Self-awareness, trust and empathy each have a far end

Chapter three names three qualities that hold a leader steady, then does something unusual: it names how each one fails when you push it too far.

Self-awareness is the opposite of self-centredness, and it is what lets you face your own poor discipline or poor communication. Stare too long into that mirror and you are back to being self-conscious. Trust is earned and valued, and Covey warns that it is lost the moment a leader's character shows duplicity. Trust someone too much and the trust gets abused. Empathy lifts followers and teaches them. Slide into sympathy and you start spoon-feeding, which leaves the most vulnerable followers exactly where they were.

Trust, experience, and intuition are on the same team.The Practical Power of Vulnerable Leadership, Chapter 3
Do this now

Run Maxwell's listening list in your next real conversation: look directly at the speaker, do not interrupt, focus on understanding rather than replying, put the need they are revealing first, check your own emotions, suspend judgment, and ask your questions only at the right intervals.

TOO LITTLE TOO MUCH SELF-AWARENESS TRUST EMPATHY works here works here works here self-centred nothing is shared never expressed self-conscious again the trust is abused sympathy, then spoon-feeding
Each quality has a working band. The book names the failure at the far right of all three, which is the end most leaders never watch.

05 Transparency  ·  what you give away

Knowledge you keep is knowledge that stops with you

Perryellis separates two things that usually get run together. Knowledge acquisition is what the leader learns. Knowledge empowerment is what the leader hands over. The second one is where the power is, and it is the one that feels risky.

A leader who keeps everything is not protecting a position, they are becoming the ceiling of their own team. The book is blunt about the motive: this is a leader who feels threatened by the idea of followers holding too much. The result is a team waiting for instructions and a leader who cannot leave the room.

The more knowledge others gain, the more powerful the leader becomes.The Practical Power of Vulnerable Leadership, Chapter 6
Do this now

Name one task only you know how to do, and teach it to one person this month. The book pairs this with transparency: share the reasoning, not just the steps, so your authority rests on knowledge you have already passed on.

KNOWLEDGE you hold keep it share it they wait forinstructions you becomethe ceiling they act anddeliver you are freeto learn more it stops here you acquire more to give away
One fork, two shapes. Hoarding ends in a wall. Sharing closes a loop that feeds the leader as well as the team.

06 Two styles, one weakness

Authoritarian and democratic leadership fail at opposite ends

Chapters eight and nine are a matched pair of case studies, and the book refuses to pick a winner. Authoritarian leadership is not inherently bad, it is open to abuse. Democratic leadership is not automatically better, it is open to drift.

Centralize too far and you get the five costs the book lists: low morale, resentment, dependency, suppression and non-disclosure. Nobody tells the leader anything, so the leader decides in isolation. Spread it too far and you get graciousness abused, discordance, and followers in open revolt, with a leader unable to execute a decision cleanly.

The fix is the same at both ends. Lee Kuan Yew was authoritarian, sometimes autocratic, and the book insists he was no dictator: he ruled by consensus and took personal responsibility for every decision that came out of his circle.

Do this now

The next decision you announce, give the reason with it. Non-disclosure is on the book's list of what quietly wrecks an authoritarian team, and it costs nothing to remove.

CONSENSUS COST AUTHORITARIAN DEMOCRATIC one person decides everyone decides its cost: low morale, resentment, dependency, suppression its cost: discordance, open revolt, no decision lands
The two styles do not differ in whether they are vulnerable, only in which direction the vulnerability points.

07 The final move

Take the blame in public, and hand out the credit

The last chapter builds to one example. The Bay of Pigs operation was run by the CIA and Kennedy was not privy to how it was carried out. Once it failed, he went live on television and apologized to the country for something that was, strictly speaking, not of his making.

Perryellis reads it back through Truman's line, the buck stops here, and forward through Martin Luther King Jr., who kept building bridges across every divide knowing what it could cost him and his family. The move is the same in both: absorb the blame, then sing the praises of other people's achievements even when the initiative was your own.

When at their most vulnerable, a leader is prepared to take responsibility and to bear the blame on behalf of others.The Practical Power of Vulnerable Leadership, Chapter 14
Do this now

Carry the next piece of bad news to your team yourself, before they hear it from anywhere else, and say plainly which part of it sits with you.

IT GOES WRONG YOU TAKE IT say it in public, and apologize YOU PASS IT ON blame a process, or a person TRUST He ended higher than he started, for a failure he did not cause.
The failure is not the fork. What the leader says next is the fork, and the two branches never rejoin.

08 The whole book

Power and vulnerability are one position, seen twice

Fourteen chapters of case studies, from a father in his eighties to Lee Kuan Yew, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs, all land on the same short instruction.

Name it

Six points of power

Influence, clarity, energy, impact, confidence, connecting. None of them arrives with the job title, and influence, the first one, is earned only by being of service.

Show it

Five elements

Admit the error, name the fear, ease off the seriousness, share the burden, ask for help. Each looks like weakness on the day and returns as credibility later.

Hold it

Blame up, credit down

Take responsibility for what goes wrong, including the parts that were not your doing, and give the praise to the people who did the work.

Nothing in this book asks you to be stronger than you are. It asks you to stop performing a strength you do not have, because the performance is what keeps everyone else quiet.

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Adapted from The Practical Power of Vulnerable Leadership
Vince Perryellis  ·  © 2023 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services  ·  33 cited sources in the source edition