In 2016 I was approaching thirty and was an executive in a fast-growing creative agency in Silicon Valley. I was having frequent conversations with my friend and mentor, Barry Brown, about developing my leadership as I struggled to grow into this role in pace with the company.
One of the things Barry had impressed upon me was the importance of openness and sharing vulnerably. Vulnerability was very present in the conversation of the time after Brené Brown gave a TED talk on the subject that went viral. (It’s still the fifth most viewed TED talk of all time.) After the success of her talk, she released a book, Daring Greatly, which I read in 2015, so Barry’s lessons were right in line with both trending wisdom, and what I had been learning myself lately.
Later that year, when I found myself in the middle of a full-blown nervous breakdown, I did my best to open up to my team about it — to mixed reviews. Rather memorably, my business partner pulled me aside and asked me if I could not do that again. It was mortifying. He did his best to explain that leadership meant protecting my team from this type of information.
I was flummoxed. On the one hand, this directly contradicted the trending wisdom and everything I was learning from both Barry and Brené. On the other hand, I could hear what my business partner was telling me, and I could feel a measure of truth to it.
A few years later, Barry and I were comparing notes, preparing for a workshop when I noticed he had dedicated time to talk about the importance of vulnerability. It made my skin crawl.
The subject brought back all my unresolved feelings from my own experience of oversharing, and suddenly something was clear to me. It’s no wonder why executives don’t share, put up walls, and can seem less than vulnerable. We can talk about the importance of being open and vulnerable with your team and even agree with it, but doing it effectively and appropriately is another matter altogether.
Just like my own experience a few years earlier, it can be hard to know where to draw the line between sharing and oversharing. As executives, we are accustomed to talking about vulnerabilities regularly, and protecting against them — legal liabilities, financial liabilities, market vulnerabilities, network security. None of these give us a warm fuzzy feeling about exposing our vulnerabilities. We spend much of our day protecting against that. So, When you’re just starting to come around to the idea that you need to open up more, trying to figure out where those boundaries are can feel overwhelming.
So how then do you find the line? There is a point in Daring Greatly near the end where she talks about the power of sharing your story. She mentions that sharing openly about herself worked so well for her because she had already fully processed the subject matter.
We want to share our story, and we want to share ourselves with our teams. But we don’t want them to share the burden of doing our emotional processing with us or for us.
You can only really share openly and appropriately once you’ve fully processed the subject matter for yourself. Once it’s fully processed, it’ll be clear what’s appropriate and what’s not.
In the meantime, share what you can. Remaining silent, or worse, covering things up when it’s obvious something is going on is one of the quickest ways to erode the trust of your team. You want to address issues head-on. Share that there are issues you are working through and that now wouldn’t be appropriate to dig through it, but you are committed to opening up fully as soon as it’s appropriate.
Leadership needs to evolve to make sense in our modern world. That means new levels of transparency and openness. When we take responsibility for processing our emotions around a situation, and then share with our teams once we have closure on it, then we unlock new levels of leadership and relatedness, strengthening our teams and our odds of collective success.
