Vulnerability in Leadership Produced Trust I Could Not Have Bought with Competence

I had been leading a product team in Manchester for two years at a point when a significant external development in our industry had produced genuine uncertainty about the direction we needed to take.

The uncertainty was real and I did not have the answer and I had, for several weeks, been managing the team's awareness of the uncertainty by providing a confident forward direction that was more confident than my actual conviction warranted.

I was performing certainty in a situation that did not have it, which is a form of management that is costly in ways that are not immediately visible: the team can usually sense the gap between the performance and the reality, and the gap generates a background mistrust that competence alone cannot address.

In a team meeting in the fourth week, I stopped performing. I told them that I had been trying to provide a clear direction in a situation where I genuinely was not certain what the right direction was, and that I thought they deserved to know that and to think about it with me rather than to receive my best current guess as a confident decision.

The change in the room was immediate and visible. Something that had been slightly held in the group released. Questions came that had not been asked before, because the questions had previously felt unsafe to ask in a climate of projected certainty. Ideas surfaced that the performance of my certainty had been suppressing.

By the end of the meeting we had a direction that was better than anything I had been manufacturing alone, assembled from the collective intelligence of people who had been waiting for a room in which it was safe to contribute it.

The trust that the honesty produced in that meeting was qualitatively different from the respect that two years of competent management had generated. Competence produces respect. Appropriate vulnerability produces trust. They are not the same thing and the second is more useful.