It is much easier to say you are willing to be vulnerable and transparent than to overcome your fear of being wrong and elevate your performance as a leader. Hiding is easier.
Hiding is part of our survival instincts. We are hardwired to react to perceived threats by employing the fight, flight, or freeze response that were the basis of primitive human behavior. It is how the human race survived when people had little knowledge or capacity to understand the world around them, and despite all, we have learned, these instincts remain intact today. Fear is a powerful emotion. How you deal with fear can shape who you are.
Hiding is part of our survival instincts. We are hardwired to react to perceived threats by employing the fight, flight, or freeze response that were the basis of primitive human behavior.
Living beings don’t only hide to seek safety; it is also how we surprise our prey or foes. When people display the courage to step out into the open to fight – it is often their fear of the consequences of not fighting that drives them. Courage and fear go hand in hand. To be courageous is to listen to your heart to find the inner strength to do what you must. You don’t need to overcome your fears; just learn to lean into them.
Leadership demands that you understand how your fears affect your thinking and your actions.
You cannot easily control how you feel at any given moment, but it is entirely possible to command how your think and choose how you behave. It is why fear can be a great motivator. Self-command allows you to constructively tap into your fears and use them to drive your actions deliberately.
Admitting we are wrong is not just a function of wanting to be correct. The fear of being wrong is described as one of the 4 Fatal Fears that all leaders experience to some degree. Proving yourself right is an easy way to stroke your ego, but admitting you are wrong can please the ego as well. We were taught that it takes a “big person” to own-up to your mistakes. Winning adulation for being honest and appearing vulnerable can be quite a good consolation prize for the ego. The problem is that you may be hiding beneath the pretense of vulnerability – and fearful that the other shoe may drop, and you will be found out. It describes “the imposter syndrome.”
Admitting you were wrong is different than acknowledging that you might be wrong about what you are thinking or doing at the moment. When the dust settles, and a mistake is obvious, owning the mess and cleaning it up is a good demonstration of character. To the ego, you can say, “I was wrong then, but now I am right.” But honestly admitting that you don’t have the answer or the solution to a current problem doesn’t offer the same opportunity for cover. You are fully exposed, but only if you are honest with yourself and others.
Your honesty here is critical in that you can also hide behind a lie. How often have you heard someone proclaim, ”I might be wrong,” when what they are really implying is that they are confident they are not. It’s like hedging a bet, guaranteeing themselves that they win no matter the outcome. It is a manipulation, not an admission, and it is an attempt to simply hide in plain sight.
The fear of being wrong is pretty easy to understand. At its roots, mistaking something dangerous for something safe can be deadly.
The fear of being wrong is pretty easy to understand. At its roots, mistaking something dangerous for something safe can be deadly. Mistaking a friend for a foe, underestimating the risk you are undertaking, or simply arriving unprepared for an exam at school all have undesired consequences. But it is not just what you have learned from those experiences. Your fear of being wrong is baked into the system of formal education most people experience during the formative years of your youth.
It is doubtful that any of your teachers ever posed a question on a test that they did not have the correct answer for. This is, after all, generally how teaching works. It is imparting what the teacher knows or understands to the student, who presumably needs to know or understand the class material. The reinforcement is the grading. You are rewarded with a passing grade and punished with a failing one. By design, the system encourages you to prepare yourself to demonstrate that you know the correct answers or how to figure them out. By-in-large, the system works. Some people excel more easily than others, while some struggle for any variety of reasons. The measure of academic success is always a bell curve.
The unintended consequence of this kind of teaching methodology is that you learn that it is safer to have the right answers for everything. Being wrong has potentially serious consequences and is therefore dangerous. Students who arrive to class unprepared for a lesson squirm when called upon for an answer that they cannot correctly supply. A common reaction is to wish you could hide – and some students literally do – by skipping class or even dropping out of school.
Successful students that elevate into successful careers and into leadership roles carry the lesson with them that it is safer to have the right answers. You may not physically hide or run away from your responsibilities. However, you might still hide by doing things to manage your reputation, by pretending to be vulnerable and hedging your bets in case you might be wrong. Of course, everyone is wrong sometimes. The humility to acknowledge when you make a mistake and the wisdom to encourage the kinds of errors essential for us to adapt to the ever-changing circumstances that are the nature of the world is what makes a leader effective.
The researcher and author Brené Brown suggests that fear and shame keep us from acting as our authentic selves. Impression management drives us from fulfilling the human needs that Abraham Maslow described in his famous hierarchy pyramid. She argues that vulnerability is not only necessary to succeed in our professional roles but is essential for living a good life.
Dr. Lee Thayer, the author of “Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing” ( and about a dozen other books on leadership), largely disagrees with the notion of authenticity. He argues that leadership is a performance art. You must play the role as it needs to be performed, and your authenticity is as an actor. You must prepare yourself to play your role, and the audience will determine whether you are successful or not. Here, vulnerability is about virtuosity. You must be honest with yourself and maintain a level of curiosity that keeps you in the learning mode. Learning requires that you have an awareness of what you don’t know and can focus on what you need to learn. The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote, “A person cannot learn what they think they already know.” Learning requires vulnerability and humility—and are essential to a leader’s character. Virtuosity comes from the word virtue and speaks to the persistent dissatisfaction that keeps a person learning, growing, and improving. Authenticity here is about being a true learner.
Leadership is a performance art. You must play the role as it needs to be performed, and your authenticity is as an actor.
We live in a VUCA world. The levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity require that you are always learning. A VUCA world also demands creativity in your leadership. Command and control doesn’t work because you must learn what you need to know – and not rely on what you think you know. Creativity, like learning, begins with the assumption that you think, know, or do is wrong. You must allow your curiosity to guide you in earnest towards discovering ways to do things differently. Creativity requires that you embrace vulnerability. You cannot cling to notions of certainty and free-up your creative tendencies.
Armor is heavy. Even when wearing modern lightweight body armor, you carry the weight of keeping alert to the danger you are trying to protect yourself from. We may like to think of ourselves as bullet-proof, but you can never entirely remove the vulnerability from a formidable force aiming to bring you down.
Strong, effective leaders embrace their vulnerability. You must take reasonable precautions to protect yourself and the people in your charge, but you cannot allow yourself to be bogged down by fear.
To learn into your fears, you must first understand them. Choosing to be vulnerable as a leader means understanding that you have fears of being wrong, of failing, of feeling alone and isolated, and of being uncomfortable when you are drawn from your comfort zone. In your gut, you understand that your fears serve to protect you, yet they also prevent you from accomplishing the things that truly matter. The weight of your personal armor slows you down and hinders your agility.
To be a better leader, you must stop hiding in plain sight and be an example to others who need to do the same.
To be a better leader, you must stop hiding in plain sight and be an example to others who need to do the same. It is time you stop hiding beneath the armor of your vulnerability and elevate your leadership by embracing the uncertainties you face, leaning into your fears, getting comfortable being uncomfortable, and preparing yourself thoroughly for the role you play. When you free yourself of the things holding you back, you are free to discover that the boundaries you once faced are nothing but limiting beliefs. You discover what it means to lead without boundaries.
