Showing your vulnerability is becoming a common theme in personal development as a way of fostering good mental health and a route to building resilience and reducing anxiety. Leaders are often told to show vulnerability at work, but the dynamic between doing this in your professional life is somewhat different than in your life outside of work.
So, how can leaders use their vulnerability to motivate their teams, and what skills do they need to learn to do so?
My guest this week is Jacob Morgan, Futurist, Speaker and Author of a new book called Leading With Vulnerability. I’ve always been a fan of Jacob’s writing. In our conversation, he talks about the art of leading with vulnerability and shares some insights about the skills we will all need for the uncertain future of work.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What is vulnerability at work?
• Adding leadership to vulnerability
• Taking action to create positive outcomes
• Creating connections
• Warmth and competence
• The importance of intention
• Motivation and growth mindset
• Predicting the future
• What skills do we need to develop for the future of work?
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
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[Recruiting Future theme]
There’s been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mine and in all the ages of history.
Matt Alder: Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 562 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Showing your vulnerability is becoming a common theme in personal development as a way of fostering good mental health and a route to building resilience and reducing anxiety. Leaders are often told to show vulnerability at work, but the dynamic between doing this in your professional life is somewhat different than in your life outside of work.
So how can leaders use their vulnerability to motivate their teams, and what skills do they need to learn to do so?
My guest this week is Jacob Morgan, Futurist, Speaker and Author of a new book called Leading With Vulnerability. I’ve always been a fan of Jacob’s writing. And in our conversation, he talks about the art of leading with vulnerability and shares some insights about the skills we will all need for the uncertain future of work.
Matt Alder: Hi, Jacob, and welcome back to the podcast.
Jacob: Thank you for having me.
Matt Alder: An absolute pleasure to have you back on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Jacob: Sure. My name is Jacob Morgan. I am a bestselling author of five books, most recently one that is just coming out called Leading With Vulnerability. And I am also a professionally trained futurist. I create a lot of content and speak at quite a few events every year, focused on leadership, employee experience, and the future of work.
Matt Alder: Now, I look back through the archives, and you were last on this podcast in 2017 on what was Episode 92 and you were talking about your book about employee experience. So time flies, but that said, a lot of things have happened in the last five years. Really interested to get your perspective on work, and employment, and all those kind of things in terms of how do you feel things have changed since the pandemic? How have we sort of moved on in the last five years, or particularly the last three years?
Jacob: Well, I think there’s a lot of different angles that we could look at as far as how work has evolved over the past five years, post pandemic. Probably, the biggest macro factor would be the balance of power and how it’s changed. So I think it’s safe to say that a lot of the balance of power has shifted from organizations to employees, and now it’s shifting back a little bit more into the hands of organizations or at least being centered a little bit.
So I actually think that what we’re seeing is a net positive as far as the relationships between employees and organizations, it needs to be a little centered. I think we need to refocus on what it means to do challenging work, to contribute to an organization, what employee experience means. And so I hope that that is what we’re going to see over the coming months and years.
Matt Alder: So tell us about your new book. What’s it about and why did you write it?
Jacob: The new book is called Leading With Vulnerability. It builds on this theme a little bit because it focuses on two critical aspects, vulnerability and leadership. As you can tell, I have some frustrations in what’s going on in the realm of work today, vulnerability was around one of them. So vulnerability is basically saying or doing something that exposes you to the potential of emotional harm. Brené Brown has talked about this in the form of risk, uncertainty, and emotional exposure. I think we all have felt vulnerable. And in our personal lives, it’s also very clear what the value of vulnerability is. When you’re vulnerable with a friend, with a family member, a spouse, a significant other, it creates that connection in that relationship.
But I was very interested, is there a difference in dynamic between being vulnerable at work versus being vulnerable in your personal life? And of course, there is. Because when you’re vulnerable at work, you have hierarchy, you have a boss, you have leaders, you have employees who work for you. You have customers, you have deadlines, there’s the issue of money. It’s a very different dynamic.
Similarly, if you’re a leader inside of a company, being vulnerable is very different for you than it is for everybody else because you’re actually responsible for people, you’re actually responsible for the fiscal aspect of a business. Vulnerability is not the same for leaders as it is for everybody else, and vulnerability is not the same at work as it is for everybody else. And this goes back to understanding the relationship that employees have with an organization. It’s very, very basic. An organization has the job that it wants to fill. It basically says, “We need somebody who could do X, Y, Z,” and you as an employee say, “Hey, I can do X, Y, Z and I’m pretty good at it.” And the company says, “Great, you’re hired.”
So imagine that scenario, and now all of a sudden, this person that you hired is showing up to work every day and they’re saying, “I’m so sorry, I made a mistake. Oh, I don’t know how to do this. I’m having a tough time. I’m not sure what to do.” Eventually, what’s going to happen if this becomes a repeatable pattern is you’re going to take a step back and you’re going to say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’m confused here. We hired you because you said you’re really good at this. But now all of a sudden, you keep showing up to work, and you’re talking about your mistakes and failures, and you’re using vulnerability as a way to justify your poor performance. That’s not cool.” So vulnerability at work is not the same.
Let me give you two stories. One of them is from Hollis Harris. He is the former CEO of Continental Airlines. And in the 1990s, the company was going through a tough time, and he wrote a memo to his entire workforce basically addressing what was happening. And in his memo, he talked about the difficulties that the business was going through, he talked about the fact that he wasn’t sure what course of action the business should be taking, and he ended his memo by basically saying that, “The best thing that employees can do is to pray for the future of the company.’ The next day, he was fired. Now, what Hollis Harris did was very vulnerable, but there was no leadership.
Another story, very contrast to this one, is from Fleetwood Grobler. He’s the CEO of a company called Sasol, South African energy company. He took over as CEO when the company was $13 billion with a B-dollars in debt. He too had to addressed his entire workforce. But the message he gave was different. Now, he started off being vulnerable, acknowledging that the business was going through a tough time, that the macroeconomic climate was unfavourable, that he was not sure exactly the steps that the business needed to take to get out of this mess. But then he added leadership. He said, “You know what? I have a vision of where I think we can go. I know we have a very talented group of people. I know that we can rebuild trust in the eyes of our customers and in the eyes of our employees. And if you come with me on this journey and if you help me figure out the steps that we need to take, I know that we can become a successful business.” That’s exactly what they did. That’s the leadership piece.
So a more specific way to think about this, and it’s a very concrete example that I think a lot of us have experienced. Let’s say somebody gives you a project, you’re supposed to do something, and you mess it up. Being vulnerable would be where you go to your boss at the time and you say, “Hey, you know what? I’m so sorry, I know you gave me this project to do, but I screwed it up. I’m really sorry.” That’s vulnerable. Now, your boss at the time might say, “Well, that’s great, but you still screwed it up. That doesn’t make me feel comfortable just the fact that you’re apologizing.” Leading with vulnerability is adding the leadership to that. So instead, I would say, “Hey, I’m really sorry you gave me this project. I really screwed it up, but here is what I learned from my mistake. Here are three things that I’m going to do going forward to make sure that mistake never happens again.” That’s leadership.
So the way that I like to think of defining what it means to be a vulnerable leader is a leader who intentionally opens themselves up to the potential of emotional harm, but while taking action to create a positive outcome. That’s what we miss. Take action to create a positive outcome. Vulnerability, fine, but add leadership to it. Talk about what you’re doing to close the gap, how you’re getting better, what you’re doing to improve, how you’re trying to become more competent. When you don’t include that piece, you hurt your credibility, your authority, your reputation, and your ability to create trust at work simply by repeatedly talking about mistakes, and failures, and challenges, and just being vulnerable.
Matt Alder: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. There are some great examples that I think really underscore what you’re talking about there. The question from this is, why should leaders be vulnerable? What’s in it for them? What’s in it for the business?
Jacob: Well, it’s two parts. So vulnerability is connection. I like to think of it as that that’s what creates connection, and leadership is what creates competence. It is very clear why connection is crucial inside of an organization. Because let’s say, for example, you’re just really good at your job. If you’re really good at your job, and I go to one of your employees and I say, “Hey, what do you think of Jacob as a leader?” And somebody might say, “Oh, Jacob is really good. He’s able to close deals, he brings in a lot of business, he’s really, really good at his job. But as a leader, I don’t really feel a connection with Jacob. I don’t feel motivated, engaged, or inspired by the work that I’m doing. I don’t feel like I’m being challenged. We don’t have that great chemistry, the collaboration isn’t there, but Jacob is still really good at what he does.”
So you need that connection because the connection is what creates the engagement, the motivation, the trust, that relationships. You need to have good chemistry. You see this in a lot of different areas and fields that you work in. You’re not going to want to work with somebody who you don’t feel that connection with. There was a lot of really interesting research that was done on this, most notably by Susan Fiske and Amy Cuddy. They found that there are two fundamental attributes that we use in social cognition when we’re trying to evaluate another person, and these are warmth and competence, similarly to leadership and vulnerability.
Warmth is the vibe, the feeling that you get from somebody, the likability aspect. That’s the first thing that you notice about somebody else. If we were to meet for the first time, I’m not going to know right away, “Oh, hey, so and so is really good at their job, or they’re very competent or they’re very talented.” I’m not going to know that. The first thing I’m going to notice is, “Okay, this person is warm. They’re open, they’re friendly, we have that good connection, there’s chemistry there.” And only then, after I get to know you will I be able to determine if you have that level of competence.
So the vulnerability aspect is crucial, A, because it’s one of the ways that you as a leader are judged, evaluated, and perceived. And second, it’s important because it is how you are able to unlock the potential of those around you? How you can create trust? Get people to come up with their best ideas, to bring their whole selves to work. If you don’t have that vulnerability aspect, people won’t do that because it’s like you’re working for a robot.
Matt Alder: In the book, you have frameworks and attributes and a number of things to help people scaffold this. How should leaders do this? Talk us through some of the models and things that you’ve put forward.
Jacob: I think there are a couple of places you can begin. First, it’s important to take a step back and to remember that in any situation, in any interaction, especially in a work setting, where you know that vulnerability is going to be present, see what you can do to try to sprinkle in some leadership.
Another classic example. Let’s say, you’re a first-time leader. This happens a lot. You’re a first-time leader, and you just got promoted, you’re now running a small team, let’s say, you’re running a team of 3 people, 5 people, 10 people, whatever it is, and you have to talk to your team for the first time. You got to address them, introduce yourself. Just purely being vulnerable in that situation you would say, “Hey, my name is Jacob. I’m a first-time leader here. I am so excited to be leading this team. I’ve never done this before, but I’m sure we’re going to be able to figure out. We’re going to have a great relationship. It’s going to be fantastic.”
Matt Alder: Yeah.
Jacob: Now, on the surface, you might say, “Well, that doesn’t sound that bad.” It’s vulnerable. But if you think about how the people will perceive that message that you have just given, you’ve demonstrated that you’re vulnerable, but you have done nothing to demonstrate that you actually belong in that role. You’ve done nothing to demonstrate that you are capable, that you’re qualified, that you’re competent. And so the people that you say that to might take a step back and say, “Yeah, that’s great, but I don’t know about you. I feel like I could do your job. I feel like I know more than you do.”
So if you were to take that same situation, again, first-time leader, you go, you introduce yourself. “Hey, I’m Jacob. I’m really excited to be leading this team. I’m a first-time leader, and I acknowledge that. And so here’s what I’m going to do to make sure that I can be the best leader that you have ever had. For starters, one of the top leaders and executives at this company, I’ve reached out to them, to coach me and mentor me, so they’re going to help oversee some of the things that I’m doing. I’m working with an executive coach who’s going to give me some feedback on how I lead and the things that I do and say. Here are also three leadership books that I picked up, which I think are going to be really, really helpful for how I’m going to be able to lead this team, and there’s maybe one or two courses or certifications that I’m taking as well.”
Now you take a step back and you say, “Oh, wow. Okay.” Well, clearly Jacob has been vulnerable, he acknowledged that he’s never done this before that he’s a first-time leader, but Jacob has also clearly demonstrated what he’s doing to close the gap. And so now I’m confident in Jacob as a leader. I’m confident that he’s doing what it’s going to take to be the best leader that he can be and to make sure that we are successful together as a team.
So again, vulnerable, sprinkle in the leadership, and do this all the time. If you ask for help, you go to somebody and you say, “Hey, can you really help? I’m struggling, can you help me with this?” Vulnerability. How do you sprinkle a little bit of leadership in there? “Hey, I’m really struggling. Can you please help me with this? By the way, in the future, I know that you’re really busy and I don’t want to bug you for this in the future, but I signed up for this class that’s going to teach me how to do this in the future. So don’t worry, I’m not going to keep bugging you again.”
Again, a simple, casual way, but you’re demonstrating that I signed up for a class, I’m getting some training, I’m doing whatever it is to make sure that I can close that gap going forward. I do this with my team all the time, because we all make mistakes. I make mistakes, my team makes mistakes. And so one of the things that I hate is when somebody just says, “Hey, I made a mistake,” or, “Hey, Jacob, can you help me?” I always ask them, “Sure, I’m happy to help you, but what are you going to do going forward to make sure that you can help yourself?” Or, “I get it. You made a mistake. Totally fine. What did you learn from the mistake? What are you going to do going forward to make sure that these things don’t happen?”
I am looking for what are doing to solve the problem. Leaders and your employees and everybody that you work with is also looking for, what are you doing to solve the problem? What are you doing to be more accountable to take ownership over the things that you’re saying and doing?
Matt Alder: What about more experienced leaders? What can they do to harness this to develop their leadership style in this kind of direction?
Jacob: So same piece of advice for that first part is bring together leadership and vulnerability in everything that you do. Two other things that you can do. Number one, and this is a framework that I have in the book. I won’t go through the whole thing, but I could touch one piece of it. It’s called the vulnerability wheel. And the wheel basically is a series of ripples. At the center of this ripple is intention. The whole idea behind this is understand what it is that you want to say or do and why it is that you want to say or do it.
So for example, if you’re talking about a personal challenge or struggle, ask yourself, “Well, what is it that I actually want to share and why do I want to share it? Am I sharing it just because? Am I sharing it because I want to be more relatable to my team? Am I talking about a failure or a mistake just for the sake of sharing it, or am I going to talk about some lessons learned? Am I trying to create a culture of collaboration and innovation?” Ask yourself the why behind what it is that you’re sharing and what’s the intention? The intention is important because if you don’t have it, then work becomes a big therapy session. I can promise you that nobody that you work with wants that, and I can promise you that you don’t want that from somebody else. We’ve all experienced that. It’s not pleasant. So ask yourself, what’s the intention behind what it is that I’m doing or saying.
The last piece is to build, what I call, your vulnerability mountain. The vulnerability mountain basically looks at what is something that you could do tomorrow, and what is the scary thing that’s at the peak of the mountain that’s going to take you some time to be able to do. Once you identify what the base of the mountain is and what the peak of the mountain is, then over time, you can gradually take steps to climb that mountain. You’ll make mistakes, you’ll stumble, you’ll have to backtrack a little bit. That’s totally fine. But identify the base camp and identify what’s at the peak and then climb the mountain.
Matt Alder: So I want to ask you a couple of questions about the future. Before I do though, you mentioned at the start of the conversation that you’re a trained futurist. How do you look at the future? How do you break it down? How do you work out what’s going to happen? What kind of models do you use?
Jacob: A lot of people actually think that futurists predict the future, which I wish was the case, but unfortunately, that’s not what futurists do. I should also point out a lot of people have futurists written in their LinkedIn title and in their bios, but few people realize that this is actually something that you can study. You can get a master’s degree in this, and you can get a professional certification in this.
So I went to the University of Houston. I got a professional certification in the field of foresight. So it’s something I’ve studied. They teach you various models, and frameworks, and how to think in a way that you don’t predict the future, but that you are not surprised by what the future might bring. That’s a difference, and it’s similar to a game of chess. I play a lot of chess. One of the things that good chess players do is you try to anticipate moves. In other words, when you make a move on the chessboard, you ask yourself, what are some of the ways that my opponent might reply? If my opponent replies in one of those different ways, how might I reply? Now, of course, you’re not predicting the move that your opponent is going to make, but you at least want to think through various scenarios and possibilities, so that when one of those moves does get played, you’re not going to sit there and say, “Oh, wow, I had no idea that was coming,” which inevitably will happen at some point. You can’t foresee everything, but at least you can get into that habit of thinking.
So for me, a couple of things have been very helpful. One of the reasons why I have my podcast is I talk to a lot of people. I talk to a lot of people. I work with a lot of organizations, and I pay attention to the various trends and things that I keep hearing that are coming up. That’s just a high level, scanning the horizon, paying attention to what people are telling me who are leading organizations and various businesses and teams around the world.
My favorite framework is actually one called the cone of possibilities, which people could Google, Jacob Morgan, cone of possibilities. I wrote a whole post about that, and there’s a whole framework in there, but it’s basically a visual tool that helps you think about what are some potential scenarios that might come up, either in the near term and in the long run. It goes through a series of questions that you can ask yourself to think through those scenarios and possibilities and helps you walk through them and at least explore them. I talk about it from a very high level. When you study this, it’s a very, very complex framework that looks at challenges, and opportunities, and political issues, societal issues, demographics, psychographics. It’s completely a very big long drown out framework. But the way that I wrote about it is very simple and high level, and it’s just a good practical tool to use.
Matt Alder: With that in mind and also in terms of what we’ve been talking about in terms of work and developments in leadership, I also want to add into that technology, because this year, everyone is talking about AI more than ever before. In fact, I think it’s illegal to have a podcast interview where you don’t mention AI. So I’m going to make sure I mention it right now. How do you think AI is going to affect work and how is it going to affect leadership as we move forward?
Jacob: Well, there are so many ways that we can go down on that one. Generative AI, especially something like ChatGPT is huge. I’m already using it on a regular basis in my business. I know a lot of teams and functions are exploring how to use it for themselves as well. I think what generative AI and tools like ChatGPT are going to do is they’re going to enable us to focus more on the human aspects of work, focusing more on creativity, ingenuity, but also focusing more on how to use these tools. For example, with ChatGPT, it’s a very powerful tool, but you have to know what sorts of questions and prompts to feed into it. You have to know what to ask something like ChatGPT to get the response that you want. So being able to get trained on how to ask the right questions, I think is also going to be a very, very important aspect when we think about how work gets done in the future.
For example, if you were to ask ChatGPT something like, give me leadership advice. It’ll spit something out for you that’s probably not usable. But if you were to say, give it something specific, I need leadership advice. I’m working in a technology company. Here’s the situation that I’m in with my leader. Here’s what’s going on. Give me three potential actionable steps that I could do and give me a follow up for each one. That’s a very different way to ask ChatGPT a question versus give me leadership advice. We see this a lot with content creators. I experience this all the time when I try to use ChatGPT for guidance. So being able to know the right questions to ask I think is going to be very important going forward. Being able to focus more on the human aspects of work, coaching, mentoring, unlocking the potential of other people is going to be a huge aspect when we think about the future of work.
When it comes to leadership, I think AI and all these technology tools are going to make it very blatantly clear who the good leaders are and who the bad leaders are. Because the bad leaders only focus on command and control and on delegation and on trying to make the best decisions. Well, I think a lot of that can be done by tools like ChatGPT, as far as what projects to do, helping augment decision making, the command-and-control stuff, you don’t need a human for that anymore. A lot of AI tools can guide us in that direction of what to do, how to prioritize when things should be done, creating timelines. We have technology for that.
But what good leaders do is not only are they familiar with that aspect of work, of the project management, of the delegation, of the traditional aspects of business, but they’re also really good at getting people to want to do those things. They’re really good at getting people to move in the direction of that decision. That’s something that technology cannot do, and that’s something that is a unique leadership skill and attribute. So leaders who are able to focus on unlocking the potential of others, on coaching and mentoring others, on helping other people become more successful, even more successful than they are, that to me is where I think the true value of leadership in the future is going to be.
Matt Alder: A related question as a final question. With that in mind, what are the most important skills that you think people need to develop for this future of work?
Jacob: There are a few. In the book, I talk about eight attributes which when combined are what unlock this power of leading with vulnerability. Now, I won’t go through all eight of them, but I can touch on some of them. One of them is definitely competence. Competence, I think, is a skill. Being able to be good at your job. And part of that is being able to be motivated to take the actions and steps that you need to be able to get good at your job. So I view the skills in terms of the leadership attributes and also in terms of the vulnerability attributes. Okay. So number one is competence. Be good at your job. Do 10% more than what’s asked of you. There’s no substitute for hard work. There’s no substitute for being good at your job. That’s fundamentally a skill.
Number two is having self-confidence. Self-confidence is believing in yourself. It is understanding that you have the ability to grow that challenges and obstacles that are put in front of you are meant to be overcome. Having that growth mindset. That’s all a part of self-confidence.
Next is motivation. Motivation is the drive to actually do something instead of talking about it. So I might say, “Here’s what I’m going to do in the future, so that mistakes don’t happen again. Motivation is what’s actually going to get me to do those things that I said I will do.” So those are the three elements of leadership.
Then we have five for vulnerability. One is integrity. Having that north star, that compass, something that’s pointing you in the right direction, something that’s making you be ethical, honest, that north star is very crucial.
Next is authenticity. Authenticity is this idea of being a single version of you and not having like multiple personas. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so to speak, try to be that single version of you.
Next is empathy. It’s trying to see things from other people’s perspectives. Not just saying I’m sorry, but focusing on saying I understand how you feel and where you’re coming from.
Next is self-compassion, which is talking to yourself in a positive way. If you make a mistake, instead of saying, “You’re an idiot. How could you do that? Why would you do that?” You say, “You know what? It’s okay. You’re good. You tried. You made a mistake. What did you learn? Let’s move on.”
The last one is self-awareness. And self-awareness is understanding your strengths, your weaknesses, how other people perceive you. I think these eight attributes are going to be crucial when we think about the future of work, especially leading with vulnerability, which as a concept I think is going to be the most important thing for leaders over the coming years.
Matt Alder: Lastly, where can people find you and where can they find the book?
Jacob: Thank you for asking. There are a few different places people can go. We created a special URL for the book which is, leadwithvulnerability.com. That’s where people can go to preorder it. If they email me, bonus@thefutureororganization.com, I’ll send them some cool bonuses, including some CEO interviews. We also created a Substack recently, which is where I’m sharing a lot of the interviews and behind the scenes stuff. That is greatleadership.substack.com. And then my personal email and website is thefutureorganization.com and email is jacob@thefutureororganization.com.
Matt Alder: Jacob, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jacob: Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder: My thanks to Jacob. If you’re a fan of the Recruiting Future podcast, then you will absolutely love our newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast. Not only does it give you the inside track on what’s coming up on the show, you can also find everything from book recommendations to insightful episodes from the archives, and first access to new content that helps you to understand where our industry is heading. Sign up now and also get instant access to the recording of my recent webinar on the future of talent acquisition. Just go to recruitingfuturefeast.com/webinar. That’s RECRUITINGFUTUREFEAST dotcom slash webinar.
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