Jacob Morgan, author of ‘The Future Leader,’ joins TheStreet to explain why some leaders mistake being vulnerable for being weak.
Transcript:
Jacob Morgan: When we think about some of the things that leaders do for employees, I think there are a couple missteps that leaders frequently make. One is they assume that they cannot be vulnerable at work. They assume that vulnerability is a sign of weakness.
They assume that if you’re vulnerable at work, people are going to view you as being incompetent. And so I recently wrote a book called Leading with vulnerability, and I talked to hundreds CEOs and surveyed 14,000 employees and really dove deep into the subject of vulnerability.
And what I found is that the ideal thing that a leader can do is not just be vulnerable at work, but combine vulnerability with leadership or competence with connection. So very simple example of this might be instead of saying, I’m sorry, I made a mistake, which is being vulnerable, you add the leadership to it.
So you might say, I’m sorry, I made a mistake, but here’s what I learned from that mistake. And here are three things that I’m going to do going forward to make sure that mistake doesn’t happen again. So as a leader, don’t be scared to show emotion or vulnerability.
But at the same time, when you’re doing that, add leadership to that mix, add competence to that mix. I think that’s a very, very important thing for leaders to do. And second, I think we’re seeing a massive change as to the types of leaders we’re seeing in organizations and there are a lot of different attributes and skill sets that I think we’re starting to see much more of.
So these are things like thinking like a futurist, being a coach, leading with vulnerability, as I talked about, and I think a lot of it centers around human centric leadership.
And so what that means is creating a corporate culture in an organization where you don’t assume that employees need to work there, but creating an environment where people actually want to work there. And that I think, is a very big shift in the minds of a lot of leaders out there. And they’re trying to figure out how to actually do that. And all of that starts by having conversations with your employees and treating them like human beings and not just as workers.
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