I heard someone pose a challenge about how strong leaders could show vulnerability. While I couldn’t formulate a response in the moment, my heart told me that strength was a prerequisite for being vulnerable.
In order to be a leader, one has to attract followers. A necessary distinction is between appointed leaders who possess positional or formal power and leaders who generate followership through inspiration and personal or informal power. We all know the people in an organization that people listen to and follow despite their seeming lack of power in the formal hierarchy. Given a choice, it is always easier to get things done through personal power rather than positional power. A generation ago, people defined strong leadership as being able to make tough decisions and get things done, no matter how they did that. It was “the cost of doing business” or “why we get paid the big bucks”. More and more, I am hopeful that things are changing now to a model where strength in leadership is about resolving difficult decisions in a manner that takes into account the competing priorities and focuses on the people. Tough on the problem, easy on the people. I see more women bringing their authentic personalities to the workplace as well as the impact of the upcoming generations who we have brought up to express themselves and be genuine.
But back to vulnerability… The vulnerability that triggered the discussion was an art performance where the actor, a middle-aged woman stood up naked before her audience and carried on a 75 minute conversation without a script. I thought back to the times when I had been my most powerful and they were clearly in those moments when I was my authentic self and simply spoke from the heart, also without a script. In one meeting, I needed an executive committee to commit to genuine action to change the organizational culture around safety. I told them about a young woman at one workplace who was an aspiring concert pianist and lost several fingers because someone had bypassed the safety interlocks on the machine she was working with. And watching a father bleeding to death after a forklift accident. I still can’t talk about those incidents without my skin prickling. But the impact of me telling that team why it was personally important to me meant that they did go out and lead the cultural change. And in a corporate world where tears aren’t normal, I needed personal strength to stand up and talk to those people from my heart. It is perhaps one of the most difficult things for most of us to expose our hearts in a situation where it isn’t common behavior and especially for women where they are still struggling to make their place.
I realized that what was missing in the theatre conversation was a common definition of strength. Perhaps it is time to reclaim the word strength to include the full power of an individual when they are being authentic and vulnerable.