Striving towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

Let's talk a bit about courage and its relevance for leadership growth. Dr Brené Brown, whose work on vulnerability has become widely known, defines vulnerability as uncertainty risk and emotional exposure. Vulnerability is when we are at our most human and it is not a sign of weakness rather our willingness to get into that state of discomfort and emotional exposure is exactly a measure of how brave we are willing to be. Based on her research she argues that vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage and it is a prerequisite to the behaviors that her research has found are important for what she calls daring leadership, which are rumbling with vulnerability, braving trust, living our values and learning to rise.

Being a leader takes courage, takes courage to let go of the assumption that we as leaders have it all figured out. It takes courage to let an employee or team member take ownership over a project. It takes courage to have a difficult conversation with members of our team. It takes courage to look at ourselves and be willing to say, I'm going to try to grow as a leader even if it's hard. Again it's kind of a sobering responsibility and is it that you're being watched all the time? And the answer is unfortunately yeah, a lot of times we have unrealistic expectations of our leaders. I remember being junior in Allergan and being in a meeting and sitting with the director and I was like, they must know everything. When I was a Director I was like, yeah, I don't really know anything, coz sometimes you don't know anything about the topic and you have to have the humility to ask the questions. But people often will have unrealistic expectations and part of what you can do and part of that is being very human and being willing to be vulnerable sometimes. And that's part of the challenge with that authentic style of leadership and leading because there's some vulnerability but there are ways to protect yourself as well, right? But at the end of the day you were much more fulfilled and you feel much better. And when you put your head down on the pillow at night, you can rest better knowing that you are authentic self and you are bringing your best to your team or whatever situation you're working in as a leader.

As leaders, we are in a prime position to have to deal with uncertainty risk and emotional exposure, meaning we have to get messy with vulnerability. Just think about it, relationships with people who are looking to you to make decisions, to be a role model, to empower them, to do great work and to grow themselves as leaders. Just to name a few of the responsibilities of leaders that require us to be vulnerable, because of all of this, it can be easy to build up a sort of emotional armor. So what does this armor look like?

Defaulting to making a decision without listening to others, avoiding hard conversations, being a no or instead of a learner, blaming others instead of considering our own role in the situation. Being courageous is about getting vulnerable and learning to lower that armor. So how do we practice lowering the armor? How do we develop that sense of courage requires practicing vulnerability? Play with vulnerability, Brené Brown calls this rumbling with vulnerability and I like that to test out what it feels like to acknowledge your vulnerability instead of hiding from it.

Start by acknowledging those places of risk, uncertainty and emotion with people you trust employees, team members supervise or maybe even family members. I have to get vulnerable to be a good leader, get curious, ask yourself? I wonder where vulnerability appears for me, look for opportunities to shift from blame to internalization. Good problem solvers look for the source of a problem and in teams and organizations that often turns into finding someone to blame. This is a great place to practice being vulnerable. It's easy to blame others, it's harder to acknowledge our own role in a problem or sometimes even to forgive when someone has done something wrong. If you find yourself leaning toward blaming someone, turn inward, acknowledge any resistance you are feeling and see if you can figure out why, then consider other elements of the system around you that may be playing in a role in this problem.