Vulnerability – a key skill for product leaders

It takes a healthy dose of courage and self-awareness to be ok with vulnerability. To become aware of how it affects your relationships and to start consciously using it to improve your working relationships. It took me quite a few loops to become aware, start experimenting with it and start learning how vulnerability turns into a strength and key skill. To be perfectly honest, there is still a small part of me that cringes and wants to hide in those moments where vulnerability it truly asked for. It does take courage to go there (and not avoid those conversations), and it’s 100% worth it!

Let’s start by first looking at a definition:

Vulnerability is the emotion we experience during times of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.
(Brené Brown)

Reading this your first reaction might be “no, I don’t want that!” and it is true, vulnerability is not the most pleasant and comfortable feeling in the world. And yet: it is at the core of true meaningful connections with other human beings, and as such also at the core of your most important working relationships. Would you not want to make sure that those are successful, thriving and a source of joy (rather than a draining and energy sucking experience)?

Brené Brown goes a step further and describes vulnerability as the “birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.” (Daring Greatly, Brené Brown, Penguin Random House). If you want to have these traits in your teams, you won’t get around the vulnerability part either.

How does vulnerability show up at work?

Vulnerability plays a role in a lot of situations you face in a product team. Here is a small selection of the ones I faced regularly in my product roles:

• Conversations about ethics and values that might be full of paradox and dilemmas. While knowing at the same time that ethics and values need to inform my team’s vision and strategy for the impact we want to create. (Here are some tips on how to get started with this)
• Conversations with stakeholders to align on priorities, when those priorities will disappoint expectations. It asks of me to anticipate and be with the resulting tension and conflicts in a calm, constructive and empathetic way. Aware that all perspectives on my priority decisions are valuable input, but not all of them can be fully satisfied.
• Talking about my feelings (e.g. the anxiety and uncertainty I experience about getting vision and strategy right when our market is constantly changing, when there is a surprising delay in delivery, or a contradicting new insight from discovery or client conversations.)
• Feedback conversations (both giving and receiving it)
• Remembering that product leaders don’t have all the answers, but ask important questions
• Apologizing to a colleague about how I spoke to them in a meeting when I did not show up as the best version of myself.
• Releasing a feature and seeing, that it does not produce the intended commercial success or impact. Or releasing something and finding bugs in production, or learning that my product leads to unintended negative impact for our customers. It takes guts to then sit in the conversations with partners or clients, or in triage calls with the angry colleagues from customer success, who are the first to receive a wave of complaints about the issue my team just created.
• Having to roll back a feature and explain transparently, what led to the mistake, what you and the team are learning from it and how you plan to prevent this in the future (especially when you pretty much know, that you can’t guarantee that there will be no future mistakes. You can do your best not to make this particular mistake again, but bugs and honest mistakes will likely happen again).

While these are all uncomfortable and often difficult situations, they are actually key moments to show up in a way that maintains connection, these situations present opportunities to keep trust and earn respect from those around you. If you manage to be with them in a constructive way. Something you will likely not always manage, but then the skill to apologize and repair the damage you just contributed to will become even more important.

What might help you train your vulnerability muscle?

If I could go back in my own career and tell myself to be more courageous and less avoidant with those situations, I would have benefitted a lot. Everything I described above will likely happen to you as part of being in your product role. So my key advice would be:

Expect to feel vulnerable a lot more than feels comfortable – learn to lean into it!

It’s simply normal to face these situations. Product work is about creating new things. It is by definition coming with uncertainty, risk, ambiguity and complexity. You will make decisions you wish you had made differently, and you will find yourself in conversations you wish you had shown up different for. Name this and normalize it in your teams.

When you do anticipate and expect that feelings of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure are simply part of every product leader’s life, you can start preparing yourself to be with vulnerability in a better way. As funny as it sounds, put a sticky note with those Brene Brown quotes where you can see it. It will make it more present for you, that vulnerability is the birthplace of so many cool things. Connection, belonging, joy, empathy, accountability, authenticity and ultimately trust rest on a foundation of vulnerability. These are also the keys to psychological safety and high performing teams. Your courage to be vulnerable ultimately translates into the success of your team.

Also find a way to speak about how work makes you feel. You can have the conversation with your entire team, in a product community, or in 1:1 meetings with your direct reports and managers. Dare to share how your work, or a specific work relationship makes you feel, and intentionally go about building and repairing relationships constantly. Michael Bungay Stanier describes a great way to do this in his book “How to work with (Almost) Anyone: Five Questions for Building the Best Possible Relationships”.

Learn what your dark side looks like. What patterns and behaviors surface when you’re stressed? Share those with your team and ask for their feedback and help to flag for you when it happens, and to help adjust your behavior on the spot. This takes real courage, but makes your team your co-creators of shaping you into the leader you really want to be.

Learn how to intentionally create a break between trigger and reaction and how to calm yourself down immediately and effectively in high stress situations. The key is to anticipate the stressful situations (they will come, and the list above is a great starting point for the kind of things you can anticipate). Then show up having a plan, and an effective practice for how to regulate your emotions in the moment. A great way to start with this is anything that trains your self-awareness of your own emotional state and body signals for stress. Any mindfulness practice will be great here. Learning a few breathing techniques (e.g. box breathing or any of the other techniques described here) will help you quickly self-regulate and put you back at choice in how you want to react to something stressful happening in the moment.

You can also work with a sparring partner and accountability buddy (this could be a trusted peer, your manager or your coach) to develop the leadership presence you actually want to be. Make a commitment to yourself to invest time in your personal development (beyond technical skills), and to connect with, effectively channel and tap into your wise inner leader presence. We all have this part of us, who acts as our wise inner friend, with full access to our intuition, knowledge and wisdom, the part of us that is at ease, is creative and has the best interest of ourselves and those around us at heart. Knowing who you are as that best version of yourself, what values matter to you, and how it feels to be connected with joy and wisdom, acts as a guiding north star to you in the face of any difficult decision or situation. Being connected with this wise and calm inner presence makes it easier to find the courage to be vulnerable. You’re simply not as scared of hard conversations, when you trust yourself to be ok with them. And finding that trust and acceptance can be practiced and learnt. You can anchor that feeling for yourself. It will make vulnerability feel a lot less scary as a result.

How not to be with vulnerable situations:

It’s super tempting to simply try and avoid them.

Like choosing not to ask for or provide feedback to avoid awkwardness. Or choosing not to address and apologize for the hurt feelings when you got angry or condescending in a frustrating or challenging meeting. It’s hard to dare sharing how something makes you feel (you may even hold a limiting belief that emotions don’t belong at work – as if you could prevent them from arising).

We’d all rather please others rather than tell them “no” as a result of one of our prioritization choices (but saying yes to everything is a surefire way to overwhelmed product teams).

We don’t like to admit when we were wrong about a strategic choice, but ignoring the new evidence coming out of UX research will not bend reality in a direction that somehow magically will make a feature or product work just to do as the favor to not have to admit to an error in judgement. What will help us instead is to learn fast and pivot to what works, even if that means a 180 degree different course from what you presented to management last week.

It also does not help to hide behind business and a full schedule when something uncomfortable has to be discussed with a key client or another team.

Numbing with lots of social media scrolling or a glass of wine at the end of the day will also not truly address that uncomfortable feeling of vulnerability, that arises from the normal stressors of a product role.

Perfectionism, pleasing, trying to “win” arguments and attempts to prove being “right” are other ways to avoid being with vulnerability. (Yes, I’ve tried all of those at times! No, they don’t create the kind of team culture or success you want.)

So what are you invited to instead?

You’re invited to consciously build and repair your important working relationships. You’re also invited to build the courage to be vulnerable. Connecting with your wise inner leader will make those hard product choices, priority conflicts, or feedback conversations a lot less stressful as a result. Practicing vulnerable conversations makes your retros, your 1:1 conversations, and all of your stakeholder conversations a lot more successful.

Keep your eyes on the price: Brené Brown’s research clearly surfaces that vulnerability is the “birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity“. The invitation to dare to be vulnerable ultimately leads to the foundational building blocks of high performing teams. You’re invited to become a lot more comfortable with uncomfortable conversations and situations.

Go ahead, think of at least one thing you will do to start training your vulnerability skills this coming week! Then tell somebody about it. Make them your accountability buddy in actually taking that next vulnerable step. They’ll also celebrate the results with you down the road!

Photo by Dalton Touchberry on Unsplash

___________________________
If you would like to explore this more: reach out for a free coaching session with me.
I coach, speak, do workshops and blog about #leadership, #product leadership, #AIEthics #innovation, the #importance of creating a culture of belonging and how to succeed with your #hybrid or #remote teams.

I’m also hosting a 3,5 day in person leadership retreat in the beautiful Bavarian Alps this fall. This will be an immersive experience to explore how you as a leader can intentionally create thriving and successful teams. What the best version of you as a leader looks like and what unconscious reactive patterns might stand in your way. We’ll look at practical ways to shift these. Join me and Philippe for the Inclusive Leaders Retreat! (Sept. 28th – Oct 1st, SEINZ Wisdom Resort Hotel, Early Bird Price is EUR 1990 through August 15th).

Get my latest blog posts delivered directly to your inbox.

Your email address will only be used for receiving emails with my latest blog posts in them. You can unsubscribe at any point in time.