What is leadership? This was the first question posed during a leadership course I attended last year, and I was surprised at how difficult it was to answer. I was able to reel off a dozen qualities of good leadership, but summarising all of those qualities succinctly proved elusive. At one point I thought I had found the answer when I suggested that being a leader was being whatever your team needed you to be at that time, but the question was then posed about whether leadership was also about being able to prioritise your own needs. At times those needs can conflict with the needs of the team, and therefore I was no nearer finding a neat answer to the question.
The purpose of the discussion wasn’t to arrive at a neat answer. The purpose was to consider everything being a leader entailed, and the challenges that presents. Later in the course, the role of leaders in shaping the culture of a team or organisation was discussed, though over the past week I’ve been reflecting on an important omission from that discussion – vulnerability.
When people discuss a healthy culture in the workplace, the focus is often on how to make coming to work fun and rewarding. However, a healthy culture will also be one where people feel comfortable feeling vulnerable, whether that be knowing there is someone they can speak to if they are experiencing challenges in terms of their mental or physical health, or the vulnerability that is felt when questioning decisions made by others, particularly those more senior in the organisation. The traditional view of leadership is one of strength and resilience, against which the need to be comfortable being vulnerable seems a contradiction, but it isn’t.
The reason why this conflict has been on my mind in recent days is because having come through a few weeks which were tough personally for several reasons, I was looking forward to a week of annual leave as an opportunity to refresh and recharge. That was until a nasty wasp or bee sting to my face last Sunday left me feeling bad and looking worse (if you want further details, look at my recent Instagram post). At one point I couldn’t even wear my glasses comfortably, and whilst the swelling was barely noticeable by Wednesday, I was still limited in what I could do.
I began to feel increasingly frustrated by how my week was unwinding. Normally my way to cope with that type of frustration is to go for a run, but when I tried to do that, I realised that my body was still physically drained and not ready for even moderate exercise. Which, in turn, was even more frustrating. Far from coming back to work refreshed, it looked like I would be coming back to work feeling much worse than when I left. I therefore started thinking about if it would be something I needed to address when I got back to work, and if so, what that would look like.
I haven’t made a decision on that yet. Thankfully I have been able to exercise over the weekend, and am looking forward to visiting the Kenilworth Food Festival this afternoon, so am feeling a lot better now than I was a couple of days ago. But I’m more aware than ever that I still have plenty of work to do in terms of showing vulnerability as a leader. I recently ran some workshops on how to deal with difficult conversations, and whilst the purpose of that was primarily to help equip the team with the skills to deal with those conversations as best as possible, it did prove a useful opportunity to demonstrate vulnerability too.
Moving forwards, I want to look for other opportunities to display vulnerability. Having never really sought those opportunities out before, I’m not really too sure where to look. Every organisation is different, and there is only so much you can learn from the outside, particularly in terms of culture which really needs to be experienced to be understood. One area I like to look at is professional sport. Whilst you don’t see all of the preparation and never really know what is said privately, we get to see not only the outcome of their work but a lot of the process too.
One sports team which has both been praised and at times ridiculed for their culture recently is the England Men’s Test Cricket team. The leader of the team, Ben Stokes, is a fascinating case study. Last Summer, the question was put to him that his approach to batting was doing himself a disservice by being so attacking as to prevent him making big scores consistently, but Stokes refused to accept that argument, countering that it was important to demonstrate the approach that he wanted the team to take, not just speak about it in the dressing room.
Stokes’ leadership has been described with words such as boldness and aggression, but vulnerability should not be overlooked either. He has spoken often about the challenges he has faced with his mental health, and took a break from the game in 2021. Almost every player in the team has come out and said how much they enjoy playing for Ben Stokes, and any thoughts about whether that is just a message for the media are banished when you watch the team play.
Stokes is not the only example I could cite. Gareth Southgate is another. So too is Adam Peaty, who even in a primarily individual sport like swimming still has a leadership role within Team GB. And of course there are countless examples across other industries too. Opportunities to learn can come from the most unexpected places at times, and when you are dealing with a topic which is under-discussed like displaying vulnerability as a leader, those opportunities can be extremely valuable.