Jacob Morgan – Leading With Vulnerability

Connect with Jacob:

• 

Connect with Dwight:

• 
• dwight.brown@salary.com

Connect with David:

• 
• 
• david.turetsky@salary.com

Podcast Manager, Karissa Harris:

• HRDataLabs@salary.com

 

Production by Affogato Media

Resources:

• Leading with Vulnerability
• Compensation Consulting
• HR Data Labs Season 7 Episode 11
• HR Data Labs Season 7 Episode 9

• “Leading with vulnerability is about talking about a gap [in competence, knowledge, experience, etc.] that you have and then demonstrating what you’re trying to do to close those gaps. ”
• “The #1 response that came back [from 14,000 employees who were asked why they were scared to lead with vulnerability at work] was, ‘I don’t want to be perceived as weak or incompetent.”

Announcer  00:02

Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record for their discussions into a beaker. Mix thoroughly. And voila, you get the HR Data Labs podcast, where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate and even irreverent, that count on each episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now, here's your host, David Turetsky.

 

David Turetsky  00:46

Hello, and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Turetsky alongside my friendand trusted colleague Salary.com own Dwight Brown, Dwight, how are you?

 

Dwight Brown  00:56

I'm doing well, David, how you doing?

 

David Turetsky  00:58

I'm good. It's snowing a lot outside today. They've closed down Franklin, Massachusetts, for the three and a half inches of snow that we have right now. Which, you know, it's not that much. Anyways, today we have with us a best-selling author, Jacob Morgan, Jacob, how are you?

 

Jacob Morgan  01:18

I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.

 

David Turetsky  01:20

Thank you for being here. So Jacob, why don't you give us a little bit about your background and all those best selling books you have? What five books?

 

Jacob Morgan  01:28

Yes, sir. Five books recently that just came out a couple, I guess a few months ago now called leading with vulnerability. And so we can talk a little bit about that as well. Sure. But basically, I got involved in everything that I'm doing, because I had bad jobs working for other people. And so around 1516 years ago, I went off on my own started writing, speaking, doing all sorts of fun stuff. And now here we are. Well,

 

David Turetsky  01:54

Well so everybody wants to be their own boss, but haven't been one. Yes. It's not as easy as people think.

 

Jacob Morgan  02:00

No, no, it's not. If that's easy everybody would do it.

 

David Turetsky  02:06

Well, everybody tries. Right. Yeah.

 

Jacob Morgan  02:08

I mean, there's certainly pros and cons to everything and anything that you do. But yeah, I mean, I've been very fortunate. And I've enjoyed being my own boss. But of course, I mean, you work like crazy, right? I mean, it's lots of challenges that come your way, I was fortunate to start off golf on my own when I didn't have kids that never mortgage, if you have a car payment, I was single, my expenses were low. So that that certainly helped. You know, if I were in the position I'm in now where I'm married, I have two kids and mortgage and all that sort of stuff. If I did go off on my own, it probably would have been much harder to do now than it was 1516 years ago. complications. Yes, yes. That's a nice way to put that complications. The best complications possible. Exactly. Yeah.

 

David Turetsky  02:50

So one of the things we love to do, Jacob is to ask each of our guests one fun thing that no one knows about them. What's your one fun thing?

 

Jacob Morgan  03:00

Oh, my goodness, I play competitive chess and racquetball. Let's probably some people don't know now. But not at the same time though, right? Now that the same that would be pretty impressive. If I could do both at the same time. That'd be very impressive. A Yeah, I am really into fitness health. So exercise all the time, eat healthy, so I'm really in depth into that whole space.

 

David Turetsky  03:20

So the fact that I have ramen, and pizza for lunch, that does not impress you at all

 

Jacob Morgan  03:24

that I'm in ramen, and pizza, just hearing those two things together. It's like shivers going down my spine. Well,

 

David Turetsky  03:33

Well, it's gonna be shivers going down my belly and a little bit because that's, that's lunch today. It's just no, well, you know, it's what you got to do. I, you know, kind of running out of time today. So, there you go, gotta do what you got to do. So the really cool thing that we're gonna be talking to you about today, the topic is leading with vulnerability, which is really about bringing together competence and connection. And this is one of the really cool things in HR. Is people having a really good EQ, I guess, right? Yep. So that that'll be a really interesting thing to explore. So let's talk about this in a way that might make sense to people and bring it a little bit home. What's the difference between being vulnerable and leading with vulnerability

 

Jacob Morgan  04:25

Vulnerabilities, I think something we are all familiar with. We've talked about it for years Brene Brown was one of the pioneers and doing your research in that space and making the phrase of the word vulnerability, commonplace something that we've talked about in our personal and professional lives. Simply put, when we think about vulnerability, you can broadly think of it as doing or saying something that exposes you to the potential of emotional harm. Now in your personal life, it's very clear why vulnerability is relevant and why it's important because it creates trust and connection and it builds relationships with friends, with family members, with your spouses, people who are close to you But inside of our organizations, we have a very different dynamic. inside of an organization, you have a boss, you have employees who work for you, you have customers, you have projects, you have deadlines, you have a salary, you have people who are depending on you, and people who you are dependent on. Now, in that kind of environment, simply just doing or saying something frequently, that exposes you to the potential of emotional harm is actually not going to serve you very well. In fact, purely being vulnerable at work can actually hurt you far more than it can help you. And so think about vulnerability is this idea of exposing a gap that you have, it can be a gap in competence, a gap in knowledge, a gap and experience a gap and emotion, a gap in whatever it is. Now, again, in your personal life, it's very clear why that's useful and why that's important. But in your professional life, do you just want to show up every day talking about the gaps that you have? That's really what vulnerability is, and what it's about. Leading with vulnerability, on the other hand, is about talking about the gaps that you have, and then demonstrating what you're trying to do to close those gaps. So for example, if you work on a team with somebody, or let's say somebody works on your team, and they come to you and they, and they say, Hey, I'm really sorry, I made a mistake, that's very vulnerable, right? They're exposing themselves to the potential of emotional harm. They're admitting to something that's uncomfortable, that's maybe a little bit embarrassing, something that questions their competence and their value to the team or to the organization. However, if somebody just comes to you and says, Hey, I'm really sorry, I made a mistake, I don't know what happened. You as a leader, are not going to look at that employee and say, Oh, gee, thank you so much for telling me, you, as a leader are gonna look at your employee and say, Great, thanks for telling me now what?

 

David Turetsky  06:42

Right? Did you fix it?

 

Dwight Brown  06:43

Right, exactly? How are you gonna find out what went wrong?

 

Jacob Morgan 06:46

Yeah the customer is still unhappy, the problem is still there, the product Hill is still hasn't been finished. And so you don't just want your employees to come to you and say, Oh, I'm so sorry, I did that you want your employees to say, hey, here's what I'm going to do to fix it. So leading with vulnerability would be taking that same scenario and saying, Hey, I'm really 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 to make sure that that mistake never happens again. So in other words, it's taking that accountability, that agency that control that you are learning and growing and improving and trying to get better. And too often inside of our organizations, we've been very focused on the emotional intelligence piece, which granted is important. But I feel like over the past few years, we've been forgetting that competence, that leadership, that being good at your job, that work ethic, that occasional sacrifice, that being able to tell people to work hard, we're forgetting about that. And that is still very important. It's not just about how your employees are feeling. But you also want to make sure that they are doing a great job. And saying that has almost become taboo in a lot of organizations. I mean, can you imagine a lot of leaders now saying, hey, you know, this job, this role is going to take occasional sacrifices from you. Sometimes you might have to stay late. Sometimes you might have to wake up early. Sometimes you might have to put in a few extra hours, sometimes you're going to have to do a job or rule that you don't want to do today, you tell employees that and they say, oh, oh my god,

 

David Turetsky  08:15

Well, they might leave over that. Right, they might see that is being a challenge or a threat to them in a certain way. Yeah. And you know

 

Jacob Morgan  08:22

What that's, that's, that's okay. It shouldn't be a challenge. It shouldn't be something that pushes you, it shouldn't be something that makes you uncomfortable. Now, again, this should part of this also depends on your personal expectations and your aspirations of yourself. If you are an employee who's comfortable being mediocre, you have no aspirations of growing, of developing of being the leader of getting into senior or executive level roles. And you just want to stay where you are for the rest of your life, that's fine. Go find a job where you're not pushed, where you're not challenged, where you can just work 30 hours a week when you can just coast and not have to worry about anything. But for most people in the world, that is not something that they want, they aspire to these roles, they want to make an impact, they want to make a difference. They want to get into those leadership positions. And guess what? That's going to take time and effort. I interviewed Frank Blake, he's the former CEO of the Home Depot. And he told me that one of the things that people don't understand about leadership is that leaders always do more, and they care more. And so we need employees to understand that if they have aspirations of growth and development, they have to do more, and they have to care more. So broadly speaking, those two differences between vulnerability and leading with vulnerability, vulnerability is about exposing a gap, leading with vulnerabilities about exposing a gap and demonstrating what you're trying to do to close that gap.

 

Dwight Brown  09:41

In terms of the revealing that gap, some might say, Hey, do I need to sing it from the mountaintops? Or is it okay to go through that with one individual my boss for example?

 

Jacob Morgan  09:52

Yeah, you I never recommend somebody to just in an all hands meeting, raise their hand and say I screwed up Ted. A URL, you know, post on your internal collaboration platform, I'm an idiot, I can't believe I failed, not advisable. I mean, context matters, right. And so only you are going to know who you need to be speaking with. If it's a leader, talk to your leader, if it's a team, talk to your team. But again, the big mistake, and we see this all the time with new leaders as well, when a new leader gets promoted either for a leadership role for the first time, or when they get promoted into an executive role, for the first time a senior leadership role. And they're told, hey, you know, why don't you say a few words to your team. And one of the things that first time leaders always say is they'll get in front of their all hands, their team, and they'll say, hey, you know, I'm so excited to be here. I've never been in this position before. But I know I'm going to make a positive impact. And we're going to do some amazing things together, I'm really looking forward to working with all of you. Now, on the surface, that doesn't sound like a terrible message. But it doesn't convey any kind of competence. It doesn't convey any kind of leadership. And so what can you do instead? Again, let's say you're a first time leader, you've never done this before. When you are addressing your team, you can start off with that same level of vulnerability, Hey, I've never done this before, I'm excited to be a first time leader. To help make sure I'm the best leader that you've ever had. Here are three things that I'm going to do. Number one, is I'm getting coaching and mentoring from our SVP of marketing, who's been at this company for 10 years, she's going to be checking in with me every week, we're going to be meeting for 30 to 60 minutes, so that she can give me some guidance on how I'm leading the team and how I'm progressing. I've also been working with an executive coach, this executive coach is going to be interviewing you and talking to you to make sure that I'm moving in the right direction. And here are three to five leadership books that I'm committed to reading over the next month. And I encourage you to grab a copy of this book as well, so that you can follow along with my progress and my leadership journey. And my door's always open, give me feedback, so that I can be the best leader that you've ever had. Now, again, I'm vulnerable in that situation, I'm acknowledging it admitting that I've never done this, but I'm also demonstrating competence. I'm demonstrating what I'm trying to do to close the gap, I have a coach, I'm being mentored by an executive at the company, I'm committing my time to reading these leadership books. So now, if you work for me, and I'm a first time leader, you're not going to say now, I don't know about this Jacob person, he's never done this before, I don't really know. Now, you're gonna say, hey, you know what, I know, Jacob has never done this before. But man, this guy seems serious about being a great leader and look at all these things that he's doing, I'm actually very happy working for this kind of a person. That's a very, very different message. And a very different way to position yourself inside the company should take a bit.

 

David Turetsky  12:31

But that takes investment for both the company as well as that person, and needs to be part of their individual development plan, especially not only after they've taken the job, but potentially even before they've taken that job so that they know that they have those things behind them, and next to them. And for that, for their development, is that really part of most companies development plans to be able to provide that kind of assistance? Or is that something that someone should actually be proactive about? If they are taking that kind of role?

 

Jacob Morgan  13:02

I think a lot of organizations do a fairly good job of providing those types of programs. But let's say you're part of an organization that doesn't have that. In fact, I found that most people, when they get put into leadership roles, they don't actually have any kind of formal leadership training. And so if you don't have any formal leadership training, then you need to be proactive and take advantage of a couple things yourself. So number one, is you can ask an executive to coach you and mentor you or to give you advice that's free. You can spend time reading books, listening to podcasts, even taking courses, most of that is pretty much free. Chances are your organization has a leadership development program that maybe you just don't know about. So ask to participate in that, that for you is likely also going to be free. You can meet with peers, you can meet with leaders and other companies and other teams and other departments. There's nothing stopping you from developing as a leader if you don't have that formal leadership training. In fact, a lot of the CEOs that I've interviewed for the book, for example, the CEO of one 800 flowers, Jim McCann, he never received any kind of formal leadership training, he learned how to lead based on the people that he surrounded himself with. And so you if you aspire to be in a leadership role, surround yourself with leaders, surround yourself with people who you emulate who you want to be like. And this gets into the whole debate, which we can talk about if you want. I'm working in the office versus working from home because I have a lot of strong opinions on that as well. Again, depending on if you aspire to be in that leadership role or not.

 

David Turetsky  14:31

Well, we'll get to that. But first, let's ask the next question, because I think it's important for this.

 

Announcer  14:38

Like what you hear so far, make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by Salary.com. Now back to the show.

 

David Turetsky  14:49

Why do most people not lead with vulnerability at work?

 

Jacob Morgan  14:54

Yeah, we asked 14,000 employees this question or we said why are you scared of leading with The vulnerability inside your organization. And not surprisingly, the number one response that came back is I don't want to be perceived as being weak or incompetent. Right? I mean, I don't want to expose myself and and share any gaps that I have. Because I don't want people to think that I'm that I don't belong here that I'm not good at my job. And so the way that you change that perception is pretty much what we've been talking about is you add competence to the vulnerability. So yeah, don't just say I made a mistake. Don't Don't just say, I don't know how to do this, don't just say I need help. Don't just say I'm unsure of what the next step is, don't just keep exposing the gap that you have. But add competence, add that level of leadership, to all of those different types of situations and scenarios when you feel vulnerable. So for example, if somebody on my team asks me for help, I'll say, Hey, I'm happy to help you, but what are you going to do going forward to make sure that you can figure this out yourself? Right, if somebody says, Hey, Jacob, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. I say, I appreciate you telling you, what are you going to do to make sure this doesn't happen again, in the future? If you have a friend in your personal life, who says, Hey, I'm trying to lose weight, or I'm trying to stop smoking? You say, great, what are you doing about it? Right. So it's, it all comes down to this idea of taking responsibility and accountability over your personal and your professional growth? Right, that is absolutely crucial. And that's what this whole theme of leading with vulnerability is about. And so that's, that's nonstop, when I tell employees, you have to combine leadership with vulnerability, competence, with connection, you cannot just have one

 

David Turetsky  16:34

A lot of times you will see the Peter Principle come into effect when people get promoted, right, they get promoted to their highest level of dysfunction, right. So somebody might be really great at building widgets, but they're not great at leading. And so the they're get promoted to a new role where they might actually have this leadership, as you know, one of their potential, you know, skills that they need to grow. It's in that case, it may not be as easy as just getting training. And while they have may have competence in all the other areas of their company, and that's really served them well. What did they do to kind of make sure that that's something that they can achieve? Or do people sometimes have to be much more mature about this? And sometimes say, I don't, I don't know if this is good for me. Maybe I should be in that other role instead? Oh, absolutely.

 

Jacob Morgan  17:21

There are many scenarios. And I used to work. This was many, many years ago, but I interned at Morgan Stanley way, way back in the day, I don't even remember, I mean, maybe I was 18 or 19 years old. And at the time, when I was working at Morgan Stanley for the summer, I noticed that all the people who were getting promoted to leadership roles to being like a VP or an SVP had nothing to do with their ability to lead other people. These were some of the biggest jackasses, rudest, just unpleasant people.

 

David Turetsky  17:54

I used to work there, too, and I got promoted there. So you're probably talking about me? Oh, it's okay. I own it. Yeah.

 

Jacob Morgan  18:03

But they got promoted into leadership roles, because they weren't bringing, bringing in a lot of deals. Right. So if you were managing X amount of millions of dollars, you were a VP or an SVP had nothing to do with your ability to lead anybody else. And I was working in an interning and I was interning, I think it was for an SVP there. And man, this guy was just, I don't want to get into the details. But he was just rude and unpleasant, had no social skills, no emotional intelligence. And I'm sitting there thinking, like, how the hell are you an SVP at this organization simply because you brought in a lot of money. And this is very common inside of organizations around the world, right? And so the big challenge here is, I mean, very rarely are you going to see somebody in that position, say, hey, you know what, I know you want me to be SVP here. But now I know, thank you, like, I acknowledge, I don't have these skills. And I'm just going to turn down this massive race and the partnership opportunity. Leaders are very rarely ever going to do that. And so the big challenge there, and what we need to do is to focus on defining what leadership means what does it mean to be a great leader inside of your organization? And identify what are those filters? What are those values? What are those qualities and attributes and mindsets and skills and make sure that those are the types of people that you're promoting. And one of the things that I'm always fascinated by is I would go inside of an organization, I've been inside hundreds, if not 1000s of them at this point. And I would see it in the same company with the same corporate values with the same principles with the same mission and vision statement. There will be some leaders that everybody loves, admires and respects in other leaders in that same company that everybody's scared of and hates and fears. Now, how is it that the same company, same culture, same values, two different types of leaders, one that everybody loves, one that everybody hates? It's because the people who promoted them have different definitions of what leadership is. And so this is why at an organizational level, and one of the one of the things that HR can really step in to do is to define what does it mean to be a leader at Our company, what are the values that we're looking for and the qualities and the attributes and only promote people that have those things. And even if you bring in a lot of money to the business, if you don't have that coaching and mentorship mindset, if you don't have the mindset where you put people first and where you take care of those that are around you, even though you bring in a lot of money, hey, you know what we'll take care of you as an individual contributor, you'll get a bonus, you'll get all those different types of things, but you will not be put into a position where you're leading other people, unless you can demonstrate that you have these qualities. And that needs to be the way that we promote.

 

David Turetsky  20:33

Jacob, let's talk about that. Because that's really important. We do a lot of work with companies to create career frameworks where we have leveling guides, and the leveling guides have significant criteria attached to each level. Now, many companies do a really good job of separating individual contributor tracks from managerial and executive tracks. And they allow for levels to creep up into the executive levels, but really never all the way up, you know. And I've experienced other companies and Dwight, I think we've worked on projects where we've seen other companies that do have individual contributor levels, almost at the executive committee level that high, while they have influence over the entire organization, to your point, they don't have those leadership skills. And so therefore, they're not in people, management positions, they're in thought leadership positions, and they're allowed to flourish and be able to get those rewards that are necessary monetary, as well as as leadership in an industry and be seen as that leader in the industry, without actually having to have that, quote, unquote, leader and that and have that those skills, because they don't typically these are people who are brilliant. But as to your point before, they're jerks. I've kind of been that in an organization. And so because you know, you didn't have that capability, you had to be in that individual contributor track. Why don't most companies have that?

 

Jacob Morgan  21:59

I think for a few reasons. Number one, it doesn't go with how we typically structured companies, right? I mean, our idea of a company is you have a hierarchy, and you climb the corporate ladder. And so the assumption is, if you're no longer climbing that ladder, if you're not getting promoted into those leadership roles, then you're not climbing that corporate hierarchy, and you're not good at your job, and you are not a high performer. And so I think we need to separate this idea of being a high performer from being somebody who's quote, unquote, climbing that ladder and being responsible for others, you can be an amazing individual contributor, but be a really bad leader. And so we need to separate those two things. Just because you're a great performer doesn't mean you're a great leader. That's first of all. Second, I think we need to change the way that we promote people, because right now what we do is we focus on people who bring in the most amount of money to the business, and we promote them instead. And I'm not saying that that's not important, obviously, you want somebody especially in sales was able to bring in a lot of money to the business. But that shouldn't be the only criteria and the only metric that we look at. So we shouldn't be looking at those other skills, those other qualities and attributes as well. I think a third reason we're scared of losing top talent. If you have somebody who's performing very well, on an individual level, you don't want them to leave to one of your competitors. And so what do you do, you say, oh, you know, you stay here, we're going to, we're going to promote you, yeah, you're going to leave the whole team now and five of 20 people. And we forget that, even an individual contributor, if you put them in charge of a team of 10 people, and they're not a great leader, what you've just done is sabotage your team. And the value of that individual contributor, is now being eclipsed by the poor performance of the team, that that individual contributor is now leading because they do not have the ability, the skills and the qualities to lead effectively. So it seems like a good short term solution because you kept that employee. But you've also hurt the broader team and the organization in the long run, because the team as a whole is now performing worse. And not only that, but that individual contributor is now no longer an individual contributor. They're not doing the job that they were so good at. They're now leading other people who are doing that job. So you've shot yourself in the foot twice, because that top performer is no longer doing that task that made them a top performer. And now you have somebody who doesn't know how to lead, sabotaging the team. And so you're hurting the team and the individual performer and now everything is gonna go down at the same level. And a lot of teams and a lot of organizations and a lot of leaders simply don't realize that they just think in terms of Oh, yeah, so and so is still working here. We were able to keep them and that's not the right approach.

 

Dwight Brown  24:35

That makes total sense. Essentially, you're polluting the pond. Yeah. Trying to keep that one fish but you're polluting upon.

 

Jacob Morgan  24:43

Yep, exactly.

 

David Turetsky  24:45

So Jacob, one of the things I was gonna say is performance management systems aren't doing a great job of capturing that either. They may be capturing certain goals. They may be capturing certain metrics, but they're definitely not unless they're capturing values. They're not filtering that out. Absolutely

 

Jacob Morgan  25:03

Absolutely! Couldn't agree more. And I like the divide said what I was trying to say in about like five words polluting the pond, I had one apple that ruins the entire batch.

 

David Turetsky  25:12

That's a good quote twice.

 

Jacob Morgan  25:14

Now that we were talking, I think one of the reasons that came to mind is just fear, right? We are scared to rock the boat. We're scared to do things differently. We are in. So one of the things that I've been thinking about that I haven't shared is this idea of an establishment versus an anti establishment leader inside of an organization. So we've been very obsessed with this idea of establishment leaders, leaders who are always maintaining the status quo, doing things the way that they've always been done, not thinking differently. And we need more anti establishment leaders who are going to come into a business and challenge convention and ask questions. We're so scared to write where I was worried that we have to put out fires. But sometimes we need leaders who are going to be the ones to start those fires and say, Wait a minute, that doesn't make sense. And we need more people like that the anti establishment, anti traditional leadership stereotype approach to just kind of break things and figure out new ways of getting things done?

 

David Turetsky  26:06

Absolutely. Well, a lot of times those people don't get promoted, they get mitigated or minimized because they're troublemakers.

 

Jacob Morgan  26:14

Yeah, exactly. And we need more than I agree.

 

David Turetsky  26:19

Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, Man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck, we have a special offer for listeners of the HR data labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast, or whatever is on your mind. Go to Salary.com forward slash HRDLconsulting, to schedule your FREE 30 minute call today.  Jacob, let's go to the last question, which is, can you tell us the difference between what it's like to have vulnerability work and vulnerability in our personal lives? Can you give us examples? And how do you start leading with vulnerability?

 

Jacob Morgan  26:57

Yeah, I mean, the difference is kind of what we talked about at the beginning, right? I mean, if I go to my wife, for example, and I say, hey, you know what, I had a really bad day. Or, and I, I did a speech or I did XYZ, and I really didn't think it went well, I didn't feel like I performed well, I can stop there. Right? I don't need to, there's no, I don't owe her anything, she doesn't owe me anything, I don't work for her, she doesn't work for me, she's not paying my bills, I'm not paying her like that dynamic isn't there, it's just purely there for the relationship for the support for the company. Now, I'm not saying you can't have some of that inside of an organization. But again, inside of the company, you have a different dynamic, or you have people who are dependent to you and on you. So if I'm an employee, and I keep showing up to work every day, and let's say I do have a supportive leader, but just everyday I'm showing up, I'm having a hard time, I don't know how to do this, I'm not feeling great, I'm going through a tough over time, if you keep doing that, eventually your leader is going to look at you and they're gonna say, You know what, maybe this isn't the best fit, because it seems like you're having a hard time doing what you got hired to do. And we forget that the relationship between an employee and an organization is exactly that it's a relationship, it's a mutual exchange of value. And at a certain point, if you are not demonstrating that you are providing value to the organization to the leader that you are working with, and for then, bluntly put, what you say are you what value are you bringing to the team into the business, there are 100 1000 other people who are willing to step into that role to do the job that you had, probably better than you were able to do it. And so at a certain point, you do need to step up, um, to be accountable and to be responsible for what you need to do.

 

David Turetsky  28:40

There's a difference between being vulnerable in the way in which you're defining it. But being your authentic self. We all know that people are being challenged by whether it's whether it's their, their children, their older parents, mental health issues, or whatever. And not being your authentic self means that you're, you're not exactly being honest with the company either. And if you're having challenges, and I get I get balanced, right? You're talking about balance, you're saying, Don't do that. Don't be completely vulnerable. But also, just be careful, you're not exposing your whole self.

 

Jacob Morgan  29:15

And by the way, authenticity and vulnerability are not the same thing. Those are two separate two separate pieces, right? Because you could look at somebody like a jack Walsh or a Steve Ballmer. They were very authentic. But they were not vulnerable. I mean, they had no problem cursing you out, or throwing a chair or computer across the room and basically looking like they wanted to punch you in the face. And they were as authentic as they get. But they were not vulnerable. But sorry, sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. You're getting to your point about like, if you were going through a tough time or something like that, right?

 

David Turetsky  29:44

Yeah, no, I think you made the point quite nicely, which is that there's a gigantic difference between being authentic and exposing something that you should probably shouldn't be, or having a good balance between your vulnerability and sharing or oversharing. Right. Yeah.

 

Jacob Morgan  29:59

Absolutely, I mean, at the very central piece of I have this framework called the vulnerability wheel. And at the very center of that is intention. And if you do not have intention, basically understanding why is it that I want to share or do whatever it is that I want to share with you, if you don't have that intention, then it all falls apart. And yeah, there have been lots of situations where employees, we're CEOs go through a tough time. And that's fine. And that's okay. And it's okay to talk about that and to share those things. But I mean, even in those situations and scenarios, like I remember, Shelley Archambault, She's the former CEO of price smart, and I think they have around 10 or 12,000 employees. And she was telling me this story where her father recently had a stroke, and this was during the pandemic. And she still had to leave these team meetings. While her father was in her house upstairs, he you know, recently had a stroke, and she was taking care of them, and also leading these team meetings. And you know, so she had to be able to figure out a way to do both. Now, if you are going through something like that, it's okay to say I need time. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they assume that they don't need time, and they try to do both when they realistically can't, right. So somebody, maybe a family member passes away, and they're back at work the next day, and you're like, What the hell are you doing here? Or you're, you know, you just had a kid, and three days later, you're back in the office. And I think that's when we get into problems where we don't understand what our boundaries are. And we don't understand that we need time. And we need space to get to the level that we need to get to. And that's when I think a lot of things start to crumble. So if you go through a tough time, it's okay to go to your leader and say, hey, you know what, I'm really going through a tough time, I don't think I can be the best that I can be here. I need a few days off, or I need a week to deal with my personal stuff that I'm doing. And when I get back, I'm going to be back at 100%. having those conversations is okay. i And again, what's not okay is just to show up and say, I'm going through all this difficult stuff in my life. But I'm still gonna show up here and fire and then I'm fine. Yeah, and your team is gonna look you they're gonna save energy for all of us to do. Yeah, it's a tendency to do it. But what happens is your work suffers, your team suffers, your leaders are looking at you thinking like, What the hell are you doing here. And now what you're doing is you're just trying to use vulnerability as a way to justify your poor performance. Now, what happens? You show up every day, and you say, Hey, I told you, you know, I'm going through this tough time. And this is why my performance is low, when really what you should have done instead is said, I need time and space, because I'm not going to be able to perform. I'll be back when I'm, you know, when I'm able to be at that level. And I think if you can do that you'll be doing yourself and your team a big service.

 

David Turetsky  32:39

Jacob, I've learned so much already. And we're about 30 Something minutes. I wish we could keep doing this all day, we might ask you back to keep talking about it. If you don't mind.

 

Jacob Morgan  32:49

Hey, I'm happy to come back and share all sorts of fun stuff. Cool.

 

David Turetsky  32:53

Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you.

 

Jacob Morgan  32:56

Thank you for having me, Dwight. Thank you.

 

Dwight Brown  32:58

Thank you. And this definitely given me a lot to chew on myself. So yeah,

 

David Turetsky  33:02

I think we can both pull some very important examples for how we lead differently. And what we're going to do is in the show notes, we're also going to put links to your books, too. So people want to check out your books, they can certainly do that.

 

Jacob Morgan  33:09

Yeah, that would be great. So I was gonna say my email is Jacob at the future. organization.com If anybody has any questions, or they want to share any stories, then I can also mention my substack if people want to join there, it's great. leadership.substack.com

 

David Turetsky  33:27

There you go. Well, again, Jacob, thank you so much. And thank you everybody for listening, take care and stay safe.

 

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