Initially I thought this is just a fluff piece with some idealistic goals.
Turns out it has actual, detailed examples of how a leader can cultivate culture. This is super valuable because a lot times it's not intuitive how a leader's action leads to people behaving certain ways.
Kate Matsudaira is an amazing tech leader and writer who covers topics from culture and process, to Distributed Systems and Architecture, I cannot recommend her essays enough.
What kind of culture do you think could pull off such a complex, high-stakes mission that lasted not even fifteen minutes? The entire mission was Livestreamed. It was amazing. History was made. The doors were literally blown off.
The points that the author made in the article are represented in a body of academic study and were validated at companies such as Google some time ago. These aren't her own novel findings, but she does a good job summarizing into a single article.
A lot of what they say is really obvious, except if you are an incredibly toxic individual. The core problem with this is not that it won't work IMO, it's that the right people won't internalise the advice.
If you were genuinely questioning whether this advice makes a difference, I'm happy for you. You've apparently never had to see the examples of where it is not applied. I can tell you from experience that working in a team with one or more toxic leaders is like dying a slow death every day you come to work.
Can someone help me understand current use of the word, vulnerable? At least in the context of leadership/self-help writings like this I'm seeing the word used a lot, and it's not being used the way that I would expect.
For example, in these writings "be vulnerable" is a suggestion for a way to help yourself, to improve yourself. In my understanding of the word, being vulnerable is never a good thing. It's always been used as a negative thing to avoid. "Your code is vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks unless..." Right? Also, I'm not used to it being used in a general sense like, "be vulnerable," it's usually, "watch out, you are vulnerable to X, Y, or Z."
From context I think I'm starting to understand what it means, but it's a struggle for me every time I read this kind of stuff. Is there a better (at least for me?) word I can substitute in my head?
I'd say "vulnerable" in this context would be admitting personal / professional weaknesses and significant professional mistakes. In a bad corporate culture, being vulnerable in such a way would be used against you by your peers and managers to damage your political standing and to deny you bonuses, promotions, etc. In a more positive culture, that same knowledge would be used by your peers and managers to use their strengths to cover your weaknesses, help you and others learn from your mistakes, and so forth.
From that text, I think they might be talking about being open to showing any kind of weakness or ability to use help -- perhaps in contrast to an environment of posturing, competition, maneuvering.
Words are loaded. Being more "vulnerable" than you have to is something you probably don't want to do, with most organizations. A manager encouraging "vulnerability" within the organization is suspect. (Especially when the organization they cite for this school of thought is known for one-way hazing hiring process, having to play games for engineering promotions, etc.)
I prefer the term "humility", such as in intellectual humility in reasoning (I'd think this is an easy sell, even if hard to practice) and/or a sense of humility as a person (maybe not as easy a sell, or debatable).
Think of this scenario: your group has a new manager that none of you have met. Now lets imagine that this manager is fairly inexperienced (you don't know that yet). Consider a couple of options.
1) They come in at first aggressively controlling, because they don't want to look inexperienced or weak.
2) They come in saying 'Look team, I don't really know what I'm doing yet, and I need your help working it out'
The vulnerability exists in both cases (inexperience). How you treat it can hugely effect team dynamics. I think work like this often suggests the latter approach is much more effective on average. NB there are definitely times when showing vulnerability isn't going to help things at all.
The internet is a cruel and hostile place, where if you are vulnerable you are eaten alive. You must proceed as if every input comes from far someone smarter than you and bent on your destruction. Your designs must trade off other desirable properties in exchange for a defensible security posture. Human environments can be like that too, but good ones aren't.
System design, in some organizations, is about generating a paper trail that protects the architect's career in the investigation after something inevitably goes wrong. You cannot take prudent risks, adopt good new technologies, etc, even if they actually reduce project failure rate. Project failures still happen, and having done something like that on a failed project is career suicide.
In other organizations, teammates feel completely at ease having conversations that, reported to HR out of context, could be career-ending.
"Be vulnerable" says you should try to make your organization more like the latter, which sometimes means going first, taking risks with your metaphorical ass uncovered and showing your teammates that you trust them not to defect.
For the systems architect example, I'd like to suggest for discussion an (opinion-heavy) point between the two you mentioned:
* Admit mistakes freely. It's the right thing to do, it's good for the culture, and anyone you should want to work with will respect that, and also do it themselves. People usually pick up on actual culture quickly.
* Do appropriate engineering diligence and responsibility, not CYA. This includes identifying and clearly communicating tradeoffs and risks, and discussing with others. Sometimes you will be vulnerable to a hypothetical party who might try to throw you under the bus, but you should avoid organizations where that's a likely consideration. If an organization is doing bad things, and it goes to the top and can't be fixed -- the concern is not to CYA while you stay, but to leave.
* Avoid situations in which "conversations that, reported to HR out of context, could be career-ending". That means avoiding organizations with HR that is feared rather than respected, and it occasionally might mean considering how a conversation could sound, out of context. (For the latter, I'm thinking scenarios like mutual joking among colleagues, then one person complains -- you never want to be giving a deposition of what everyone said about each other's mothers. I'm not talking about work-related things: if discussing work with your team can be career-ending, maybe you're in a bad organization, and/or doing something bad.)
* Avoid organizations that have been caught treating employees badly, yet who ask for employees to be "vulnerable". And where executives don't lead by example. The entire organization might not be onboard with being a safe place, and wanting others to be "vulnerable" might be a euphemism for "exploitable by me". (Advisors might've been sincere when they came up with the "vulnerable", but the necessary "safe place" precondition got lost along the way.) Be honest, trustworthy, diligent, responsible, and at times humble, foster mutual trust among colleagues, but be skeptical of anything that looks like a wolf asking hens to be vulnerable.
Effective collaboration requires an environment where everyone feels safe to be vulnerable.
Even by proposing an idea you're opening yourself up to criticism, not just of the idea, but of your competence or even personal attacks. Just read through some HN threads to see the kinds of responses that are common.
Or admitting when you've made a mistake that broke production, or wasted the team's time for a few days. These make you vulnerable.
Admitting you don't know something might lead to questions about your competency in a toxic environment.
Being open like this is necessary for teams to ensure ideas are critiqued and improved with the best of everyone's input, as well as learn and improve from things that go wrong.
Imagine the opposite. A senior member of the team states an idea that others in the team can see will fail, but won't speak up because they fear a snide shutdown from said person. Or a flawed system that makes it easy to damage production data, never fixed because when it happens no-one feels safe to admit that it has happened.
Creating an environment where people feel safe to be vulnerable in this way is therefore important.
One way to promote this environment is to be vulnerable yourself. Admit publicly when you're wrong. Ask questions even when you think you ought to know the answer. Bring your whole self to work etc
I may be wrong, please correct me if I am. The way I read it is pretty synonymous to psychological safety.
Sometimes speaking up about an idea in a meeting opens yourself up to be contradicted and challenged in ways that may be percieved as uncomfortable. The lack of vulnerability stifles ideation and promotes groupthink because differing opinions and unconventional ideas won't be shared.
Mh, I think it's the opposite: people won't speak up if they are vulnerable. Tenure gives scientific freedom because it removes the vulnerability of being easily fired. If you're rich, you can be honest, because annoying people and getting fired won't hurt you - you're not vulnerable.
I think it's about expressing vulnerability, not merely being vulnerable (which we all are, and have no control over, whether we choose to express it or not).
A simple example of expressing a vulnerability is prefacing a technical opinion with "I'm not too familiar with this technology, but..." or asking a teammate for help with a problem that is giving you trouble.
These just don't fit into my understanding of vulnerability. Saying you're not an expert is either honesty (if you're not) or misplaced modesty (if you are / know enough to be sure that what follows after the 'but' is right).
This usage gives me a bit of a vibe of "retaking a word". I vaguely get the idea with slurs, but vulnerability isn't a slur, and changing the meaning won't make anybody less vulnerable, it will just make communicating about that which traditionally was called vulnerable harder.
A tiny change and that advice makes total sense to me: help others be less vulnerable.
The main thing is to share vulnerability, otherwise only your team members are vulnerable.
If things go wrong, people will be blamed and there may be consequences. The point is that when that happens, the team lead takes part of the blame instead of pointing fingers to others.
Take responsibility for mistakes made by your team, perhaps.
1) Always be willing to admit you don't know something. Ask others for their feedback. Listen to constructive criticism.
2) Whenever there's a problem start with the assumption that it's your fault. For example, if your call to an API fails, assume you're calling it wrong; if there's a misunderstanding between you and someone else, assume that you're not paying attention.
A good team will eventually hone in on the real problem and solve it together.
A lot of people are guarded in corporate settings. They speak in corporate talk and don’t really appear human. If you’re “vulnerable” then this shield of corporate invincibility is put down and people can be people. That’s in my view what is meant - whether this is the proper use of the term, I will leave to you. For me, vunerability, empathy, and gratitude have all become corporate lingo that at this point I would be surprised if anyone truly knew what they were talking about but I guess it feels better to say them.
Words mean whatever people who use them intend them to mean.
Having said that, I think this is a particularly cumbersome shoehorning.
Here's my attempt to explain: be vulnerable in this context actually means be strong, thereby turning vulnerable in to an auto-antonym - a word that is it's own opposite. Also know as Janus word, contronym, or antagonyms.
Allow me to elaborate, and then I'll provide a context for my elaboration.
It takes strength to admit fault and weakness because it requires one to expose their flaws, inconsistencies, triggers. It requires one to expose their vulnerabilities.
The context to support the idea I'm presenting here is that we can't, in the current social climate use the word strength in this scenario because that would be implying someone specific is weak, and that is perceived by some as an attack.
So we've substituted the technically correct word, strength, for it's opposite, vulnerable, due in large part to our collective weaknesses.
I like my explanation because it's a little bit fun and societal-level self-deprecating.
Our culture is turning in to a satirical plush-toy caricature of itself.
I have my suspicions that this is a healthy, and necessary, stage of social progress. Hopefully this turns out, over time, to be less intimidating, and more inclusive and encouraging, than the previous stages, which by many measures has significant problems for large swathes of the global community.
I think you're trying way too hard to make a thing out of this. You were able to give an explanation of 'be vulnerable' here in the shortest sentence in your paragraph
> [Be vulnerable here means] expose their vulnerabilities
I put a bit of effort in to providing a comprehensive, multi-pronged, take on my interpretation of what's going on with this use of vulnerable, a use that isn't covered by any of the entries for the word vulnerable listed in any of the dictionaries I have close at hand.
The article doesn’t mention directness or confrontation. When your people do great things you need to openly celebrate that and advertise it outside the team. When your people do bad things you need to be confrontational, mentor your people with a path to success, and put all that on paper. It is much easier to separate that bad apple when you have paper.
The article does mention leading by example, which is important. Taken to another level let it be known that you will never ask your people to do something that you are not willing to do yourself. You cannot lead by example if you don’t set boundaries and goals for the team and heavily enforce such. When everything is nebulous and the standards are not defined your people will do what they can get away with like children running the day care.
Just finished trillion dollar coach, great book. Quick read, lots of great topics about team building etc. Great stuff, and great to hear Bill's story. Wild how he was connected and cared for so many influential people, his Co workers etc. If anyone has a personal story I'd love to hear it.
Turns out it has actual, detailed examples of how a leader can cultivate culture. This is super valuable because a lot times it's not intuitive how a leader's action leads to people behaving certain ways.