Let’s Get Vulnerable: Patrick Lencioni Meets Brené Brown
If you know me, you know that I believe Patrick Lencioni’s book The Five Temptations of the CEO is a must-read for anyone who wants to improve as a leader. I make it required reading for all my coaching clients and we continually reference “The 5 Temps” in my group meetings.
I’ve never discussed this book with anyone who didn’t say that one or two of the five temptations impede their ability to lead more effectively. For the record, Lencioni’s temptations are:
- Status over Results
- Popularity over Accountability
- Certainty over Clarity
- Harmony over Conflict
- Invulnerability over Trust
Three of the temptations (2, 3 and 4) are the ones people recognize most often. This is ironic because Lencioni calls Temptation #1 the most dangerous and # 5 the most important. Consequently, I spend a lot of time asking my coaching clients questions about #1 and #5 and more often than not, we spend the majority of that time focused on # 5, discussing trust and vulnerability.
Serving as an executive coach for more than a dozen years has convinced me that trust and vulnerability are prerequisites to becoming an authentic, successful leader. Despite the power of Lencioni’s book, I’ve had trouble finding the right questions, the right words that make a convincing case that acting like you’re bulletproof won’t make you a better leader.
Enter Brené Brown
Recently, a colleague introduced me to a book by Brené Brown. This led me to view her TED talk, “The Power of Vulnerability.” It gave me a whole new way to make visible how damaging Temptation #5 can be.
For me, one of the most powerful things Dr. Brown discusses in this video is the link between vulnerability and shame. I had never really thought about how shame drives our need to be invulnerable. If you’re like that friend of mine who said, “Sounds like an interesting TED talk, but I don’t have 20 minutes to spare to view it,” here’s my summary in just 50 words:
If you can’t let down your guard and be vulnerable, you’ll forever be trying to please that voice in your head that the poet and mystic William Blake called “The Accuser.” You’ll never be content and parenthetically, you’ll never be the leader you and your colleagues want you to be.
If that video touches a nerve in you as it did in me, you’ll want to view Brené Brown’s second TED talk, “Listening to Shame.”
I understand that these TED talks lie within the bounds of that category of topics we call “touchy-feely.” Just chalk it up to me being vulnerable, and if you want to explore these topics more deeply, I recommend Dr. Brown’s book “Daring Greatly.” She published this book in 2012, after the two TED talks went viral. In it, she describes why being vulnerable is so hard and explains the role that shame plays in motivating us to wear our emotional armor 24/7. She also shares her research findings to explain the differences between how men and women experience shame.
Daring Greatly is not a leadership book; you’ll probably find it in that section of the bookstore called self-help. For my money, it’s really a book about emotional self-awareness, and if you’ve worked with me, you’ve heard me say time and again that self-awareness is the cornerstone of leadership. Enjoy.