Leadership Essentials: Vulnerability

I am a crier. At work, in meetings, in hard conversations. I have never been proud of it exactly, but it is who I am, and for a long time, I was ashamed of it in a way I did not fully admit to myself.

There is a scene in Friends where Rachel Green confronts her boss about a job interview that went poorly. She is emotional, visibly so, and she says something that has stayed with me: I may cry, but these are not tears of sadness or anger. They are just me having this discussion with you. I have watched that show more times than I can count, usually at night with my son, and that line hits every time. Because it is exactly right. The tears are not weakness. They are presence. They are the cost of actually caring about what you are saying.

For most of my career, that kind of presence was treated as a liability. Emotional. Female. Evidence, some people seemed to believe, of why women should not lead. The cultural and professional pressure to suppress it was real, and I felt it.

Years ago, I was back at work after being treated for ovarian cancer at 30. I was an emotional mess, understandably I think now, though I did not give myself that grace at the time. I started seeing a therapist for the first time, and I told her I wanted to change. That I was afraid people would not respect me if I seemed fragile. She did not tell me I was wrong to want that. She said: showing emotion is a sign of strength. But if you want to change it, you need to understand that when you change how you present yourself to the world, the world will change too. You can do the work. But there are tradeoffs.

I thought about that for a long time. And then I made a conscious choice to stay open. To stay myself. I have cried a lot ever since.

That choice has not always been comfortable, and it has not always been without cost. But it is the reason I lead the way I do. Because vulnerability is not just about tears. It is about the willingness to be honest about what you do not know, what you are working through, what matters to you beyond the metrics. Researchers like Brené Brown gave language to something a lot of us already knew but could not defend in a boardroom: that openness, authenticity, and the willingness to be seen create a shared space between a leader and their team that authority alone never could.

As someone who manages people, I bring this deliberately now. I let my team see me uncertain, frustrated, moved. And I have watched what it builds. Younger professionals respond to emotional honesty in a way that older leadership cultures never anticipated. It does not make them trust you less. It makes them trust you more. The relationship it creates is not transactional. It is foundational.

But I want to be honest about where we still are. Because I do not think those days are fully behind us. It depends on the room. In certain boardrooms and at certain levels, the old expectations are still very much in play, held there by people who came up in a system that rewarded hardness and who still do the promoting. Vulnerability has not fully arrived where the power is most concentrated. Not yet.

So the question I want to sit with, and that I want you to sit with, is this: Can you be vulnerable at work? Not won't. Can't. And if the answer is no, it is worth asking why. What is the cost you are calculating? What room are you in, and what does that room demand of you?

And if the answer is yes, what does that actually mean for how you lead?

My therapist was right. The world does change when you change how you show up in it. I just decided I could live with that version of the world better than the other one.