The system that could take you down... no it's not AI
One rainy November night in New York City back in 2016, I attended the book launch party of a friend who started a secret supper club, called "The Influencers." (Long before the term "influencer" was a "thing").
This supper club was one of those places where you were sure to meet some really interesting people. At one of Jon’s dinners the year prior, I had a 45 minute conversation in the kitchen with Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel and one of my favorite authors, Malcom Gladwell.
Anyway, that rainy night, I met a bunch of new friends.
Since you’re not allowed to talk about what you do initially, I found out later that one of my new friends was actually a professional hacker. Something I’d never once given thought to a decade ago...
He’d hack into systems, find and expose the vulnerabilities and then share his findings with the organizations that hired him (banks, governments, etc).
But the more fun part, to me anyway, was what he did next with this skill…
One day, a mentor of his said, “if you are so good at figuring out black boxes (mysterious containers that we can’t see into and don’t understand the workings of), why not apply it to the greatest black box in all of science — the human brain?”
So, he went from hacking computer systems to hacking the human brain… he became a neuroscientist.
Interesting.
Hacking systems to hacking humans.
Why am I sharing this story?
Because there is something about tech systems and human systems that we need to understand if we want to be good leaders.
It’s the key differentiator that no one really teaches us.
More in that in a minute.
Fast forward to present day...
I realized this key difference in last week’s How to talk to Humans Bootcamp session. One of our leaders shared a line from the course material that forever shifted her thinking about leadership.
Note: In the course material, I go deep on the art and science of human conversation, how our brain interprets certain responses and how to train ourselves to respond more skillfully, on purpose.
We explore each of the five steps of BRAVE that were designed around the five pitfalls that leaders fall into in conversations under pressure.
And, yes, you fall into these traps, too.
No, you don’t intend to, quite the opposite in fact. You fall into these traps because you genuinely desire to be helpful, knowledgeable, significant, supportive… and because you were never taught how the human brain interprets these things.
(Or maybe you were because you love hanging out with neuroscientists, too!)
Anyway, she shared that the below changed the way she thought about vulnerability (the V in The Brave Framework) and how she’d lead from that moment on.
Part 1: In technology systems, vulnerability is a liability.
A weakness in the system.
A crack that puts everything else at risk.
It's the reason the system falls apart.
It’s the thing my friend, the hacker, would look for and expose.
The entire goal of cybersecurity is simple: find the vulnerability and eliminate it.
So, what is vulnerability between humans?
Is it a liability? No, it is actually the exact opposite.
It’s not the crack that breaks the system.
Part 2: In human systems, vulnerability is an asset.
It's what holds the system together.
It’s the signal that the system is still alive and functioning.
It’s what makes the system thrive.
But only under one condition: that it’s shared.
Take a moment with that...
And yes, now is the moment to reflect on:
Are the people around me showing vulnerability?
Are they speaking up?
Pushing back?
Disagreeing?
Asking for help?
Saying no?
If they’re not doing ALL of those things, your human system (culture) is dying.
It’s at risk of falling off the Culture Cliff™ (my name for the moment when growth and speed outpaces the conversations holding the team together).
Take notes: Silence is never a good sign…
Ok, now back to vulnerability.
Beneath almost every vulnerable moment lies the same thing:
Exposure.
Someone just revealed something real, honest, truthful. Something that might have been easier to keep inside.
They probably shared it unintentionally (many displays of vulnerability are actually slip up’s or last-straw eruptions). These shares are generally imperfect, clumsy, awkward, messy or just plain not ideal.
But something underneath the surface just became visible.
And that moment:
It’s not the problem you think it is.
It’s your greatest opportunity.
It’s your cue... IF you’re really a leader.
(Definition clarity: Leaders lead humans (they're not robots -- messy, imperfect. Managers manage metrics -- simple black and white numbers -- robotic.)
So what’s the difference between vulnerability in tech systems and human systems?
How leaders respond to it.
That's what determines if it's a liability or an asset.
Leaders are taught (and continuously — however incorrectly — urged by executives, the board, investors) to focus on performance, metrics, KPIs, OKRs. (Sounds very "manager" like, doesn't it?)
Not vulnerability.
So when vulnerability appears, they try to:
Fix it
Shut it down
Move past it or ignore it
Get back to the task
The conversation closes. The signal disappears.
And the person who risked showing something real learns a lesson:
Don’t do THAT again.
Do you see it now? Most leaders respond to vulnerability in the human system like they do to vulnerability in tech systems... And that couldn’t be worse for business!
The moment leadership actually begins
Seeing vulnerability in someone else is a fork in the road.
You can react.
Or you can lead.
We tend to react when we weren’t trained like a ninja to see vulnerability in others.
(98% of leaders I work with come to me not actually being able to identify vulnerability in others. Yes, even the ones that are high EQ. Yes, even the ones who say they’re empaths. Even if you have some innate competency here, we need to harness and refine this skill — aka train it like a ninja — so it becomes your superpower...).
Once you can see vulnerability all around you. Even in places you never thought to look, then, our next step is to work on your response to it in the moment.
For trained leaders, they get it fairly quickly because they took the time to first understand the most important system in play in this new world of work: The human system.
Research in social neuroscience shows that perceived social threat activates the same neural networks as physical pain, which explains why people become defensive or shut down when they feel exposed or judged.
Conversely, feeling understood reduces that threat response and restores cognitive capacity for problem-solving, creativity, connection and collaboration.
In other words: connection unlocks performance.
Better said: BRAVE conversations unlock performance.
In an era where technology has created efficiencies and speed that we’ve never seen before, leaders are being called to level up.
We must remember something important:
Our tech systems are robots.
Our human systems are not.
Vulnerability for robots is a liability.
But for the human system. It’s the greatest asset. It’s the gateway to performance, purpose, productivity and even, wellbeing.
The single most common question CEOs and executives have been asking me has been this very thing:
How do I scale human performance at the speed of business today?
My answer is always this:
Performance is driven by the ability of your people to be absolutely honest, to be vulnerable without fear of judgment or punishment (technically called, “psychological safety”).
For example: you want your dev team to tell you that they don’t exactly know how to build what you asked for EARLY, not in six months from now when you have little to no runway left. Get me?
Psychological safety is a foundation of a high performing culture.
And culture is not created by offsites or swag, it’s created by the thousands of conversations your people are having every day.
So we’re back to the tech / humans theme:
Just like the way code scales exponentially because it follows a repeatable pattern, a system.
If you want exponential human performance (accountability, excellence, alignment), your leaders need a repeatable system for conversation.
A conversation code™.
So that when vulnerability appears, they can follow the proven playbook and address it in a way that unlocks more, better, faster.
(Hi, this is what The BRAVE Framework was built to do . And bonus points because when you learn the framework for work, your personal life gets better, too.)
TLDR: So, in closing…
If vulnerability in the human system is exposure.
A leaders job is to transform exposure into connection.
Because connection leads to performance.
Being trained to see and address vulnerability in your (human) system is when leadership actually begins.
Anything else is just thinking you’re important because you have a fancy title in front of your name. That’s not leadership.
And trust me, the last thing the world needs is more managers. They'll be out of a job soon anyway.
If you want to go deeper, this is exactly what we practice inside How to Talk to Humans Bootcamp.
How to recognize the signals most leaders miss.
How to become a Jedi at seeing vulnerability
And the exact framework for what to do next to turn that moment of exposure into connection and connection into performance.
Join the wait list ---> here.
Or, if you don't want to wait (which, I don't blame you!) and you want me to do a workshop for your team on the above, shoot me a note. Let's future-proof your leaders and lead the new world of work, together.
One (brave) conversation at a time.
Yours,
Elisabeth
