Learning to Weave Vulnerability Effectively into our Ecosystems

Sharing struggles can change lives and organizations for the better

In a piece published in the winter issue of The Boston Review, author Vivian Gornick (whose work on Emma Goldman and on the topic of rereading I’ve found wonderfully helpful) shares the story of an interaction she had many years ago with one Mr. Sperber, a Polish-Jewish émigré who was living in her building in Manhattan. The two, the older émigré and the young writer recently moved to the city, found themselves riding in the elevator together. The elevator stopped at a floor before the lobby, and the door opened. A teenaged Black resident was waiting to get on. For whatever reason, a young Gornick acted in one of those small, easily dismissed ways that actually push others away—she made a face that clearly conveyed a negative reaction. The unspoken racism so common in that era (and now) came through in a matter of seconds. The young man responded with dignity: “I’ll wait.” Her reaction wasn’t purposefully intended to cause harm, but nevertheless, it did.

Mr. Sperber could, as I might well have done when I was young, have said nothing at all and let the incident pass without comment or controversy. Instead, he decided to make himself vulnerable by sharing uninvited insight. In doing so, he gracefully and powerfully made Ms. Gornick aware of the painful impact that her unconscious beliefs had just had. He shared one line of pointed insight: “One must remain human until the last moment.” She saw things, suddenly, in a new light. In essence, Mr. Sperber effectively changed Vivian Gornick’s nascent beliefs. Half a century later, Sperber’s quiet, dignified response has continued to illuminate Gornick’s life and her writing.

Part of being human, I have learned over the years, is learning to be meaningfully vulnerable, both at work and out of work. We all have embarrassing, anxious, and uncertain moments in our lives. Whether we have the courage to share them constructively is another story altogether. By continuing to tell the story of Mr. Sperber all these years later, a story in which her own embarrassing ethical error is at the center, Gornick is demonstrating the import of vulnerability, which seems certain to have contributed to her own successful work as a writer over the years. As critic Clem Cecil says of Gornick, “her writing is all about getting to the vulnerable heart of things.” She certainly did here, and she regularly writes about her own shortfalls. I, with Mr. Sperber’s sentence in my head, keep thinking back on any number of situations where I acted, unthinkingly, unintentionally, in similarly uncaring ways. Like Gornick, my intentions weren’t bad, but my impact certainly was.

While most Americans have been trained to hide it, vulnerability could well be a key to a more positive future for all of us. In an article in the Harvard Gazette, poet Tracy K. Smith says,

In order to get to community, we have to go quiet, slow down, allow ourselves to be both vulnerable and brave.

Bringing bravery and vulnerability into one holistic and healthy existence is no small achievement. While it sounds straightforward, it is, in my experience, far harder to do than it is to suggest. And although bravery hits the headlines regularly, and the stories of seemingly heroic, brilliant entrepreneurial business leaders get a great deal of attention, the vulnerability part gets far less notice. We would be wise to work to bring the balance that Smith’s lovingly written sentence implies.

Back around the time we opened the Deli, in 1982, when I was roughly the same age as Vivian Gornick was when she got to know Mr. Sperber, I’m pretty sure I would have failed to succeed in Smith’s simple framework of courage and bravery. Well, at least on one level, we had had the guts to open our own business, all the more notable because we’d done it smack dab in the middle of such difficult economic times (interest rates were 18%; unemployment was very high). As for the other half of Smith’s call to action, vulnerability, I’m completely confident that it was in my vocabulary. It was not, though, on the list of leadership “tools” I could then call on.

Of course, to be clear, at some point early in my life, I did have it. Being vulnerable is an inherent element of being human. Like all infants, I was born vulnerable. Looking back now, I believe I lost my ability to express it effectively pretty early on in my life. Being the oldest kid with parents who got divorced when I was only three didn’t help. Neither did the fact that I grew up in a family that showed very little emotion. Nor did the reality of the stereotypical, unexpressive American male of that era. I can see now that, like it or not, I lost my natural vulnerability pretty quickly. It took me many years to get it back. By the time I realized that I had a really hard time being vulnerable, I was probably around 30. Therapy, a lot of reading, a men’s group, journaling, and learning how to have a different kind of conversation—one in which vulnerability was the norm—all helped me grow close to the sort of blend of bravery and courage that Tracy Smith speaks about.

What follows here is a first, and inevitably highly imperfect, attempt to both gain and then give some more clarity to the role that vulnerability plays in our organizations. To get at it, I drew, of course, on some of my own experience, along with insights from a pair of poets, an 84-year-old Dutch management consultant, a couple of really cool rock stars, and an array of wise and well-researched writers from whom I learn a lot. One of them, of course, is Brene Brown, whose 2012 book, Daring Greatly, was, in many ways, the insight that brought the idea that vulnerability is an essential element of healthy, everyday living out into the open. As Brown says, “Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.” Her TEDx talk “The Power of Vulnerability,” recorded in her hometown of Houston back in 2010, remains one of the five most-watched in history.

Last fall, I was a participant in a pretty high-level meeting. That alone, of course, is hardly remarkable. It’s a rare day I’m not part of one or two. With pretty much all our meetings here at Zingerman’s, we open up with some sort of icebreaker, a way to get “everyone’s voice in the room.” Sometimes it’s a simple, “What’s your energy, 0 to 10?” In other instances, it’s more engaged—an intro that may well still start with an energy score (it’s very helpful to hear where each other is at, the better to know how to be patient and kind to each other), but also a few minutes for each person to share how they’re really doing. The latter, in the interest of meaningful connection, is by far my personal preference—over the course of a couple of minutes, I can learn a lot about what’s going on with each person, and I can share my own ups and downs. In my experience, that kind of connection makes it infinitely easier for those in the group to be supportive, empathic, and compassionate with each other. How much each person shares is, of course, up to them, though I would forecast that in general, given the openness and emphasis on emotional intelligence that we have here in our culture, people tend to share much more than they would in most organizations.

Anyway, in this meeting, my attention was grabbed when, about halfway through everyone answering the icebreaker, one of the participants, someone who I would not have expected to share at this level, opened up with the group about the challenges she’s dealing with right now with one of her kids. “It’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be,” she added. The response from the group couldn’t have been better. Support and empathy in the moment, and offers of additional help and support continued to come during the day. 

In stereotypical corporate cultures, someone who spoke publicly like that might well be quietly referred to HR to learn how to keep her problems out of the workplace and develop better boundaries. Here in the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses), it’s essentially the opposite. Her story and struggle were welcomed. To my eye, her vulnerability elevated her standing with the group and generated even more support than she’d always had.

To me, it was all a really positive sign about the health of our culture and a testament to what so many people are working to create. I did not understand it all back when we opened in the ’80s, but it’s now very clear to me that effective expression of vulnerability is an essential element to living a healthy and rewarding life. Doing it reasonably well in a group is a critical component for any democratic construct, practiced either in companies or in countries. We cannot have an effective democracy without vulnerability.

That story is hardly the only example of ZCoBbers being vulnerable like that. In fact, around here, 44 years after we opened, vulnerability is probably more the norm than not. People will share during icebreakers about what they’re dealing with—their aging parents’ health, kids’ struggles in school, challenges and achievements at work, etc. There’s no drama really. It’s just on the level, shared and heard, far more often than not, with love.

This is not, though, I know, the norm in other places. One Zingerman’s alum is currently working in Minneapolis at a large bank. When tensions were at their peak with ICE incursions into the city, around here, it was not uncommon for folks to mention their anxiety about the situation. When I asked our former coworker what people were saying, his response shocked me: “Honestly, people in the office aren’t even talking about it. It’s like it’s not happening, even though it’s all around us.”

In a fall 2022 film from the remarkable Danish nonprofit Louisiana Channel, poet and author Ocean Vuong offers, “My vulnerability is my power.” Lo, that we were living in communities, companies, and countries where Vuong’s words would already be true for all involved. In a 2023 interview with Service 95, Vuong elaborated on the impact of vulnerability:

I think when we approach vulnerability as a common and perhaps even natural condition of our species (we are, after all, a relatively soft and physically defenceless species, hardy in groups and wilting when isolated), we’re able to connect with each other in a less superficial way. You realise that, especially in adults, when the masks of strength have been forced on us, or when we’ve calcified them through conditioning, we mostly operate in the community with performances of strength and success—when, in fact, we might very well be full of doubts, anger, fear, and grief. So giving each other permission to put down the shields in order to see each other’s faces more clearly is a gift. Vulnerability is as true and connected to us as our skin. Everything else is fabric.

As different as my life story is from Ocean Vuong’s, what he writes is very much applicable to my own childhood experience.

While we don’t necessarily call it out all that often, the truth, I’ve been realizing, is that a significant part of what has made our organization what it is is that we have made it possible for people to be vulnerable in their work. As Ocean Vuong alludes, vulnerability in this context is a strength, not a weakness. David Whyte, the insightful writer whose work on the idea of “Unordinary” I wrote a bunch about a few weeks ago, affirms Vuong’s views, saying:

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

Running from vulnerability is probably how I spent the first half of my life. When I was somewhere around 30 years old, I realized there was actually another way, a way that helped me start to make Tracy K. Smith’s call to blend bravery and courage into a reality. As Whyte writes,

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability—how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

How would people learn to practice vulnerability, to walk wholeheartedly through David Whyte’s metaphorical door and make it happen? It’s a good question and one that, to be honest, I’d never thought much about until the last few weeks. In great part, much of the learning about vulnerability has to be cultural. People see other people being real and opening their hearts, while retaining their professionalism, and still getting a lot of work done. Over time, I imagine, they pick up on the reality that it’s okay to share more openly than they might have in other jobs. It’s also, I see now, developed in our systems and frameworks:

• In our Statement of Beliefs, we state specifically that we believe in humility and also in the value of asking for help.
• Open-book management means that new staff see numbers shared that are both good and bad. And at huddles, people will regularly talk about the stress of not being as profitable as they would prefer, sales falling short, etc.
• Visioning, by definition, is about putting one’s heart and soul out on paper. Done well, it’s always a bit scary (and always powerful)!
• The six elements of dignity call for honoring the humanity of everyone we work with (including our own) and being authentic without acting out.
• Our Courageous Conversations class calls on all of us to be vulnerable in the interest of having better conversations and deeper, more effective connections.

Part of what’s drawn me to this conversation of late is the realization that, in a sense, democracy and autocracy are key players in a struggle between organizational structures: one in which healthy vulnerability is encouraged and honored as important (democracy) and constructs in which vulnerability from leaders is anything but okay (autocratic settings). Which means that if we want to work and live in democratic constructs, we would be wise to talk about vulnerability a lot more often than most of us do!

Autocrats, of course, have a strong aversion to showing vulnerability. While they are happy to have everyone they dominate be vulnerable, they themselves generally project images of perfection, the heroic leader who saves—and dominates—the day. Dutch author and consultant Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, born in 1942 during WWII and now 84 years old, has authored just under 50 books. Depending on your life priorities, you might be even more impressed that he was apparently the first fly fisherman in Outer Mongolia. He has some of the most insightful work I’ve found on how and why autocrats are almost unable to express vulnerability. That doesn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable—clearly, Jung and Robert Bly’s shadow work taught me that what I/we/anyone hides is almost always the part of themselves they need to let out. Clearly, history tells us that in time, all authoritarians eventually fall. Sunday’s elections in Hungary evidenced that in real time!

Kets de Vries has decades of experience to draw on, and he sees the situation quite clearly: autocracy and vulnerability do not go well together. In an interview with INSEAD, he helps to illustrate clearly and directly why it becomes almost impossible to run a healthy, emotionally intelligent organization in which vulnerability is encouraged inside an autocratic ecosystem. To create a healthy organization, Kets de Vries says, “You need to be somewhat open and vulnerable in front of other people.” To do that, though, many of us, me included, have to overcome suboptimal experiences with vulnerability from back when we were kids. As Kets de Vries goes on to explain,

Many bullies had a disturbed childhood. They often grew up in homes with little warmth and positive adult attention, raised by emotionally and physically abusive caretakers. Such an environment would have quickly taught them that vulnerability leads to abuse and that the best defence is to lash out. By becoming bullies themselves, they gain more control over their lives and compensate for the lack of attention (or the abuse) they experienced at home.

…

Autocratic leaders … may also be projecting their own feelings of vulnerability onto their victims. In order to avoid feeling ashamed and humiliated for their own shortcomings, they go to great lengths to shame and humiliate others.

I’ve seen all this, I’m sorry to say, in up-close action over the years, even inside our own organization. They are nearly always well-meaning people who are drawn to our values, but have unresolved childhood challenges—often challenges they aren’t even open with themselves about—that lead them to take actions that are way out of alignment. Like Vivian Gornick and the elevator incident, intellectual intentions are positive, but unconscious beliefs and the actions that come out of them are anything but. It rarely goes well. They hide their vulnerability and then act out unproductively on those around them. The results are never good. In the end, they either arrive at a personal epiphany and shift their direction or they end up leaving the organization. What Kets de Vries describes here sounds a lot like what we’ve seen in the news in any number of countries, and it’s all too common in companies, too:

This fantasy of omnipotence often coexists with a profound fear of dependency. Dictators frequently experience reliance on others—institutions, advisors, expertise—as humiliating or even dangerous. Dependency implies vulnerability, and vulnerability threatens their grandiose self. The solution to these uncomfortable feelings is domination. Institutions are hollowed out. Independent courts, media, and bureaucracies are subordinated or destroyed. Advisors are chosen for loyalty rather than competence. Authority becomes personalized.

Here in the ZCoB, given our efforts to think and work in non-hierarchical ways, it’s probably a bit easier to explore vulnerability. We stress regularly that managers and partners are also just people, flawed and trying to figure things out. Still, I know, it can be awkward. Where does one draw the line? How much sharing is too much? How little is too little? Does not sharing make a manager seem aloof and egocentric? If they make themselves very vulnerable, will staff lose respect or take advantage?

Around here, though, I’d say, we benefit most of the time from erring on the side of being slightly too open. In his book Norwegian Wood, writer Haruki Murakami, who I quoted quite a bit in my “Why Democracy Matters” pamphlet, asks, “What happens when people open their hearts?” His answer is simple and direct, and really, all the evidence I need to embrace the belief that regular and effectively expressed vulnerability leads to improvements at every level: “They get better.”

Musician David Bowie might not have been who I would have thought to look to for insight on this subject, but upon further reflection, it makes complete sense. Art, by definition, draws on vulnerability. As Brene Brown says, “There is no creativity without vulnerability,” and I will say from my extensive writing experience that that could not be more true. Artists like Bowie who work so well at the creative edge do it even more so. Bowie observes:

If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

My own experience with vulnerability seems very aligned with what Australian musician and writer Nick Cave posits. To be real, to share openly and effectively, to do it in ways that enhance connection, strengthen relationships, and open doors to new possibilities and creative connections. Cave, whose been very open in writing and talking about the pain of losing his son in 2022,

I like the idea of a robust vulnerability. That seems to make sense to me—the notion that there is a certain power or strength that can be obtained from opening oneself to the world, or by laying things bare. …

What is virtually impossible to see within a mirror is that the very essence of our humanness, our vulnerability and fragility, is the most beautiful thing we possess. … But those who have no awareness of their own fragility, who present themselves as overconfident, armoured-up and invulnerable, sacrifice the essence of what makes them both human and beautiful. … Vulnerability is the very thing that permits us to connect with each other, to recognise in others the same discomfort they have with themselves and with their place in the world. Vulnerability is the engine of compassion, and can be a superpower, a special vision that allows us to see the quivering, wounded inner world that most of us possess.

Even in non-autocratic settings, there remains the reality that it’s difficult for most leaders and managers to be effectively vulnerable with their staff. The more hierarchical the organization, the more difficult it is to do well. In a 2019 article entitled “The Cure for the Loneliness of Command,” Manfred Kets de Vries observes:

Hierarchy creates a power distance. The weight of responsibility for others makes it harder to speak to anyone with vulnerability and true honesty. This unease goes both ways: Even if CEOs try to minimise the distance, their subordinates will always be cognisant of their boss’ ability to make decisions that can dramatically affect their careers. CEOs must be close enough to relate to their subordinates, but also distanced enough to motivate them. It’s a delicate dance.

As you can tell, this is not easy work to do. It begins, I believe, with a better understanding of ourselves. The more effectively we get in touch with ourselves, access our essence, and feel grounded in our own dignity, the more effectively we can do it. As Tracy K. Smith says, effectively blending and balancing courage and vulnerability. In fact, it dawned on me that the way we define “full flavor” here at Zingerman’s—complexity, balance, and finish—is wholly applicable to effective expression! A well-shared message honors the complexity of nearly every situation, does so in a reasonably balanced way, and self-manages into a long and healthy “finish.”

Author Audre Lord advises, “That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” And when we do it with dignity, it all gets more powerful still. Her words resonate. All these years later, it is still hard for me to do. To talk about parts of my past that I’m not the proudest of. Getting divorced. Closing a business. Bad customer complaints. Partnerships that didn’t work out. Decisions I felt good about, but that turned out to be suboptimal. Bad grades on papers I can still remember from when I was in school. Recipes published that I later realized could have been written better. Getting caught cutting corners when I was a kid after I’d promised I wouldn’t. Typos in books. Fear of failure. Snippets of cynicism spoken aloud when I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

I will, I know now, struggle with this sort of stuff for the rest of my life. I miss my friend Melvin. Every time I release new print pieces—books, pamphlets, this enews every week—it is, as David Bowie described so well, a time when my “feet are barely touching the bottom.” As you know, I live with uncertainty about the seeming state of our country, and also about the economic issues we all face every day.

Intellectually, I know that we’re all imperfect and that, however I’ve erred, it could have been far, far worse. I have trained myself to talk about all of them in the right settings (I think at least). It remains awkward, no matter how much I know in my head that there’s no shame now in any of them. Intellectual understanding, of course, does not immediately equate to emotional intelligence. And even though I know what author, sculptor, and painter Anne Truitt says, that “vulnerability is a guardian of integrity,” to be true, it all remains rather awkward and uncomfortable.

Vulnerability, even when it’s well-expressed, rarely emerges into the world in a linear form. And it certainly doesn’t fit mainstream stereotypes of what strong leaders are like. John Moriarty, the Irish writer and philosopher of whom I wrote so much last week, shares a lovely story that helped me settle into the idea of what vulnerability might mean in the context of an organization. While watching handyman Bill Joyce cutting stone at Ballinahinch Castle, Moriarty became convinced that Bill was cutting it crooked. He mentioned it to him as diplomatically and in as dignified a way as he could. Taking his time and very reflectively, Bill answered, “This is a grand old castle, John, a grand old place, and in a grand old place like this, the only way to cut anything straight is to cut it crooked.” We are all, in that sense, imperfectly crooked stones trying to fit into some great, grand old castles.

I’ll leave the last words here for Brene Brown, who remains something of a guru on the subject:

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

And these days, to my eye, we can use all the light we can get!

Mindful management

P.S. I will be sharing thoughts on subjects like the value of vulnerability with Chip Conley on our late May retreat at Chip’s Modern Elder Academy in Santa Fe, Radical Wisdom: The Natural Laws of Business & A Meaningful Life. It runs from May 24–28. This is a one-time-only event, a coming together of two long-time friends who share values, a belief in writing, teaching, and sharing what we’ve learned in the hopes of helping others.

P.P.S. Speaking of Chip, sharing and vulnerability, here’s a short clip of a conversation with Seth Godin, where he shares how Chip, when he was his fellow student at Stanford, really helped Seth move forward with his life in business.

P.P.P.S. And here’s a podcast I did with Chip. The opening line: “Anarchism isn’t chaos. It might be the key to better leadership.”