The double edged sword called vulnerability

Absence of trust or “The unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group” is one of the five dysfunctions of a team as elicited by Patrick Lencioni.

Let’s try and get to the root cause, Why would one be unwilling to be vulnerable? What prevents you from sharing your weaknesses with your team? The answers contain varying degrees of fear stemming from and at times also revolving around judgement of one’s image. For nearly half a decade in my career at my current organisation, I had my inhibitions around letting my team mates know exactly what I did not know. I knew exactly who excelled at skills that I would want to focus on, but my mind cleverly prevented me with its series of “what ifs?” What if this person does not maintain confidentiality about my incompetencies? What if this had a negative impact on my career?

When I got an opportunity to take up the role of a Tech Lead for my team, my mentor suggested I read “The five dysfunctions of a team” Like most of us would agree, the book nails it on point. It clearly calls out the reasons behind a dysfunctional team. I would actually go out on a limb and say it does hold true for dysfunctional families too, but let’s hold onto that one for another day.

So getting back to vulnerability, why are we even talking about it so much these days? What lies on the other side? What do we really stand to lose if we chose to dare to be vulnerable? To let someone in on something that would expose us, does need an incredible degree of courage, of trust in the persons we chose to confide in and chose to partner with. Studies have shown that humans are instinctively kind and well-meaning even as infants.

So what happens to these moral instincts or impulses as we age? Why does kindness seem to be harder to find in the big cities and corporations of our adult lives?

One hypothesis is that, as we age we build up the capabilities of the higher-order cognitive areas of the brain. Areas that are responsible for rational thinking, planning, and impulse control. As a result, our instincts are mediated by other processes in the brain before being expressed outwardly. A study conducted at University College London using virtual reality scenarios to test the gut responses of adults found that our moral instincts are very much present when we’re asked to react to a situation before we have time to engage our rational thinking brains. The study showed that we seem to have moral impulses (gut reactions) that are distinct from our moral actions (those we take after having time to think).

We allow our cognitive areas to steer our actions and while that prevents impulsive acts, that’s where it also becomes difficult to change our habits. To shed our fears and inhibitions and to embrace change at large. It does feel like taking a leap of faith, and trust me it is worth the dive and drift!

It took me time to acknowledge the obstacles that I unknowingly created in the smooth functioning of myself, given the various roles I play in my professional life. I realised that I haven’t been wholly participating in most discussions, as one part of me was constantly on the lookout for not letting people in on what I really had in mind. This actually got me to think harder and ponder how do I course correct, be more involved and reap maximum of the collective skillset present in my well-meaning team. No, it is not rocket science, but believe me convincing one’s sub-conscious mind is sometimes much more difficult than convincing anyone else even for the utmost skilled consultant!

But a leap of faith is what I finally did take - I decided to sacrifice whatever image I believe I had built at work,in return for being a guinea pig in one of the biggest psycho-social experiments of my own life. I let my team-mates know that I do not know Kotlin, as I’ve professionally never worked on it and I’m learning. Now, not only are most of our backend services built using Kotlin, I am also the Tech Lead of this team. Did anyone mock at me or misuse this opportunity to stab at me? No, in fact the exact opposite happened, my team not only gave me pointers to improve my journey towards upskilling myself at Kotlin but also started appreciating me as I learnt the language offerings and encouraged me to get better at it.

What followed as an unintended consequence of my psycho-social experiment was that a couple of my team mates also started to slowly shed their apprehension and opened up about their shortcomings. A culture of growing together is what we’ve eventually embraced and we know that no one judges anyone in the team. We collaborate instead of competing and this feels magical! Learning together, helping each other, pushing towards excellence is actually our new way of working. Our new normal, if you may.

So is vulnerability == susceptibility?

Leave your thoughts below or share your experiences, together we can make our work places a lot more collaborative than competitive!