How Vulnerability Shows Leadership

Promoting a culture of openness is the best way to move your team forward

It’s hard to show the chinks in your armor when it feels as if you’ll be demeaned and ostracized for doing so (worst case). Or you’ll be viewed as an ineffective leader who struggles to deliver (at best).

I’ve shown my vulnerability when I know it’s best for my team and organization, despite my conflicting desires to do what’s easier and hide in silence.

“What happens in the dark always comes to the light.”

You Cannot Hide Your Skeletons

Every team has a weakness or set of weaknesses that are severe enough to potentially derail delivery. Your job is to figure out what they are, be honest about them, then propose solutions that are attainable.

My most common issue was too much work, too few resources.

Despite your best efforts, it’s hard to angle for a larger team, even in the best economy.

So I showed significant gaps in the following areas, even though my team was one of the highest performing teams in the company with well-respected dev leads.

• Systems-level coverage was missing. How can you ensure the entire feature works if you have no top-down requirements that covers how each part of the feature should work with the system holistically?

• Where was the architecture? Much like the requirements, there were no diagrams at the systems or component levels which mapped out what feeds one or several features. So, how do you know it works?

• Test coverage was lacking. Where is the test plan? If there was one, where were edge and corner cases to account for catastrophic failures? And why are we releasing with only sanity-level testing (unless it’s maintenance phase). Which brings me to…

• Who controls the releases? Why do we not stop for a sprint or two to spend time assessing why releases are not going out on time, or to wait for teams that continually have failed releases to improve so we can create a package we can be confident in.

Where Do We Go From Here?

After presenting my findings—over and over—I had to stop and ask myself, where was it really getting me, since no one listened. Which brings me back to what I said in an earlier post:

“Let the team fail.”

Even if you know a release is going out that is less than stellar, sometimes you need to get it out there

so critical discussions can finally be had at the leadership level.

Show leadership that your team put out the release not just because they were asked to meet the deadline, but that this was the only way to elicit the support they need in order to succeed.

How Do You Show Your Vulnerability?

Do you have any stories of your own? If so, please share. I’ll also be starting a chat on this in about a day or so.