Vulnerability + Business

(not so strange bedfellows after all)

Vulnerability. What do you think of when you hear this word? For a long time, I’d have answered that question with fragile, maybe weak. The words I chose may have changed, but all held one thing in common. They represented negative associations.

An a-ha moment

During SmallBox’s last Factory Week, our version of a team-wide, one-week creative sabbatical, we worked through some cultural exercises from Tribal Leadership. For one called “Mountains and Valleys,” we shared high and low points in the history of our company. It’s pretty easy to talk about the big wins and celebrations, but the flip side is a bit more challenging. We have a philosophy that says, “Make every page count.” To us, this means both clients and ourselves are proud of every bit of work, every design, every page of content. To admit we didn’t hit the mark, even if it’s ancient history, is an incredibly hard thing to do.

But a wondrous thing happened as we waded into the low points. We’d created the space within Factory Week to have conversations that we needed to have. As we ventured further into those murky, visceral waters of vulnerability, things started to click. It really just took one person opening the door to change a guarded conversation to real, honest and open.

While I would have said we had a lot of trust and openness before, we were suddenly able to speak even more candidly. We rallied as a team a little more.

In the wise words of my co-worker Drew DeBoy, uttered afterwards:

“Courage + Vulnerability = Spooning.”*

That Factory Week served as the crystallizing moment where I began to more deeply understand all of the good places vulnerability can take you, that creating space for it can serve a greater purpose in business. Now when I think of this word, I think of openness and connection first. But that doesn’t mean engaging in acts of vulnerability gets any easier…

Back in the office

Inviting vulnerability is the emotional equivalent of taking a trust-fall. Vulnerability is hard.

I re-entered our regular work flow, ready to take this new-found comfort with vulnerability into how I work. And then, just a few weeks later, I hit the first moment where I realized I wasn’t living out this new aspiration.

Since the beginning of the year, I have been working on a big project to help our whole team understand their career paths, how they connect to current goals and other HR-related stuff. I took stock of some of the things we’ve already done — a talent audit, a “greatest gifts” exercise, writing personal North Star statements. I thought about holes in what we know about one another to craft a list of questions to spark our career path conversations. I sketched out wireframes of how all of this info would come together to present a total picture of the whole employee.

In other words, I got pretty deep on the project, and I kept working. I wanted to just tweak it little more, to make it better. I stalled on sharing it with others because I was afraid if people saw it in its incomplete state, it might not be clear and prompt a bad reaction. I’d already personally invested too much. So much for inviting vulnerability.

The deeper I got into my creative process, the more attached I got to the ideas, the work. I realized that I could have avoided this if I’d been more open throughout the project. It was a good lesson to learn. One of the best ways to tackle vulnerability around ideas: share early and often.

It got me wondering what other barriers are in the way of being more open with one another at work. What can we do to make it easier? Any advice of ideas for a vulnerability convert like myself?

*No actual spooning occurred.