The Leadership Paradox: You Want a Great Team but Your Behaviour Might Be the Reason You Don't Have One

There's a lot happening in the world right now, and simply being can often feel hard, uncomfortable, and pretty paradoxical most days. Like we're all being asked to operate a little beyond what we've got. As leaders, we likely didn't create most of these challenges. But we do have a responsibility to create the conditions to help our people navigate. 

I've spent a lot of time sitting with leaders and asking them some simple question:  

• Do you want a cohesive team?  

• Do you want staff who learn and grow?  

• Do you want employees who own what they're responsible for? 

• Do you want staff to bring new ideas to the table? 

Every single one of them says yes. Of course they do. If those things were genuinely happening, you'd have a healthy, high-performing team and a culture people actually want to be part of. 

But the hard part is that the behaviours most of us default to as leaders tend to work against that. 

The Paradox 

We say we want cohesion, but we run our teams on transactional interactions. Task in, task out… not much room for actual connection. We say we want growth, but when someone makes a mistake, we get upset, react and then end up punishing the mistake, even when that's not what we meant to do. We say we want ownership, but then we take over the decision ourselves, or we dodge the accountability conversation because it's uncomfortable. And we say we want innovation, but most of us became leaders because we were good at having answers. So we get attached to being right, and we shut down the ideas that might challenge our own. 

Those four things together create disconnected and siloed teams. They make people stay quiet because staying quiet is the safer option. This results in organizations that drift toward the status quo because that's where the least friction is. 

And all of this punishes vulnerability and subsequently triggers people's brains to go into a heighten fear response. Our priority becomes survival.  

But when vulnerability gets rewarded, you get a completely different response. People stop scanning for what might go wrong and start thinking about how to engage, contribute, and make things better. That's what psychological safety actually is. A real, measurable shift in how people show up, because the environment encourages them that it's safe to do so. 

When Armour Becomes the Culture 

I've seen this play out many times. Often it can be intense in organizations with an ultraistic mission like the education sector, non-profits, and public safety organizations. For example within public safety the mission is public safety and the job itself often requires people to detect and respond to threats quickly. That instinct is inherent in all of us and trained deliberately in public safety. It can help keep people safe in the field. The problem is, these same innate process don't lend itself in running the business of public safety. 

When that threat-detection wiring carries into everyday leadership interactions, something subtle but corrosive starts to happen. A new idea stops being a new idea and becomes a comment on you. If someone says "hey, I felt that email came across as pretty rude," an armored response treats that as a character attack rather than feedback on a single action. The gut move is to shut it down and say, "That's not possible." Because what's actually being protected is your sense of status and worth, not the truth of the situation. 

A vulnerable response sounds more like, "that is interesting, can you help me understand why it felt that way." That takes more skill, not less. It means holding two things at once: this person's experience is real for them, and I can also know I'm not a fundamentally rude person, while still accepting that I might have done something rude in that moment. 

And the deeper issue is really that humans are status-seeking and belonging-seeking creatures. We look to the people above us to understand what's normal. So if the leaders at the top aren't willing to examine their own assumptions, sit with discomfort, or risk being wrong in front of others, that armor spreads. It becomes the operating norm for everyone underneath them. 

The question becomes just how much openness the people at the top are prepared to bring to the work. 

5 Ways to Lead with Vulnerability 

So what does it actually look like to model and reward vulnerability? Here are five things I keep coming back to. 

1. Be clear on your personal values: Consistency is about people being able to predict where you stand, even when things get hard, not about getting everything right. And perhaps more importantly, asking yourself what you’re willing to sacrifice living your values for. For example, one of my values is to find ways to amplify others. This means the sacrifice I need to make is my desire for control, the sense of accomplishment when I have gotten something over the finish line, and even at times the accolades that may come with it. Because for me to really amplify others, I need to not make it about me and put them and the work in the center. 

2. Take responsibility for your emotions and behaviours: Caring deeply about your work means you're going to feel things strongly. That's fine. What's not fine is treating those feelings as a free pass to react however you want. The work of leadership includes managing your own emotional responses, and when you get it wrong, which you will, that's yours to own and repair..  

3. Prioritize connection: Care for and connection with is the minimum standard for effective leadership. Get to know the people you lead. You don't have to like everyone, but you do have to care about them, and those are very different things. 

4. Ask one more question: ​​​In other words, avoid our advice monster (a concept coined by Michael Bungay)! Essentially this means, before you land on the answer you already have, make space for someone else's. Probably the simplest habit on this list and yet the hardest one to actually do in the moment because we all have a little advice monster in us that want to give advice instead of ask questions. 

5. Provide guided autonomy: Give people clear boundaries and a clear target, then let them figure out the how. When you control the boundaries, the target, and the method, you're not really leading anymore. And people can feel that because it signals that their judgment isn't trusted. 

When We Mess Up, Because We Will 

None of this works if we're expecting perfection from ourselves. We're going to get things wrong, react when we meant to respond, and defend when we meant to listen. The practice is going back, owning it, and rebuilding the trust. 

I know leading with vulnerability isn't the comfortable choice. But leading from armor tends to produce the opposite of everything we said we wanted.  

The responsibility sits with us because we're the ones who get to decide what kind of culture we build.