Vulnerability Avoidant

Over the last several years I’ve had the opportunity to mentor several newer managers, and it’s one of the most rewarding aspects of my role. On a purely tactical basis I think scaling manager capability is the best (only?) mechanism to scale my own capacity, but beyond that I know personally how rudderless the job can feel without help. The internal feeling of underperformance as an IC isn’t great, but underperformance as a manager means you’re letting down a wider scope of people: yourself, your reports, your manager, the cross functional team, etc. This feels especially bad if you’re actually trying really hard.

When I talk through challenges with these managers, a common blocker in these conversations is navigating points of conflict: underperforming teammates, delivering disappointing career news, acknowledging misalignment with close coworkers, etc. And the answer to the most obvious question - “have you told [this person] about how you feel?” - is often “no.”

There are variety of context-dependent rationales here, but if I had to generalize, the most common reason boils down to “I don’t want to be mean.” And to be fair, there’s a lot of positive signal in that response. Management is a moral exercise, and a moral compass is critical to navigating the web of surprisingly emotional judgment calls that a manager is tasked with everyday. “Try not to be mean” is a good overall aspiration.

But the more times I encounter this situation (and reflect on my own past instances of “I don’t want to be mean”), the less I think the problem is a matter of “mean” or “nice” at all. Instead I think a more accurate framing of conflict avoidance for managers is “I don’t want to be vulnerable.” And I find vulnerability avoidance in a leadership role to be very limiting, in both obvious and non-obvious ways.

Vulnerability isn’t nice or mean, it’s honest

When I use the word “vulnerable,” I don’t mean “meek” or “emotionally demonstrative.” You don’t have to have tears in your eyes to be vulnerable. In this context vulnerability means being willing to do the leg work to be emotionally and intellectually honest when evaluating a situation, and confront the truth when that evaluation diverges from easy outcomes. Confronting the truth takes courage, and it’s easier to make conclusions upstream of details because it spares you the emotional cost of grappling with confounding or unpalatable nuance.

When things go wrong, sometimes it’s your fault, sometimes it’s somebody else’s fault, and sometimes it’s nobody’s fault. Sometimes it’s a combination of all three. Either way, to be vulnerable as a leader is to be open to any of those conclusions, and owning the responsibility to follow through with fair, corrective action - even against yourself. Sometimes the right outcome might be admitting to a team, “I really screwed this up, the fault lies with me.”

The Tyrant and The Pushover

In the worst case, there are two opposing archetypes created by vulnerability avoidance: The Tyrant and The Pushover.

The Tyrant is a manager that leads by context-less accountability and fiat: “I make demands and they are followed.” When those demands are not met, yelling or finger-pointing becomes a proxy for accountability, and in the worst case people unfairly lose their jobs. Were the demands realistic? Was the team set up for success with appropriate staffing and strategic direction? Were there real, competing incentives that the team was not set up to trade off? None of these details matter to The Tyrant.

It doesn’t matter that blindly mandating outcomes isn’t strategic. The Tyrant will make generic proclamations like “I need to put a fire under this team” and “this team lacks urgency,” which are common scapegoats levied by managers who are unwilling or incapable of digging into details. Being upset about poor outcomes is frankly easier for The Tyrant than acknowledging their role in creating the inputs that undermined the outcomes in the first place.

The Pushover, by contrast, holds nobody accountable. The Pushover’s team operates blissfully agnostic to delivery timelines or role expectations, and individual underperformance is repeatedly swept under the rug. As a result the team doesn’t ship enough, or they don’t ship the right things. The Pushover believes their core job is to keep engineers happy and “protect the team,” but the net result of this protection is that the leadership team above them has no idea what they’re working on and why deadlines are slipping. Kim Scott refers to this management style as Ruinous Empathy.

I’ve found The Pushover to be much more prevalent than The Tyrant. But The Pushover is easier to overlook because at face value their team is happy and kind to each other, which feels like culture. But underneath this facade of team culture lies a much more pernicious reality:

• The team is invisible. Because the organization doesn’t understand what the team actually does (and it doesn’t ship!), the organization will never give this team priority. Nobody gets promoted, the team never grows in size, and in times of cost sensitivity the team’s headcount is heavily scrutinized.
• The strongest ICs are burning out. I am 100% convinced the best way to burn out the highest performers on a team is to fail to engage in any corrective action of any low performers, especially as titles increase. “If performance doesn’t matter, why am I trying so hard?” It’s a team and morale killer at the price of one leader’s unwillingness to engage in an honest conversation.¹

This leads to perhaps one of my most controversial management hot-takes:

It is impossible to foster a psychologically safe culture if persistent underperformance goes unaddressed.

Psychologically safe culture is not centered around being nice, it is centered around being fair. In the famous words of the Netflix culture deck, work is a sports team, not a family. Fortunately, kindness is often a side effect of just cultures.

Positive feedback is vulnerable, too

Here’s a real question: when’s the last time you received detailed, deeply encouraging and non-generic positive feedback from a manager acknowledging the effort and impact of an initiative you spent a lot of effort on? Not simply “you did great on this,” but feedback so specific and personal that it could not have been written by ChatGPT? And when was that feedback delivered face-to-face in a timely manner rather than limited to a written annual review?

My guess is that for the majority of people the answer is “never.” Because it turns out that delivering extremely positive, specific, personal feedback can feel just as uncomfortable to many managers as delivering negative feedback. This is further reason why I think feedback is less a “mean” problem than a vulnerability problem. Praise is as far from “mean” as you can get, and yet managers who are averse to conflict tend to avoid positive feedback just as much.

Earlier in my career this was me, too. I can’t rationalize why, but it simply felt more comfortable to be reserved rather than effusive in my encouragement at work. But a few years ago I made the conscious decision to change my behavior - I would lean into praise when I saw great work happening. This meant showing appreciation in 1:1s, Slack, email chains, and meetings where the recipient wasn’t even attending. And now the opportunity to meet with someone face to face and thank them for their work on something really important is one of the best parts of my job.

Closing example: Peter Principle

An idea I will always remember from High Output Management is when Andy Grove discusses the Peter Principle, or leaders “rising to the level of their incompetence.” A common excuse for managers when promoting someone to a title they underperform in is “oh, it’s fine if they struggle, they’re learning.” Andy’s response: “It’s great that they’re learning, but remember - who’s paying their tuition? The team underneath the person who is flailing.”

I think the Peter Principle is often misread as a flippant or cynical observation rather than an objective observation, but it’s absolutely the latter. It’s only natural when promoting someone into a role or scope they’ve never had before that they’ll struggle to adapt, at least for some time. But that begs the question - with sufficient time, what if it’s not working out? What if the scope is simply too big or the skills just aren’t there? Will you do the hard thing of moving them back to the level they’re comfortable in or keep them flailing at a level they can’t operate in? That’s not an easy conversation, nor is it “nice.” But is it the best thing for the team and this person? You made a judgment call and it didn’t work out. Do you have the courage to do something about it?

To confront these questions is an exercise in vulnerability.

Footnotes