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The prime minister in tears. The Prime Minister has spoken openly about the great pressure on his work. It’s hard to think of another time when two top leaders of the G7 Country exhibited their personal frailty in the way that Britain did this week by Rachel Reeves and Kiel Starmer.
Reeves struggled to contain the visible pain of something that remained a mystery at the time of writing amid the painful glare of the House.
Priorities told a weekend newspaper interviewer that his recent political turmoil came when he was facing a G7 meeting in Canada within days of his London family home, an Iranian missile strike and a NATO summit in The Hague.
Both cases say a lot about our complex and often contradictory responses to vulnerable leaders.
For a long time, it has been traditional wisdom if your boss is lucky enough to be ready to reveal fear, uncertainty, or other forms of useless form.
They are considered more trusted and respected, especially by young staff members who are said to admire “authenticity,” and therefore more valuable to the organization.
It helps some of the world’s most well-known corporate leaders support this idea. “I think one of the most underrated leadership traits is its vulnerability and seeking help,” former Starbucks boss Howard Schultz told an interviewer in 2017.
When former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi left the travel group and ran Uber, he was praised by Expedia staff for telling him he was “scary” to make the move.
Certainly, there is research that suggests paying to communicate the wobble inside. But if that was really clear, why does the evidence suggest that there are relatively few leaders willing to own it to some form of weakness?
When author Jacob Morgan surveyed 14,000 employees around the world for his 2023 book and led the vulnerability, he asked how many bosses demonstrated the qualities of a vulnerable leader.
Only 16% of people said leaders did something that they would allow them to ask for help, embrace or reveal their true feelings.
I think this is because, like so many others in work life, context is everything.
Leaders who reveal their priorities this week may be punished.
When a BBC interviewer asked one of the prime minister’s allies on Wednesday, “Don’t you think he’s saying he’s grossly weak?”
The question of prioritization was timing.
Signs of vulnerability can appear to be damage control, or excuses, if the leader comes after he is already in trouble rather than before.
According to a recent paper by American scholars, CEOs who ignore the risks of this lesson are not appealing to investors.
They read interviews with fictional technology chiefs before forecasting revenues, and then conducted a series of experiments to see how people reacted.
In several interviews, the CEO said, although he was good at speaking in public, “When I give speeches, I get nervous frequently – my mouth is dry and my hands are sweaty.”
To others, he said: “I’m good at speaking in public, and when I give a speech, I never get nervous.”
It turns out that if a more vulnerable version of a CEO publishes good financial news, people tend to find predicted and trustworthy and value attractive investments in the company.
If he had bad news, it fell badly. However, when the CEO appears to be more vulnerable, the response has softened.
Importantly, this soft reaction only occurred when the boss showed signs of vulnerability in front of bad news.
This makes sense and I think it explains at least some of the reactions to this week’s priorities.
Things get even more complicated when it comes to Reeves, but investors fear that she will be fired, not because there was an actual market sale after Starme didn’t support his tearful prime minister first.
Her display of distress also came after bad news of the party’s uprising against reforms she strongly supported. However, those who witnessed the tragic image of her anguish could not imagine them not being real. As Reeves shows, it can also sway.
