Дата публикации: 18-08-2026 19:49:01

Here’s why vulnerability feels riskier for some employees than others.
Psychological safety is a crucial ingredient for growth and innovation within a company.
“We've known for years that's the fertilizer for an environment, which can innovate and transform,” says Phil Le-Brun, co-author of “The Octopus Organization,” and executive-in-residence at Amazon. “If you and I can sit down and have a passionate debate over a problem we're trying to solve — but we have respect for each other — what we find almost every time is you and I will find a third better way.”
The problem is that psychological safety requires vulnerability, and not everyone experiences vulnerability the same way.
What comes first: safety or vulnerability?
The temptation is to find a shortcut, and force vulnerability without establishing trust within the organization.
The result? People share something personal, and they immediately regret it. Or worse, a moment of vulnerability is used against them.
Instead, leaders need to earn trust by demonstrating high-trust leadership behaviors before they can expect employees to vulnerable.
“Your leader has to know and care about you inside and outside of work because the parts affect the whole,” says Julian Lute, strategic advisor at Great Place To Work.
In our work with organizations, we see that when employees feel like they can “be their true self” at work, they are two times as likely to look forward to going to work and 50% more likely to want to stay in their job.
What we get wrong about vulnerability
Author and researcher Brené Brown first popularized vulnerability as a leadership virtue. Her definition of vulnerability? “Uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.”
In the years that followed, more leaders embraced the idea of being vulnerable and encouraging them to bring “your full self to work.” That led to misconceptions about what healthy vulnerability looks like.
Brown is clear: There have to be boundaries. This is a missing ingredient from workplace training and education, according to Claude Silver, chief heart officer at VaynerX and author of the book “Be Yourself at Work.”
“We, generally speaking, have put people into management and leadership positions because that's where they just needed to climb,” she says. That doesn’t mean a new leader knows where the boundary line should be on what to share with their team and how to appropriately share information with their team.
Vulnerability isn’t the same for everybody
Not everyone faces the same risks when speaking up at work.
“What we don’t account for is that vulnerability isn’t the same for everybody,” says Aiko Bethea, author of “Anchored, Aligned, Accountable” and founder of RARE Consulting. She worked with Brown to understand why “safe spaces” never fully delivered on their promise to create psychological safety for all.
“If you're the only in any category — you're the newest person in the room, the only woman in a team of men, the only one who doesn't have a college degree — then the vulnerability and the risk of you speaking out looks really different,” Bethea says.
“If you don't understand the barriers for some people to come in and you don't attend to them, then you've just made this kind of open invitation that can feel like a façade.”
Yet these are often the voice organizations most need to hear to drive innovation and progress.
“What they have to offer is likely something that is going to plug a spot that's less recognized because their experience is so different and unique,” Bethea says.
What leaders can do
If vulnerability carries greater risk for some employees, leaders need to act proactively to help employees feel safer to speak up. Bethea argues that adopting a “coaching stance” is one way to accomplish that.
“When I take a coaching stance, I'm going to learn a lot of things,” she says. “I'm going to learn your reason for your actions, what your intentions were. I'm going to be able to assess if you understand the other impacts that happened that weren't what we wanted.”
This requires leaders to spend more time delivering feedback, which can be a sticking point for senior leaders on tight timetables. But poorly delivered feedback is the killer of innovation, Bethea says.
“If the whole time, I’m just directing you to do it the way it has always been done, or the way I think is correct, then I walk away having learned nothing,” she says. 
Vulnerability in baby steps
How can you practice sharing more of yourself in the workplace if you’ve never been trained on how to do it? Silver recommends taking “baby steps.”
“What I'm always saying is literally putting just a foot into the water and checking it out,” she says. She models the conversation: “I’m Claude. I’m a mom of two young girls. Anyone else?”
Sharing more of who you are at work can build connection and community.
“Before you walk into the office or before you turn on your laptop at nine o'clock and you see the first meeting, try to feel what it is you are closing off, what it is you are putting in your backpack,” Silver says. “Notice what the cost is because I'm going to guarantee to you that there is a cost.”
Psychological safety doesn't happen by accident. For more than 30 years, Great Place To Work has studied what helps employees feel safe speaking up, taking risks, and bringing their full selves to work. 

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