Pull up your company's training catalog. Go on, I'll wait.
I'll bet you find a feedback course. Often two. A presentation skills workshop. Compliance modules with a deadline and a reminder email. Something on difficult conversations, something on giving a good one-to-one.
Now search it for a course on saying "I don't know" in front of your team.
You won't find one. Nobody trains this.
The Poll Nobody Expected
Debra and I ran a poll at a conference we attended. We asked the companies in the room which leadership areas they trained on. The answers came back the same everywhere. Feedback? Trained. Communication? Trained. Authenticity and vulnerability came in dead last. Least trained, in every company, in every field.
It was one room of people, not a peer-reviewed study. But the pattern was so consistent it stuck with me for months.
I brought it up when Advita Patel joined us on the Corey-osity Unleashed podcast. Vulnerability is one of the seven habits in her BELIEVE model of confident leadership, sitting right next to boldness. I asked her about the tension between those two. She didn't see any. Her line was "to be vulnerable you need boldness and to be bold you need to be vulnerable."
Then she said the part I keep coming back to. Not many organizations invest in it "because they do see it as a weakness."
There it is. We don't train it because we're scared of it.
Why Your Budget Goes Where It Goes
The money isn't small. Training magazine's 2025 Training Industry Report puts US training spend at $102.8 billion. The biggest slices of the average budget go to mandatory compliance and management and supervisory training, at 13 percent each. IT and systems training and onboarding take 11 percent each.
I don't blame anyone for those choices. Compliance keeps you out of court. Onboarding gets people productive. Feedback training has a clear shape: a model, a role play, a certificate.
Vulnerability has no such shape. Nobody puts "admitted being wrong in the Tuesday stand-up" on a completion dashboard. So it never makes the catalog, and leaders learn the opposite lesson by watching each other. The boss who never blinks gets promoted. Everyone takes notes.
I wrote about why feedback training without practice falls flat. This is the bigger gap. We drill the skill of telling other people what they got wrong. We never drill the skill of saying it about ourselves.
What It Cost Me
I hit a plateau in my career and I didn't know why. Looking back, the reason was simple. I had to be the smartest person in every room. And I'm not the sharpest crayon in the box, so most rooms had someone smarter than me in them.
The turning point came at a long table with my boss and my boss's boss watching. Somebody who reported to me said, "Ken, you're wrong." I thought about it. He was right. So I said so, in front of everyone, and asked him to walk us through his thinking. We went with his answer. I've told the full story of the day before.
Here's the business case nobody put in a slide deck. Once my team saw it was safe to not know things, I stopped being one brain on every problem. I had ten. Problems I would have chewed on for ten days got solved in one, often because somebody had hit the same issue at a previous company. Our department got far more productive, and I didn't learn one new technical skill to make it happen.
The Research Agrees With My Ten Brains
This isn't only my story. The studies line up.
Amy Edmondson's classic study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company found team psychological safety predicted learning behavior, and learning behavior in turn drove team performance. The paper names team leader coaching as one of the things shaping those outcomes.
Bradley Owens and colleagues drew on eight lab and field samples to study expressed humility. In their field data, leaders who showed humility had teams with a stronger learning orientation and higher engagement, and employees more likely to stay. In a separate study of 607 people across 161 teams, Owens and David Hekman found humble behavior spreads. When the leader models it, followers copy it, and team performance goes up.
Here's the catch, and it matters. A study of 72 teams in 11 Chinese tech firms found leader humility, defined as being open about limitations and mistakes and giving followers credit, drove information sharing only in teams with low power distance. In teams with high power distance, it hurt psychological safety. If your team expects the boss to have all the answers, a sudden "I don't know" lands as confusion, not courage.
Advita made a related point on the podcast. Vulnerability isn't equally safe for everyone, and she tells people to check the room first. We dug into this in your vulnerability has an audience.
So you don't flip a switch. You build the habit, on purpose, with practice. Which is exactly what training is for.
Engineers Already Know How to Do This
If you run a software team, you already have a template. It's called the blameless postmortem.
The Google SRE book puts it plainly. A blameless postmortem assumes everyone involved in an incident "had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had." And if a culture of finger pointing wins out, "people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment."
We built a whole ritual for systems to admit failure. We never built one for the people running them.
How to Train What Nobody Trains
You don't need a vendor for this. You need reps, and you need the senior person to go first.
Put "what I got wrong" on the agenda
Start every retro with the lead naming one call they got wrong in the sprint. Not a humble-brag. A real one. Do it every time until it's boring.
Practice the sentence out loud
Role play "I don't know, what do you think?" the same way you role play feedback. It feels silly. So did your first feedback workshop. Leaders freeze on this sentence because they've never said it under pressure.
Run the leader's postmortem
After a project goes sideways, have the manager write a short blameless postmortem on their own decisions. Share it with the team. Same template you use for outages.
Reward the person who corrects you
When someone tells you you're wrong and they're right, thank them in public. Google's SRE team recommends the same thing for postmortems: visibly reward people for doing the right thing.
Check the room first
Use the power distance finding. If your team comes from a culture where the boss is always right, explain what you're doing and why before you start. Then keep going.
I've argued before: not knowing is a superpower if you admit it. The admitting part is a skill, and skills need practice.
Open the Catalog Again
Our research found 99.5% of people have had one or more types of bad boss. A lot of those bosses weren't cruel. They were scared of looking like they didn't have the answer, and they made everyone around them pay for it.
You spend money teaching people how to give feedback. Spend a slice of it teaching them how to take the hardest feedback of all... the kind they give themselves, out loud, in front of the team.
So go back to the catalog. Find the empty tab. What would it take for you to be the first person in your company to fill it?