During a Corey-osity Unleashed conversation with Advita Patel, my wife Debra told a story I haven't stopped thinking about.
A company was moving offices. A big change for everyone. Longer commutes for some, new routines for all. A senior leader stood up in front of the staff to talk about the move, and chose to be open about how hard it was for them personally.
The hard part? Finding private schools in the new area.
Picture the room. People working out what the extra train fare will cost each month. People rearranging childcare around a longer journey. People wondering whether the job still works for them at all. And the boss is opening up about the stress of choosing between fee-paying schools.
The leader thought this was vulnerability. The room heard something else.
Vulnerability Has an Audience
I've pushed leaders to open up for years. I've written about it on this site more times than I'd like to count. Admit the mistake. Say "I don't know." Own the bad call in front of the team. I stand by all of it.
But Debra's story exposes a gap in how most of us talk about vulnerability. We treat it as something the speaker does. Open up, share the struggle, show you're human. Job done.
It isn't done. Your words land in someone else's ears, and the meaning gets decided there, not in your head.
Brené Brown has done more than anyone to put vulnerability on the leadership agenda. Even she draws the line: "Vulnerability is not oversharing, it's sharing with people who have earned the right to hear our stories and our experiences."
Her test is about the relationship between speaker and listener. It says nothing about how brave the speaker feels. And the private school leader skipped the listener entirely.
Complaining About Privilege Backfires
There's a name for what the room heard. A humblebrag.
Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino and Michael Norton ran nine studies on humblebragging, including a week-long diary study and a field experiment. They define it as "bragging masked by a complaint or humility." Their findings are blunt:
- Both kinds of humblebrag work worse than plain bragging.
- They reduce liking, perceived competence, compliance with requests and financial generosity.
- Complaint-based humblebrags do worse than simply complaining.
- People see them as insincere, and the whole thing backfires.
"I'm so stressed about choosing the right private school" fits the complaint-based pattern perfectly. I doubt the leader meant to brag. I'd bet they believed every word. It doesn't matter. The room hears the boast tucked inside the complaint, and the leader loses the trust they hoped to build.
Rank Changes the Maths
Status adds another layer. Kerry Roberts Gibson, Dana Harari and Jennifer Carson Marr published a paper in 2018 with a title worth remembering: When sharing hurts.
Across three experiments with 667 undergraduates, participants met a colleague who disclosed a weakness. Higher-status colleagues who disclosed lost perceived status. Peers who said the same thing didn't.
These were lab studies with students, not a boardroom during an office move, and the disclosures were weaknesses rather than lifestyle worries. I won't stretch the result further than it goes. But the direction matches what I've seen in real teams. The higher you sit, the more weight your words carry, and the less room your audience has to push back.
Nobody in Debra's story was going to put a hand up and say, "Sorry, my problem is the bus." The leader held all the cards in the room. Nobody else had the standing to answer back.
The Crying CEO Problem
If the office move story sounds too small to matter, look at a public version.
In August 2022, Braden Wallake, CEO of a marketing startup called HyperSocial, laid off two employees. Then he posted a selfie of himself in tears on LinkedIn. According to Business Insider, the post opened with "This will be the most vulnerable thing I'll ever share." He took the blame for the decision. He said he wanted people to see not every CEO is cold-hearted.
The post drew more than 7,600 comments by the end of the week. Some praised him for owning the decision. Many more called it tone deaf.
I don't think Wallake was faking. The tears looked real to me. The problem sat elsewhere. Two people had lost their income, and the photo at the top of the post showed the person who still had his. The story put the boss at the centre of somebody else's bad day.
Same pattern as the private schools. Real feelings, wrong spotlight.
Vulnerability Without Empathy Is a Monologue
Here's how I'd put it. Vulnerability without empathy is a monologue about you.
Empathy asks what the other person carries. Vulnerability shares what you carry. Do the second without the first and you've used your team as an audience for your feelings. They didn't sign up for the job of comforting their boss.
Our research at Step It Up HR found 99.5% of people have had at least one type of bad boss. Most of those bosses didn't set out to be bad. They had moments like this one. Small, well-meant, tone-deaf moments. Each one tells your team you don't see their world. Stack enough of them and people stop listening, even when you have something worth saying.
Three Questions Before You Open Up
I don't want anyone reading this to go back into the armour. Closed-off leaders do plenty of damage too. So before you share something personal with your team, run three checks.
1. Would anyone in this room swap problems with me?
If the honest answer is yes, you're not sharing a struggle. You're sharing a status update on a life they'd like to have. Keep it for people at your level.
2. Who is this for?
If telling the story makes you feel lighter and makes them feel smaller, it belongs with your coach, your partner or your peers. Not your team. Your team needs you steady during a change, not looking for sympathy from the people the change hits hardest.
3. Does it point toward what they're going through?
The office move story didn't have to go wrong. Picture the same leader saying: "This move costs some of you far more than it costs me. I don't know what all those costs are yet. I want you to tell me." Same openness. Same honesty. But now the vulnerability points outward. It admits a gap in what the leader knows, and it invites the room in.
Look at the Room First
Opening up feels generous from the inside. From the outside, it depends on who is listening and what they carry into the room when you start talking. A story about your stress lands one way with your peers and another way with someone on a third of your salary.
Real vulnerability from the top rarely sounds like "here's my hard thing." It sounds like "here's what I don't know about your hard thing."
So next time you feel the urge to open up to your team, look at the room before you speak. Ask yourself what their version of your problem looks like. Then decide whether your story helps them, or only helps you.
Which conversation with your team have you been treating as a chance to share, when it should have been a chance to listen?