The Marble Statue Myth
There’s an old myth that in the worst hour, the best leader is the one who feels nothing: jaw set, voice clipped, eyes dry, the marble statue in the storm. Real life contradicts that myth every single time. The leaders people choose to follow in a crisis are not the coldest; they’re the clearest. And clarity in chaos almost always begins with vulnerability, the willingness to be seen as you are, to name uncertainty without flinching, to own mistakes without excuse, to ask for help without shame, and to keep moving with purpose. Brené Brown calls vulnerability “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” In crisis leadership, those three elements are built into the terrain. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make you strong; it just makes you less trustworthy. Vulnerability is not the opposite of courage. It is the doorway to it.
A Room Reads You Before It Hears You
If you lead in emergencies long enough, you learn this lesson in the body before you learn it in the mind. When power fails in a hospital and backup fuel is thinner than the plan assumed, the room reads you before it hears you. If you mask reality with a steady smile and vague promises, the room senses the mismatch and anxiety spikes. If you acknowledge the punch of fear you felt when the lights flickered, if you say plainly what is true and what is uncertain, if you ask for specific help and pair it with a credible near-term plan, you will feel the collective exhale. Vulnerability doesn’t slow action; it accelerates it, because it restores the two human needs that crises puncture first: certainty and connection. People may not love what you say, but if they can feel that you are telling the truth and that you are with them, they will walk with you into the next hour.
What Vulnerability Means
It helps to be precise about terms, because “vulnerability” has been merchandised into everything from oversharing to on-stage tears. Brown’s definition is a good anchor: uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. In practice, that looks like admitting you don’t know the answer yet, taking responsibility when a call was wrong, asking a partner to cover a gap you cannot cover, telling a community what you can do today and what you can’t do until tomorrow, and allowing your humanity to be visible while you lead. It does not look like trauma dumping or performative distress. It doesn’t seem like handing your burdens to the very people you are trying to carry. Vulnerability in leadership is bounded, purposeful, and in service of others; it is never a request for the room to parent you. In The Crisis Leader, I call this “bounded vulnerability”: show enough of yourself to build trust and unlock agency, then convert that trust into coordinated action.
Why Vulnerability Builds Trust
The connection to trust is not theoretical. Stephen M. R. Covey’s model of credibility, integrity, intent, capabilities, and results is a practical way to see why vulnerability works. When you talk straight about what you know and what you don’t, you raise integrity. When you explain trade-offs, name who you’re prioritizing and why, and remove any hint of a hidden agenda, you clarify intent. When you admit limits and ask the right people to help, you expand capabilities. When you take ownership of mistakes, right wrongs, and show visible progress, you protect results. In other words, vulnerability is not an aesthetic choice; it is a mechanism that activates every part of trust. And in crisis, trust is the speed limit for everything else.
A Short Scene of Vulnerable Leadership
Consider a scene many of us have lived. Generators are running. The ICU monitor glows thin and nervous. A rumor is growing online that the hospital will go dark by midnight. The senior administrator gathers staff for a brief update and says, “I know you’re hearing the same rumor I am. When the substation tripped, my stomach dropped, too. Here’s what we know for certain: the hospital has four hours of fuel at current load; we can buy ourselves up to twelve by shedding non-critical consumption now. Here’s what we don’t know: whether the first fuel convoy can get past the police checkpoint; our liaison is on the phone. Here’s what we’re doing in the next ninety minutes: we’re reducing load by thirty percent to protect ICU and ER, and we’re sending two escorts to pull the convoy through. I need maintenance leads to start the load-shed protocol; I need two volunteers with trucks on radio channel three. We’ll brief again at quarter past the hour.” That short paragraph contains emotional exposure, humility, and a request for help, all in service of agency and momentum. It is vulnerable, and it is strong.
Padang: Credibility in the Open
A different example, quieter and just as decisive, comes from Padang. After the earthquake, two Indonesian women in modest UN roles became the connective tissue between government and international responders. They didn’t command with rank; they led with the kind of credibility that emerges only when you allow people to see both your grasp of reality and your heart for those affected. They acknowledged when a road they had vouched for was suddenly impassable, apologized without defensiveness, and immediately offered an alternate route with a new ETA. They said out loud when a clinic had to be served first because the children there were deteriorating fastest. They asked district officials, with visible respect, to step into the decisions that only the local authority could make. They shared their fatigue in small, human phrases, and then they modeled the following right action. Watching them work, you could feel why people followed: they were honest, competent, and willing to be seen in the struggle. That is vulnerability working precisely as it should.
The Fear of Losing Authority
Leaders sometimes resist this posture because they fear it will cost them authority. The fear is understandable; many of us learn leadership in systems that equate certainty with competence and emotion with weakness. But the field keeps teaching the opposite. People punish deception more harshly than they punish difficulty. They can metabolize hard news if it is paired with a path; they cannot metabolize spin. “We don’t know yet, and here’s what we’re doing to find out,” creates more authority than “Everything is fine,” when everything is not OK. And when you do make the wrong call, because sooner or later you will, a simple public repair strengthens you. “We misallocated yesterday’s water delivery. That was my decision. Here is the fix we’ve implemented, and here is how we’ll compensate the neighborhood that waited. Thank you to those who flagged this quickly.” That is vulnerability as accountability; it closes loops, teaches the culture how to behave, and speeds the next decision.
How Vulnerability Regulates a Room
There is also a physiological reason this works. Emotional states are contagious. Neuroscience will discuss mirrored systems and co-regulation, while field leaders will address the room. When you name what people are feeling without dramatizing it – fear, anger, grief – you reduce its grip. When you allow a flash of your feeling to be seen and keep moving, you model regulation under load. You are not asking others to become numb; you are inviting them to match your steadiness. A leader who is all armor leaves room to manage their anxiety. A leader who is all feeling floods the room with more. Vulnerability at its best sits in the middle: “I felt it too; here’s what we’ll do.” Over time, this becomes part of your voiceprint. Communities learn that your updates will be candid and usable, and they organize themselves around that rhythm. Teams know that they can bring you bad news because you won’t shoot the messenger, and that one cultural fact might save more lives than any checklist you ever write.
Boundaries: Be Human, Not a Burden
Boundaries matter. Vulnerability does not relieve you of the duty to protect. You cannot, in the name of authenticity, reveal personal information that exposes someone to stigma or harm. You cannot collapse into tears at a podium in a way that transfers care to the people you are meant to care for. You cannot share operational details that compromise safety or dignity. You cannot ask your team to hold your private despair because you are lonely. Choosing what to show and what to withhold is part of the craft. A practical internal test is simple: if the people most affected by this crisis heard you speak this way about them and your work, would they call it true and fair? If yes, you are probably inside the bounds. If not, recalibrate.
The First Twenty-Four Hours
The most helpful place to practice vulnerability is in the first twenty-four hours, when trust patterns are setting like wet concrete. Talk straight from the first brief: what you know, what you don’t, and what you will do next. Name how you are discerning priorities so people can see the intent behind your choices. Invite correction from the edge by asking for the single most significant constraint and then proving you will act on what you hear. If a rumor is true, acknowledge it and explain the solution; if it is false, accept it and present your evidence. When you give the next update, start with the repair. Vulnerability here is not confession; it is transparency and responsiveness braided together. It tells a community that they are safe to tell you the truth and that you will change because they told you.
Limits, Rest, and the Duty to Endure
Vulnerability also carries into how you set limits, with the public and with your team. There is nothing weak about saying you will not reach the northern road tonight without risking your drivers, and that you will start at dawn with an escort. There is nothing weak about telling your operations chief that you are at the edge of your bandwidth and need a handover and a ninety-minute sleep so you can make good decisions at first light. There is strength in this because it signals that you intend to be present for the whole arc, not just the first act. A burned-out leader is not a hero; a burned-out leader is a hazard. Vulnerability about limits creates a culture where pacing, handoffs, and mutual protection are usual rather than signs of failure.
The Unseen Moments That Shape Culture
Some of the most potent moments of vulnerable leadership you’ll ever see are in rooms without cameras. They are in the after-action review at the end of a grim shift, when a supervisor admits a miss and names the change for tomorrow. They are in the small circle before a convoy leaves, when the logistician looks her drivers in the eye and acknowledges the risk while detailing the mitigation and reminding them they can refuse a task they judge unsafe. They are in the first phone call to a partner where you admit that your warehouse records are incomplete and ask for a joint inventory before the subsequent distribution. None of these sentences will trend on social media. All of them will bank on trust where it counts.
When Vulnerability Is Used Against You
There is a natural question here: what if your vulnerability is used against you? What if the admission of uncertainty becomes tomorrow’s headline? What if a political opponent frames your apology as incompetence? It happens. You cannot control how every sentence will be received. You can control whether the people you most need to move can use your words to act. Over time, communities and teams become skilled at distinguishing between the leader who gets caught hiding reality and the leader who names it first and adjusts. The latter might take a hit in one news cycle; the former takes a hit that lasts for years. If you are leading for optics, you will be tempted to hide. If you are leading for outcomes, you will be tempted to tell the truth. Choose outcomes. History is kinder to them.
Building the Muscle in Peacetime
How do you build more of this muscle if you weren’t raised to lead this way? The short answer is one minor repair at a time. Start before the sirens. If you send an email with an error, send a correction and thank the person who caught it. If a teammate challenges your plan and they are right, say so in front of the group and change the plan. If a community partner alerts you to a blind spot, bring them into the solution and credit them publicly. If you don’t know the answer in a meeting, say so and set a time to come back with the best information you can find. Each of these acts is a deposit in the trust account you will draw on when the stakes are higher. As you deposit, teach by explaining to your senior team why you answered that way, so the behavior scales. Vulnerability is contagious when the most powerful person in the room practices it with care.
Structures That Make Honesty Routine
You can also build a structure around it. Establish a rhythm of brief, honest updates at predictable times. Make it a rule that every update contains three sentences: what is true now, what you don’t know yet, and how you are finding out, and what you are doing next, with a timestamp. Write down the decision criteria and post them where everyone can see how choices are being made. Invite one voice from the edge into each shift change to say, in two minutes, what the room is missing. Put a small counter on the wall that displays a handful of visible results and update it live. These structures make vulnerability routine. They do not rely on the leader’s mood or charisma; they make honesty the operating system.
Tell Stories That Hold Both Gravity and Agency
There is a storytelling dimension to all of this. A vulnerable leader tells crisis stories that do not skip pain or sell fantasy. They use the gravity-and-agency formula I teach throughout The Crisis Leader: name what is heavy, and immediately name what we will do. They pair that with the near win, a picture of the following four hours that people can help build, a ward lit by midnight, soup in the gym by six, a convoy through the checkpoint by fourteen hundred. They tell these stories in sentences ordinary people can repeat, because repetition is how a community becomes a team. They allow a tremor of feeling to pass through their voice when they speak of what has been lost, and then they stand up a plan that honors the loss by acting. They apologize when necessary. They thank them by name when possible. They let others be the heroes. None of this dulls urgency; it sharpens it.
Enough, Not Too Much
There is a risk of going too far. You can be so open that you blur professional boundaries. You can narrate your inner life when what people need is a generator. You can conflate catharsis with leadership. The answer is not to rebuild the wall. The answer is to keep the wall low enough that people can see the person leading them, and strong enough that they can lean on it without it giving way. That balance is personal, cultural, and situational. It will not be perfect. The good news is that the people you lead are extraordinarily forgiving when they believe you are acting for them, not for yourself, if you overshoot, repair. If you undershoot, stretch. The practice is the point.
The Discipline, Not the Mood
If you take only one idea from this essay, let it be this: in a crisis, vulnerability is not a mood to project; it is a discipline to practice. It is the discipline of naming reality without varnish, of inviting help without surrendering authority, of owning error without collapsing into shame, of showing feeling without handing the work to someone else, of setting limits without losing heart. It will make you a better strategist because you will hear more truth. It will make you a better communicator by helping you waste fewer words. It will make you a better partner because others will know where they stand. Most of all, it will make you a keeper of trust, and trust is the one resource that makes every other resource more effective when seconds suddenly matter.
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Your people don’t need you to be impenetrable. They need you to be human, honest, and brave in public. That’s the kind of leadership a crisis remembers.
By Gisli Olafsson, Author of The Crisis Leader
