Leadership Minute: Cultivating Vulnerability on Your Team

Building resilience and trust on your team requires vulnerability

One of the most important roles a leader plays is cultivating their team’s emotional capacity.

Emotional capacity is how you react to challenging situations, your emotional mindset and the quality of your relationships. In an organization, high emotional capacity ensures deep levels of trust, open lines of communication between colleagues, and emotional resilience in the face of challenging situations.

Developing emotional capacity in an organization is a challenging process involving significant discomfort and vulnerability. But teams that push through these barriers of discomfort will often attain a high level of psychological safety, which is essentially trust at scale and crucial to transparency, candor and growth.

The JOHARI Window

Psychological safety is the collection of group norms that build trust between individuals and teams throughout the company. It’s necessary for any thriving organization, as it allows teams to have productive conflict while knowing everyone on the team is rowing in the same direction. Psychological safety requires people to share vulnerably, as people cannot feel safe among others until they know them and make themselves known to them.

A powerful explanation of this relationship comes from a framework called the JOHARI Window, created by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham. It maps out awareness in two dimensions—what you know about yourself and what others know about you. The four areas in the window are: