One model of leadership ran boardrooms for most of the twentieth century: the leader as fortress. Unshakeable, decisive, revealing nothing that could be read as uncertainty. It is being dismantled now, and the interesting question is what the evidence against it actually consists of.
Most writing on this subject answers that question with Brené Brown, which is a reasonable thing to read and a poor thing to cite. Her work is qualitative, her claims about vulnerability as a source of creativity and belonging are interpretive, and the line about vulnerability being the birthplace of these things gets attributed to whichever of her books the writer happens to own. Worth reading. It does not carry an organisational argument on its own.
There is a sturdier piece of evidence, and it comes from hospitals.
The Study Where the Good Units Looked Worse
Edmondson examined eight units at a university hospital in 1996, combining surveys about the social and organisational properties of each unit with observation of how the nursing teams actually worked. She then compared those readings against medication error rates.
The units with stronger nurse manager direction and coaching, better perceived performance and better relationships showed, in her words, “significantly higher rates of medication errors”.
Read quickly, that finding says good management causes mistakes. Her explanation is the useful one: “detected error rates are dependent both on the actual error rates and the rate of reporting.” The better units were not making more errors. They were surfacing them.
Which means the error rate crossing an executive’s desk is partly a measurement of the organisation’s willingness to tell them things. A low number can indicate a clean operation. It can equally indicate a population that has learned what happens to the messenger. From the top, those two look identical.
One caveat belongs with this. Eight units in one hospital is a small study, and the reporting explanation is Edmondson’s interpretation of the pattern rather than a direct measurement of who reported what. It is a sound warning about reading a quiet dashboard as good news, and it is not a law.
What the Fortress Costs
Edmondson’s later work gives the mechanism a name. Her 1999 study across 51 teams found that psychological safety, the belief that one can speak up without being punished for it, predicted whether teams engaged in learning behaviour, and that the learning behaviour carried the effect through to performance.
A leader who performs infallibility is setting the local standard for what admitting a problem looks like. If uncertainty is never modelled at the top, surfacing a problem lower down becomes an act with no precedent, and the cost of that is paid in timing. Bad news arrives late, which is the same as saying it arrives expensive.
The Thing Being Asked For Is Narrower Than It Sounds
Resistance to this usually rests on a misreading of what is being proposed, so it is worth stating the narrow version.
Owens, Johnson and Mitchell studied what they call expressed humility across eight samples, published in Organization Science in 2013. Their definition is specific: it is manifested by “transparent disclosure of personal limits, acknowledging mistakes, and seeking realistic feedback about the self”, and it involves seeing the people you work with as “key sources of learning and insights about personal development”.
Notice what is absent from that definition. There is nothing about sharing anxiety with the board, nothing about emotional disclosure, nothing about talking about your feelings in an all-hands. It is three concrete behaviours: say what you do not know, own a mistake plainly, ask for feedback you might not enjoy.
Their results are worth stating precisely. In one study, expressed humility predicted individual and contextual performance alongside conscientiousness, self-efficacy and general mental ability, and appeared to compensate for lower general mental ability. In a large field sample, leader-expressed humility related to employee retention through job satisfaction, and to engagement through team learning orientation.
The authors are candid about what they have not shown. Their studies, in their words, “say little about what individual or situational factors foster the expression of humility in the workplace”. They can tell you it matters. They cannot tell you how to produce it.
Why This Is Hard for Senior People Specifically
What follows is a reading rather than a finding.
Saying “I do not have the answer yet” costs almost nothing if your sense of being adequate sits somewhere other than your competence. It costs a great deal if competence is the whole foundation, because then every admission of not knowing is a withdrawal from the only account you have.
That would explain why the behaviour is so hard to install by training. It is not a skill that is missing. The three behaviours are simple to describe and most executives could perform them tomorrow. What stops them is what the behaviour would cost given where their worth is currently funded.
Which reframes the problem. The executives who do this well are generally not braver. They have less at stake in the admission.
Behind that shift sits a longer argument about what strength in a leader actually consists of.
Where Your Adequacy Is Funded
If saying “I do not know” feels more expensive than it should, the obstacle is usually not a communication skill. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more than it can bear. It takes about ten minutes. Begin your profile here.
If this was worth your time, there is a letter. One short piece a week on identity, self-worth and the arithmetic of senior work. It costs nothing, and leaving takes one click. See what arrives.
References
- Edmondson, A. C. (1996). Learning from mistakes is easier said than done: Group and organizational influences on the detection and correction of human error. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 32(1), 5–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886396321001
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
- Owens, B. P., Johnson, M. D., & Mitchell, T. R. (2013). Expressed humility in organizations: Implications for performance, teams, and leadership. Organization Science, 24(5), 1517–1538. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0795
Further Reading
If this resonated, these go deeper. You can also browse the full Research Library for all recommendations.
- Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. On vulnerability and shame resilience; essential reading for leaders who want to lead with authentic strength rather than projected invulnerability.
- The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson. The practical companion to her research on psychological safety, with concrete guidance for leaders building teams that can surface hard truths.
- The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown. On letting go of what you think you should be and embracing who you are, a quieter but often more transformative read than Daring Greatly.
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