Book Review: Leading with Vulnerability

Title: Leading with Vulnerability
Author: Jacob Morgan
Genre: Nonfiction; Self-help
Book Length: 261 pages (print)
Book Type: PDF
Year Published: October 2, 2023

Date Started: January 2, 2024
Date finished: January 5, 2024

This book focuses on using vulnerability to manage/lead in the workplace. As a leader (CEO, manager, etc.), it’s important to understand your employees and co-workers in order to create an environment where everyone can work together harmoniously to achieve the required outcome for the company. This book explains a technique that can benefit the leader. It can be difficult to manage a large group of people, especially in a corporate size company. Without a strong leader, things can go awry. However, having a leader doesn’t necessarily mean everything will work out perfect. The leader must know their employees and must sympathize with them, and in order to sympathize, the leader must show vulnerability toward their employees.

There are lots of great information in this book to guide a person in a leadership position to better work with their employees. The interviews with CEOs from large corporations was a nice touch in showing how these leaders were able to overcome obstacles. This book explains how to use vulnerability alongside other leadership techniques to achieve the best outcome between employees and the leader. It also touches on failure, learning from mistakes, and how vulnerability can lead to situations where the leader could be taken advantage of.

Overall, I found this book informative and knowledgeable in the area of leadership. It’s important to understand your employees and using vulnerability as a technique can benefit most situations. Personally, I’ve been on both ends as a person in a leadership position and as an employee. I’ve learned that being vulnerable toward employees can backfire because it can lead to being taken advantage of. Once you’ve built trust with an employee, you are kind of digging yourself a hole because they may not understand your goal. In this case I think it’s better to form a professional rapport and not become too vulnerable. As an employee, my experience was that those in position only had one goal and that was to hit numbers. It didn’t matter who you were. You were always replaceable. In those situations, it’s never a good idea to allow your leaders to fully understand you because they can and will take advantage of you.

Who should read this book: This is an excellent resource for anyone in a leadership position who wants to try a different method of leading or who wants to add a new technique to what they are currently using.