The Two Ways to Tell Your Team You're Not Perfect

The most useful thing I do when I start working with a new team has nothing to do with process.

At some point in the first few weeks, I tell them I see a counselor every other week. I talk about what's going on with my kids. I share things that aren't running perfectly, because nothing runs perfectly, and I'd rather say so than spend energy performing otherwise. This isn't strategy – it's just who I've become. But I've come to understand why it works.

Susan Wheelan's research on team development – documented in Creating Effective Teams – maps how groups actually mature, and the pattern isn't what most leaders expect. It runs: time together → vulnerability → trust → performance. Trust isn't the starting point. It's what you get after vulnerability has already happened. And vulnerability requires people to actually know each other – not just their work product, but something about who they are.

What her data shows is how rarely this happens by default. She tracked more than a thousand groups and found that only 12 to 20 percent of teams ever reach the high-performing stage. Most cycle through polite coordination indefinitely and never get there.

Remote teams don't get this by accident. When every meeting has a deliverable and you're connecting over a screen instead of a hallway, nobody accidentally lets their guard down. You have to create the conditions. Someone has to go first.

I go first. I model openness deliberately, early – well before there's much trust in the bank – because waiting for trust to develop before being vulnerable is backwards. Vulnerability has to come first. When I stay an open book about my own life, it makes it safer for others to do the same. It accelerates the whole thing.

What I hadn't thought to name explicitly until recently is that there's a second mode.

An HBR piece by Ron Carucci and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic from January 2026 caught my attention. Their argument: leaders who publicly model learning – sharing what they don't know yet, what they're figuring out – build more durable trust than leaders who model competence. The research on learning orientation backs this up. Prioritizing learning, even at the risk of looking uncertain, outperforms projecting certainty.

When I read that, something clicked into place. When you share what you're learning, you're also sending a vulnerability signal. "I didn't know this. Now I do. Here's what I found." That's a vulnerable position. It says the same thing my counselor disclosure says, just in professional language: I'm not finished, and I know it.

The practical advantage of this second mode is that more people can access it. Talking about your personal life – your family, your mental health, the things that aren't going well – requires a kind of courage that not everyone has built yet. Sharing what you've been learning this quarter requires willingness to look like you're still figuring things out. Lower threshold. Still meaningful.

If you can do both – personal and professional – you're sending the same signal in two registers at once: I'm not performing perfection, and neither should you.

The alternative is a culture where leadership models infallibility. Everyone sees through it. People notice the mistakes even when leaders don't acknowledge them. But when the unspoken norm is that leaders don't get things wrong, staff can't admit it when they do either – not out loud, not where it would matter. PwC's 2025 Hopes & Fears survey found that employees with the highest psychological safety are 72% more motivated than those with the lowest – the single largest motivation lever in the entire dataset. When people can't admit mistakes, they can't learn from them. When teams don't learn, they fall behind. The leaders driving that culture think they're protecting their authority. What they're actually doing is making sure their teams never catch up.

I've been willing to talk about what I'm learning and growing in for more than twenty years. In that time, a handful of executives found it off-putting – leaders who read openness as weakness, who wanted certainty from the people around them. Those relationships didn't go far. But the relationships that came from being genuinely open – the teams that actually worked, the clients who stayed, the opportunities that came from trust – that's the whole of my career. Being open hasn't cost me anything I wanted to keep.

There's still a step zero here, though. Before this becomes a practice, it has to become an identity. Personal vulnerability takes courage. Professional vulnerability takes a willingness to look like you're still figuring things out, which feels risky for a lot of leaders even when they intellectually agree with the idea. Reading about it doesn't dissolve the discomfort. What changes is deciding to do it anyway.

That's the work. Not the technique, but the becoming.

– Matthew