Vulnerability as a leadership tool: building trust through story

Executive overview

Most leaders mistake emotional distance for professionalism. Real trust — the kind that lets teams move faster and tackle harder problems — requires vulnerability. Vulnerability is not weakness; it takes courage, and that courage sets the tone for everyone below.

Corey Blake, CEO of Roundtable Companies, developed this insight through his own story: a childhood spent reading rooms for safety, a Hollywood acting career built on performance, two companies imploded by bad judgment, and finally a leadership reckoning that forced him to dismantle the walls he had built.

The core insight: when leaders share the stories they usually hide, teams gain the trust required to do their best work together.

Why vulnerability is hard for leaders

• Leaders conflate emotional exposure with weakness; the reframe is that it requires courage, and courage is strength.
• Survival skills developed in childhood — people-pleasing, performance, reading the room — become adult superpowers but also default settings that limit growth.
• In the absence of awareness, leaders operate on default. Through awareness, they gain choice.
• When vulnerability is attempted in an unsafe environment and rejected, the resulting scar tissue can last a decade or permanently close that door.
• Keeping struggles private turns them into shame; going public with them removes their power.

How Corey developed his model

• A year of his mother's undiagnosed bipolar disorder at age five taught him to read the energy of a room — a survival skill that became a lifelong superpower and a source of compulsive people-pleasing.
• A decade in Hollywood acting, then directing, showed him leadership without labelling it that way.
• Two storytelling companies in LA collapsed after he made romantic decisions that destroyed team trust — he was blind to his own lack of morality until the implosion.
• At Roundtable Companies he built walls against women in the workplace to avoid repeating those mistakes, then hurt a key team member through the resulting coldness.
• His leadership team mediated a reckoning: he disclosed the full history, and they challenged him to dismantle the wall brick by brick.
• The other side of that conversation revealed how much was possible when deep trust existed.

The vulnerability is sexy framework

• During long-form book-writing projects (12–18 months), clients move from surface sharing on day one to saying things at nine months they have never said aloud — not even to themselves.
• Witnessing that process created a term inside Roundtable: vulnerability is sexy — not sexual, but the feeling of being lit up by another person's courage to be real.
• Corey turned this into a structured game for leadership teams: rules that enforce deep listening, no talking over one another, full presence.
• Used the night before a strategic offsite with a 14-person publicly traded company leadership team, it produced disclosures between decade-long colleagues that had never been made before — and it shifted the next morning's conversation from intellect to heart.

The one-word exercise

• Each person identifies a single word — from the roughly 250,000 in the English language — that encapsulates what they are trying to paint in the world through their work.
• The word surfaces not what someone thinks they value, but what the world has prepared them, through their own experiences, to stand for.
• A military veteran's word was "people" — rooted in the mission principle that you are responsible for the person left and right of you. That story became embedded in the company's formal definition of that value.
• Two people can share the same word for entirely different reasons; both inform how the organisation deploys them.
• The word reveals what you're actually driven by beneath intellectual positioning — and lets the organisation match people to challenges where their deepest motivation is directly relevant.

How leaders set the permission level

• The depth to which the top leader goes into vulnerability sets the waterline for everyone else.
• If the CEO dips their toes in, no one else dives.
• The lifeline exercise — charting life highs and lows from birth to now, then sharing the stories behind them — is a practical starting point for leadership teams.
• Used extensively in YPO and EO forums; when applied across hierarchical teams (not just peer groups), it opens trust even faster.
• Safety must be built before courage is asked for. The process needs scaffolding; rushing it produces rejection, and rejection produces permanent scar tissue.

Vulnerability requires a supportive container

• Most Western business culture runs on posturing, metrics, and projected success. Vulnerability is not the default; it has to be designed for.
• Vulnerability is co-created. Internal self-examination alone is useful but limited — the self-story is usually far harsher than how others receive the disclosure.
• Real learning happens in the gap between how you expected to be received and how you actually were: people lean in, not away.
• Two personal vulnerability practices worth adopting:
  • Before speaking to a group, ask where there is access to one degree more courage than is expected.
  • Mirror work: look until you can connect with the person you see, then ask what you cannot be with right now in yourself — then go public with it.

Polarity thinking: give and take

• Leaders who over-index on giving deplete themselves and eventually swing hard toward self-indulgence — then feel shame, then reset.
• Polarity work replaces the "give vs. take" framing with an intentional cycle: decide consciously how much you will give and how much you will receive.
• Practical application: before a full-day leadership session, take care of yourself first — a walk, a slow breakfast, whatever creates a feeling of abundance. End the day the same way. You arrive full and can give freely throughout.

Stories as drivers of organisational behaviour

• Every leader carries stories installed in childhood that are not necessarily in service to what the organisation is trying to accomplish.
• Awareness of those stories enables choice. Default is a limiting setting for people trying to build something significant.
• Revising the story revises behaviour. Revised behaviour revises results.
• Paying attention to this work in a business context is an underused lever — most leaders have never been trained to do it.
• When people meet on the level playing field of their humanity — both deficient, both trying — they can solve hard problems from a fundamentally different place.