Trust is essential to a healthy culture. That’s not controversial. It’s common wisdom. What is controversial is that you can’t build trust without vulnerability. Vulnerability precedes trust.
That’s far from common wisdom. Because vulnerability, when it’s real, is scary for most of us. It touches upon one of our biggest shame triggers – feeling or being seen as weak. We’ve been convinced, in our bones, of a myth: vulnerability is weakness, and weakness is something to be avoided at all costs.
Vulnerability is hard to define. For the sake of our conversation, we can define vulnerability as “the awareness of your weaknesses, limitations, and failures, and the willingness to abide the uncertainty and emotional risk of being seen.”[1]
Question: Given the definition above, do you find it hard to be vulnerable?
Every word in that definition is important, but for now let’s just acknowledge that vulnerability goes beyond an earnest desire to be transparent or honest. You can be sincere, even disclosing, and still not be vulnerable (all the while believing yourself to be, in fact, a vulnerable person).
Vulnerability is frightening, inescapably. It’s that sensation that follows the uncertainty, the risk of emotional exposure. “Now that they see me will they still accept me?” The fear of rejection, of being unwanted and cast out, is primal. By “primal” I mean all the way back to our first parents (Gen. 3:7-10). The desire to be loved colliding with the fear of being seen – one hand motioning come closer in while the other is outstretched to signal, STOP. This is us.
That’s why it always takes courage to be truly vulnerable. Only the brave are vulnerable.
Imagine two people in a conflict. To stay present, to avoid reacting (fight or flight), to lay down your arms, to strip off your armor, this takes immense courage. Exposure. Risk. Uncertainty. It’s not a stretch to say that this is exactly how Jesus asks us to show up (Matt. 5:39).
You might be struck down (like Obi Wan Kenobi was by Darth Vader in Star Wars). There’s no guarantee that your vulnerability will be honored. You can’t engineer the uncertainty and discomfort out of vulnerability.[2]
“Six myths of vulnerability” (from Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead)
1. Vulnerability is weakness.
2. I don’t do vulnerability.
3. I can go it alone.
4. You can engineer the uncertainty and discomfort out of vulnerability.
5. Trust comes before vulnerability.
6. Vulnerability is disclosure.
Question: Which one of these myths feels most familiar to you?
Question: Why might church leaders have more difficulty with vulnerability than most?
Physician, Heal Thyself
If you knew my story, you might think I’m the last person who should be talking to church leadership about what makes for a healthy culture. My leadership deficits were at the center of a painful division of a large church staff that resulted in splitting our church.
So today when I’m talking with you about the difficulties of navigating conflict, the need for vulnerability, and the importance of staying present with distressing emotions for the sake of care – this is from a position of mistakes I’ve made and my failure to practice what I learned too late.
I’ve had the privilege of getting a lot of help over several years from some very wise helpers. Today, I’m going to draw principally on two voices, Patrick Lencioni and Brene Brown.[3] You may have heard of Lencioni and his most famous book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, where he spells out the most common traits of a dysfunctional team. Today we are going to focus on his first two, as they are foundational to the rest and are integrally related to one another, as we’ll see.
The Primary Dysfunction: Absence of Trust
For Lencioni, the primary dysfunction is the absence of trust. I have a mentor who specializes in organizational health. He’s given decades of his life to helping churches sort through thorny conflicts. He says it’s a given that when relationships get stuck, the absence of trust is both the presenting issue and the root problem: sides entrenched, neither trusting the other, each convinced of the rightness of its own position.
Maybe you’ve heard the saying: trust is gained in inches but lost in yards. And once it’s gone, it’s hard to rebuild, at least without a lot of time, patience, mercy and forgiveness on all sides. Which is to say that trust, while critical to a team’s success, is a fragile thing.
Question: How do you define trust?
We commonly define trust as a confidence in the reliability or character or strength or truth of someone. But according to Lencioni:
“Trust is about vulnerability, team members who trust one another learn to be comfortable being open, even exposed, to one another around their failures, weaknesses, even fears… It is predicated on the simple – and practical – idea that people who aren’t afraid to admit the truth about themselves are also not going to engage in [the kind of disruptive, dysfunctional behavior that thwarts a team’s success].”
Note how Lencioni defines trust not only as reliability – a strength of character – but as a level of comfort with vulnerability. Lencioni calls this “vulnerability-based trust.”
We will get to what it might mean to “admit the truth” about yourself and give some examples of trust-destroying behaviors. For now, simply note that trust goes beyond building a team of high-performing, skilled players. Early on in an organization’s life, a team may function more like a golf team (highly competent individuals) than a basketball team (a cohesive unit where the total is greater than the sum of the parts).
Even if the team is able to have spirited conversations about strategic decisions, it doesn’t mean they know how to navigate “crucial conversations.”[4] Crucial conversations can be defined as high stakes, with clashing opinions and strong emotions. It’s how we work through those conversations and the conflicts they bring that will determine if, over the long run, we are building a healthy culture.
Marriage counselors often say, “It’s not about the rupture; it’s about the repair.” That’s their way of saying that conflicts and fights – these ruptures are inevitable in any marriage. Working through conflict is a necessary step toward building intimacy in a marriage.[5] Human beings make mistakes. We let each other down. We are sinners. It’s how we handle our unmet and disappointed expectations – the repair – that determines the health of our relationships.
Lencioni applies that same logic to an organization. You can’t make trust about batting a thousand, because no one does. Rather, trust has to be broadened to include how you navigate errors together. In this way, every conflict can become an opportunity to glorify God and build trust on a team.
Vulnerability-based trust looks like team members getting to a point where they are comfortable being painfully honest and transparent with one another; where they can say and mean things like:
-
- I screwed up.
- I didn’t know.
- I need help.
- I was wrong.
- I was in over my head and was too prideful to admit that.
- Your idea is better than mine.
- I’m not good at that.
- I wish I could do that as well as you.
- This is a real weakness of mine.
- Please forgive me.
- I’m sorry.
Mistrust and hiding take root when team members are unable to recognize, let alone admit or show, their weaknesses. While we may be very fond of one another, as long as we remain reluctant to be vulnerable, we won’t be building the type of trust our team needs to flourish.
The leader sets the tone. The leader must take the lead in creating a culture of vulnerability. He or she has to be approachable, and not just about organizational decisions. Approachability as a leader has one devastatingly simple metric: how often do those who work alongside you approach you and give you feedback?[6] In a church context, leaders need to be what Jack Miller called “chief repenters.”
How Vulnerability-Based Trust Can Be Destroyed
One way of grasping how to develop vulnerability-based trust is through identifying behaviors that erode trust on a team. Here are four common killers of vulnerability-based trust.
1. Triangulation
Nothing destroys trust on a team more than triangulation. Triangulation happens when two (or more) people have a conversation about a third party who is not present. Person A is shaping Person B’s opinion about Person C, but Person C is NOT present.
Triangulation is a form of gossip. Somewhere Dietrich Bonhoeffer said nothing does more damage to the local church than gossip. It doesn’t feel evil in the moment. It feels enticing (Prov. 18:8). But the Apostle Paul warns us with a vivid word picture that backbiting destroys a community (Gal. 5:15).
It’s important to stress that triangulation is often well-intended, which is why it is so often defended as necessary. You don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, or you just want to check your own impressions. So, you avoid talking to them directly. It can seem humble, “Am I seeing this clearly?” But Person A is crafting a lens for Person B to begin interpreting Person C’s behavior. It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Yes, I see it now!” Triangulation can be pronounced in churches and on church staffs – wanting to be “nice,” viewing conflict or distressing emotions as sinful or at least sin-adjacent, and thus to be avoided. We triangulate to avoid conflict.[7]
It’s often well-intended. But triangulation poisons trust; it creates a culture of suspicion. Because we all know: if someone will gossip with you, then they are telegraphing that they will gossip about you (Prov. 20:19). Whether Person B is aware of it or not, they have been brought into a culture of whispering. If vulnerability is necessary for trust, then it’s hard to be vulnerable when you are afraid of how your confidence might be broken or used against you (Prov. 11:13).[8]
On a church staff, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens…” (Matt. 18:15). Yes, allowances need to be made for power dynamics. But by and large, Jesus’s wisdom does not need an asterisk.[9] Make no mistake: nothing destroys trust on a team more than triangulation.[10]
2. Lack of Approachability
Are the senior leaders on your team approachable concerning their own deficits and blind spots? Is regular feedback a part of the organizational culture? Do leaders frequently ask for feedback, not just about their ideas but about their character? Do they ask, “How do you experience working with me?” Or do leaders, explicitly or implicitly, communicate that they are unresponsive or unwilling to listen? Defensiveness, a lack of approachability, stifles a culture of trust.
Watch out for this one. I once considered myself an approachable leader. I often said, “I’m not after my idea, I’m after the best idea.” But I had no idea how highly defended I was. That’s a good gauge: the level of defensiveness when something precious to you is challenged (your work, your reputation, your character, your work ethic) is inversely related to your approachability. Approachable people are not defensive. Approachable leaders are meek.
3. Meetings After the Meeting
Do team members talk afterwards about one another, or about issues discussed at the team meeting, in a different way (more frank, more direct, more personal) than they were willing to talk with everyone present? When this starts happening, it opens the door for “teams within the team” to talk about the team without the whole team present. That’s triangulation.
There can also be “meetings before the meeting.” Say an elder board will be meeting to discuss a sensitive or controversial topic, do some members meet individually, beforehand, to frame the narrative? This creates a bias, so that when the group convenes and ideas are heard, it’s already being interpreted through a grid. This is illegal in court cases – talking to individual jury members outside the court. But in churches it sounds like, “I just wanted you to know what this is really all about before we meet.”
As guardrails, make it part of your team culture: no meetings before the meeting. Make it a norm that “silence is hearty consent.” If you don’t speak up in front of the whole team, then we will interpret your silence as your hearty consent. Which also means that you don’t get to say later or behind closed doors, “I told you so,” or, “I knew this wasn’t going to work.” We will get to this in closing, but having agreed-upon norms creates mutual accountability.
4. The Fundamental Attribution Error
The fundamental attribution error is the tendency of human beings to attribute negative or frustrating behaviors of others to that person’s intentions and personality (character flaws), while attributing our own negative and frustrating behaviors to environmental factors. When other people make mistakes, it’s about their character. When we make a mistake, we insist upon considering the larger context.
This is doubly dangerous because on the one hand we use this error to justify our judgements of others while at the same time minimizing or excusing our own culpability. Jesus warned us about this deeply ingrained tendency (Matt. 7:1-5). But even if we remember these verses, we tend to forget that what we are best at is convincing ourselves of our own righteousness.
By nature, we tend to be exacting with others and charitable with ourselves. The gospel challenges us to reverse that tendency, quite intentionally. You know an organization is in trouble when team members begin to make assumptions, behind closed doors, about the intentions of others.
Assumptions about others’ intentions is how a weed of grievance turns into a root of bitterness. We make up stories about other people, and have feelings attached to those stories that justify our judgements. But all this is because we avoided going to them directly, which brings us to Lencioni’s second dysfunction of a team, the fear of conflict. Of all the things that erode trust on a team, fear of conflict is the most significant.
The Second Dysfunction: Fear of Conflict
Can you see how these two reinforce one another? Lack of vulnerability-based trust makes us run from conflict, but avoiding conflict in the first place precludes the vulnerability that trust needs.
Avoiding conflict is second nature for most of us. How many of us grew up in homes where conflict was handled with wisdom and skill? Very few of us have seen this modeled well. Not to mention, conflict is messy, awkward and painful. We’d rather not.
Conflict brings up all kinds of distressing emotions (like anger, fear, sadness) that many of us are well-rehearsed in running from or suppressing. If you grew up in a home where you associated conflict with anger and anger with hurt or devastation, then any hint of conflict as an adult might make you shut down or run away and here’s the kicker – you probably aren’t even aware that you do this. I wasn’t.
But somewhere Mark Twain said that conflict is like a tiny frog on the corner of your desk in the morning. Best to deal with it right away and directly, while it’s small. Because if you ignore it and hope it will go away, you more often find that tiny frog has turned into a gorilla by end of day. Conflict avoided is conflict worsened.
One of the main ways people in churches avoid conflict is… triangulation. Again, what makes it so insidious is that this is often done with good intentions. But team members who don’t know how to engage in healthy conflict can easily start to resent one another.
We have different recollections of events (that we don’t share with each other but that we are each convinced is exactly what happened). Then, we make up stories to make sense of our recollections. This happens so naturally that we don’t even realize we’re doing it. But attached to those stories are feelings, often strong feelings, which feel entirely justified to us.
“Of course I feel this way!” we think, forgetting that our feelings are attached to a story we made up, which emerged from our recollection of events. This doesn’t mean facts don’t matter. But it is a reminder that all facts are interpreted. Which is why working things out face to face and sorting through colliding interpretations of the same event is so essential for working through conflict. We must begin to understand where the other side is coming from.
Fear of conflict can take benign forms, from not speaking up when you disagree with someone’s proposal, to not voicing your disappointment, to letting your frustration build until it explodes all out of proportion. And opportunities to engage instead of avoid are plentiful – from the less risky, “What assimilation plan should we use?” to the far more personal, like our work or our work performance.
Questioning professional performance almost always feels personal, even and especially when someone says, “Don’t take this personally. I’m just talking about your work.” These kind of conversations touch upon deep feelings and questions of identity and worth. Why get into it? Only when you are convinced that the alternative – avoiding it – is going to cause far more damage to your team and to each of you in the long run.
Question: Why do you tend to avoid conflict?
Common ways to avoid conflict are fight or flight or freeze. Flight: it seems easier to play nice. Most of us would rather be nice than kind. We’d rather try and maintain some appearance of harmony, some easy peace. Just let it slide.
Fight: In my case, I learned in the middle of my life that even though I presented as someone who enjoyed debate, I was actually terrified of conflict. If the conversation became charged, I’d drop a bomb, as it were, so I could run away from the distressing state of being engaged in conflict. I was afraid that if everyone’s emotions were not contained, like radioactive waste from a nuclear power plant, they would unleash terrible damage. It took a great deal of professional psychotherapy to understand why I ran from my emotions. But it played out in that whenever there was conflict, I would shut down, disassociate (freeze).
Emotions are pesky – we can try and suppress them. But they will leak out in ways we don’t realize and spill all over the people around us, who, if we don’t have a culture of vulnerability-based trust, will begin to make assumptions about our intentions with very strong feelings attached! Just add triangulation and we’ve got a full-blown war on our hands – all because we failed to handle conflict face to face.
I thought I could “manage” conflict through carefully chosen words. But you can’t escape it: conflict avoided is conflict worsened. Take it from me: when leaders avoid discomfort among themselves, they transfer it throughout the organization.[11] Avoiding conflict in the name of keeping peace, sweeping things under the rug, thinking it will get better in time only makes things worse.
You’d think churches might be better at conflict, because of the enormous resources we have been given in the gospel: a deep conviction of the gravity of our own sin alongside a deep gratitude for God’s provision and mercy in the cross of Jesus. But in my experience, churches are often worse at handling conflict than most secular workplaces.
Question: Why might churches be some of the worst at handling conflict?
N.T Wright said the church should be “a small group of people living out Jesus’ way of forgiveness together.” But far too often, Christians can be some of the least forgiving. And where does this discrepancy show up the most? In how we handle conflict.
Can you see the relationship between the absence of trust and the fear of conflict? Can you see how these dysfunctions mutually reinforce one another? Because you don’t trust, you don’t dare enter in. You don’t make yourself vulnerable. But because you are withholding your true opinion and your true feelings, it’s not possible to establish trust.
We armor up, wearing the armor of excellence, performance, and competency. And for a while, we are rewarded for it. But what we need for our team to flourish – vulnerability-based trust that dares to risk the emotional uncertainty of being seen – never takes root.
By way of quick review: Dysfunction 1: Absence of trust: the fear of being vulnerable prevents team members from building trust with each other. Dysfunction 2: Fear of conflict: the desire to preserve artificial harmony stifles productive conflict within the team.
If you’re feeling down on yourself, grace to you. It’s easy to feel shame but shame won’t help you. Shame is the devil’s weapon. All teams will struggle with these dysfunctions in some measure. Use that pain to turn more confidently toward Christ and celebrate both your need and Jesus’ provision.
Brené Brown and Patrick Lencioni have helped millions. But their wisdom is not unique. It touches so many people because it is rooted in God’s wisdom. The gospel not only grounds but enhances their message. It’s the gospel (the confidence we are given that, in Christ, we are both fully seen and fully loved) that gives us the courage to be vulnerable.
The gospel gives a solid foundation to our sense of worth, apart from our work. The gospel gives us the freedom to confess our weaknesses, limitations and fears, even to confess our fear of vulnerability. We can bring our weaknesses to God and enjoy the power and provision of Christ.
Some Suggested Paths Forward
Consider agreeing upon organizational norms. Norms are intentional ways we commit to live and work together. Here are some possibilities:
-
-
- Any admission of personal inadequacy is an achievement to be celebrated.
- No triangulation.
- No meetings after the meeting.
- We will stive to be aware of and call out “the fundamental attribution error.”
- Silence is hearty consent.
- Conflict is an opportunity to glorify God and build trust, so we won’t avoid it.
-
These are just some suggestions. As a team, come up with a small handful that you can agree on together. Write them down. And then live them! It’s what you practice, more than what you say, that will become your norm.
But having them recorded allows you to hold one another accountable. And because you choose not to fear conflict, when those norms are violated, you can talk openly about it, face to face, which builds trust.
When fear of conflict is no longer the norm, people can openly challenge one another’s perceptions – a true “team of rivals” is created.[12] It’s not about sorting out who’s right. It’s about a mutual commitment to mutual health, with all of us being willing to have our stories questioned. Everyone at the table. Face to face.
Question: Are we creating a culture where conflict is accepted as a necessary part of building trust?
A Final Word for Leaders on this Journey
Bill Belichick was famous for saying “Just do your job!” But please know that if you are a leader, then care is a big part of your job. You can’t effectively lead people you don’t care for. And this care needs to be felt (by your co-workers) more than expressed (by you).
It doesn’t take a lot. But caring prepares the soil to take people with you on the journey. If you know someone cares about you, then you can abide conflict with them. If you know someone cares about you, then you can hear and trust their feedback. They don’t even have to tell you that it’s for your good, because you already know it.
Questions for a Leadership Team to consider:
1. Do you consider yourself a vulnerable person? Which of the “myths of vulnerability” resonates most with you?
2. What keeps you from being as appropriately vulnerable as you might want to be?
3. How does our staff typically handle conflict? What’s our track record? By way of measuring, can you give an example of a conspicuous failure?
4. Given Lencioni’s definition, do we have a culture of vulnerability-based trust?
5. Can you articulate the connection between lack of trust and fear of conflict?
6. Are you an approachable leader?
7. Which of the “trust killers” resonates most with your experience?
8. What’s a next step for us?
[1] Adapted from Brené Brown and Thom Needham.
[2] For an amazing conversation on what makes for true (as opposed to false) vulnerability and what are the limits of vulnerability, see the conversation between Adam Grant and Brené Brown which you can access HERE.
[3] I should tell you that I read these authors’ books years ago and thought – sincerely believed – that I understood what they were saying. It was the writer Parker Palmer who once said, “We have a strange conceit in Western culture that just because we’ve said something we understand what we just said.” The fact was, I didn’t know what I was talking about even though I could talk about it quite well. Some books I have to read twice to understand them the first time.
[4] Crucial Conversations and Difficult Conversations are two books that should be in the working toolbox of every leader.
[5] “Never fighting” is not a sign of a healthy marriage. Often it’s a sign of each partner reinforcing some of the most damaging patterns of the other, such as co-dependency on one side and domineering control on the other. Both are unhealthy strategies to manage anxiety and maintain a fragile peace.
[6] If you think that’s not practical, then you are probably admitting, “I’m not an approachable leader.” It’s because feedback is threatening that leaders must model that not only are they not defensive about feedback, but that they welcome it, even need it, as an opportunity to learn.
[7] “Nice” is counterfeit kindness. But niceness is not a Biblical virtue; kindness is. They can appear similar, but nothing differentiates kindness from niceness more than how we navigate conflict and move toward the mess together. Nice people avoid conflict. Kind people move toward the mess for the sake of mutual healing.
[8] But” someone might object, “there has to be place for discussing someone not present, for trying on perceptions before they are shared.” Yes, but here the Army has an old saying that can be helpful. “Always complain up.” Not sideways. Not down. To protect against power imbalances, an organization should have an agreed-upon conflict resolution policy that includes how to handle conflict with your immediate supervisor if/when you feel he or she is unresponsive. The goal is to bring the conflict to the light, as quickly as possible, with all relevant parties at the table. There can be a space to talk about someone without them being present. But those instances should be rare and always with an agreement to bring them in BEFORE a narrative lens gets set.
[9] I’ve found that most people are convinced they’ve done this step. “I tried to talk to him. But he didn’t listen!” Perhaps. There are ways to make sure you’ve at least been heard (if not agreed with). But more often, even if we tried to talk to Person C, we are much bolder talking about Person C to Person B, which deceives us even more about how direct we’ve been. Tim Keller points out that Jesus’ admonition in Matt 18:15 was never meant to be a “box to check,” but a series of personal, one-to-one, conversations. That’s a high bar. “Have you spoken to them the way you’ve spoken about them?”
[10] For more on this, see Steve Cuss’s excellent Managing Leadership Anxiety.
[11] The opposite is also worth saying, that not everyone will welcome a culture of vulnerability-based trust, especially if they are uncomfortable with their own emotions, or their own vulnerability. They may feel threatened by such a culture and might even resent a leader who they feel is trying to “upset” things. Changing entrenched patterns is painful. If you want to create this culture, make it a part of your onboarding process to normalize discomfort.
[12] The title of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln, celebrating his ability not only to forgive his harshest critics but to move toward them, even welcome them onto his cabinet. Lincoln is a case study in building vulnerability-based trust.