The Value of Vulnerability at Work

I decided to hold lunches at my house for my staff. I think Henry, in the introduction of the book, talks about servant leadership and so the idea was for me to serve my staff a lunch for them to talk about what they value, we called them ‘Values Lunches’ and they’ve been going now six or seven years. I get twenty staff, who aren’t management, who aren’t directors, they come round and I cook them lunch; and they can talk about whatever they want. There’s no agenda, they can talk about football, whatever, they can talk about work and it’s not compulsory so they can come and go whenever they want.

So I did this about seven or eight years ago and I must admit it’s been absolutely fantastic. It’s become a really good talking shop, you can go round to the Chairman’s house, have lunch and you can tell him what you really think. My role, which I ask permission to do, is just to keep some notes, so I can make sure I record what they do and talking about power, with the suggestions that come up, I needed the power to make sure those things happened within the organisation, which they did. For me that part of the power is very necessary. I’ve been doing that for about five or six years.

This next slide shows a picture of some of the staff that have shown up for one of the lunches. It’s a whole cross-section of staff, we have 18 sites across the South East, so they come from all over – generally one person per site, there’s no management and no Directors there, and they’re waiting for their lunch as you can see.

So what were my observations about this? And I’ll talk about my ‘checks on power’. One of the things that happened with me, I decided to make myself quite vulnerable in this – I talked about all my difficulties of life, including my divorce, I’m a single parent, I have an alcoholic ex and coping with alcoholism and my children, so I brought up four children on my own, and all of that, over time, really lowered the barrier between me and the staff. I was seen very much more as a human being who had suffered in various ways, and I think we all suffer in different ways. I think the more open we can be about that, the greater empathy we have with people. And it’s interesting, one of the things I note, I don’t know what the stats are about divorce, but it’s one in three or whatever, so when people go through divorce or single parent issues, it really resonates with myself, I’m a lot more sensitive to those people’s issues. So some of the values that have built up around that are that we have a 24-hour counselling service for people and that’s been driven by people being much more open at these lunches, where all our values are starting to come up.

So the values aren’t prescriptive, they’re all about where people are on their journey through life. What’s great is it all comes up from the staff. A chap called Andy Law’s book called ‘Open Minds’, this quote I think is very important he says: “It’s reflection. It’s unless you give up something about yourself and be stripped down, you will never develop or change. The baggage of your past will emerge as the biggest driver in your decisions”. So making yourself vulnerable, while very challenging, I think has great benefits because we’re all human and we all have issues with our lives. So that for me was a good check on power and it was a good basis to get values moving up through the company.