The Exposed Wallet

We hear a great deal about vulnerability at work. Leaders are encouraged to be open, authentic, transparent, and willing to show more of themselves. Employees are told that trust grows when people speak honestly, admit what they do not know, ask for help, and take interpersonal risks.

I believe most of that. But I have been thinking about the other side of vulnerability, the part we discuss less often: how much of yourself should you reveal before a person, team, or organization has earned that access?

A few days ago, I was talking with a group of graduate students about The People Dividend. One student asked about vulnerability, and how difficult it can be to practice in a business culture that still prizes toughness. Another raised essentially the same concern.

The questions stayed with me because I am not sure the difficulty is simply that people are afraid to be vulnerable. Sometimes hesitation is telling us something useful. There are good reasons to pay attention to where we are, who is around us, and what has happened when other people have taken similar risks.

That is discernment.

I first learned to think seriously about discernment nearly forty years ago from Dr. Darya Funches, one of my teachers and later a mentor, colleague, and friend. Darya described Discernment, Heart, and Presence as three gifts of the Organization Development practitioner. I recently came across the notes I had taken in her class in 1987 or 1988. Beside discernment, I had written, “I can see clearly now.”

I smiled when I read that. I am not sure I could see particularly clearly in my thirties. I was probably beginning to understand why it mattered.

Darya’s gifts have stayed with me because they resist easy formulas. Discernment does not stand alone. It sits beside Heart and Presence. Her work asks us to enter relationships, to care about what happens to people, and to pay close attention to the systems we join. In something I wrote about Darya several years ago, I reflected on her observation that Heart allows us to belong, sometimes only marginally, to some systems and not at all to others. That is a considerably more complicated idea than simply telling people to bring their whole selves to work.

What Has to Be Earned

Recently, another image has been working on me.

An open locker. A wallet left where anyone could see it. The surroundings did not appear especially threatening. Still, I had an immediate reaction: I would not leave mine there.

The image came from a dream, although the dream itself is less interesting to me than the thought it left behind. A wallet is ordinary. We carry one into all kinds of places without much thought. Yet it contains things we value and things that would be difficult to replace. We do not hide it from the world, but neither do we leave it everywhere simply because no one has given us a reason not to.

I wonder if we sometimes confuse vulnerability with leaving the wallet out.

Work asks us to put quite a lot on the table. We offer ideas before we know how they will be received. We tell colleagues what we really think. We disagree with people who have more authority than we do. We disclose mistakes. We share ambitions and disappointments. Over time, we may reveal parts of our personal lives as well. All of this can deepen relationships and make better work possible.

But none of it occurs in a vacuum. We notice what happens around us. We learn who keeps a confidence and who turns one into currency. We see whether disagreement leads to curiosity or punishment. We discover whether a mistake remains a mistake or becomes a permanent description of the person who made it. We watch what happens when someone says something the group does not particularly want to hear.

That noticing is not necessarily mistrust. It may be discernment doing its work.

I have written a great deal about trust. In Integrity by Design, I connected integrity with the development of authentic and trusting relationships, arguing that trust grows from the ordinary experience of people doing what they say they will do. In The People Dividend, I returned to openness, dignity, respect, and the conditions that allow people to contribute fully. I described one leader who encouraged me to speak up, listened even when we disagreed, and left me confident that his respect did not disappear when he was unhappy with my work.

What interests me now is what happens before we get there.

Trust develops through experience. Until that experience exists, we are making judgments. Sometimes small ones. How much do I say in this meeting? Do I offer the unfinished idea? Can I tell this person that I think we are heading in the wrong direction? Is this a place where I can admit uncertainty? Do I know enough about this relationship to hand over something that matters to me?

Those judgments do not make us less authentic. They may be part of how authenticity survives.

There is a tendency in leadership writing to turn useful ideas into virtues without edges. If vulnerability is good, more vulnerability begins to sound better. If transparency is good, withholding begins to look suspect. If trust is desirable, caution can seem like a defect that needs to be overcome.

Life inside organizations is rarely that clean.

Heart matters. Presence matters. So does the ability to distinguish one situation from another. The colleague who has earned access to one part of your life may not have earned access to another. A team can deserve your best thinking before it deserves your deepest confidence. You can care about an organization and still recognize that there are things you should not hand over casually.

What We What We Actually Bring to Work

Perhaps that is why the wallet image has stayed with me. There was no thief. No betrayal. No cautionary tale waiting at the end. There was only something valuable sitting in the open and a quiet recognition that I would make a different choice.

Discernment may be less dramatic than vulnerability, but I suspect we need more of it. Not as a reason to retreat from people, and not as a sophisticated name for self-protection. Darya paired it with Heart and Presence for a reason. Seeing clearly should help us enter relationships more intelligently, not avoid them.

We carry valuable things with us into every organization we join. Our judgment is one of them. So are our trust, our candor, our loyalties, and parts of ourselves that cannot simply be taken back once offered.

‍