A Story About Vulnerability

The question I have no answer to lands on the table on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.

There are five of us in the small meeting room on the second floor. It smells of cold coffee, and as always the heating is running a shade too warm. My notebook is in front of me, my phone next to it, screen down. I have led this team for three years, four developers at a mid-sized software company, and most Tuesdays are calm. We go through the open tasks, hand them out, clear things up, and go our separate ways. I like these meetings, because I am rarely surprised in them.

Then Sarah, our youngest colleague, speaks up and asks a question that disturbs the relaxed harmony: “The client wants to retire the old interface by autumn. How do we approach that without the running bookings breaking off?”

Every head turns towards me.

And in that moment I simply do not know.

I know the system, I know the old interface inside out. But the clean route from the old solution to the new one is not in my head. Three routes are conceivable, and each one has a point where it gets expensive or risky. I notice the blood rising to my head and an old thought coming up that I have known for years: “You’re the manager, you have to know this.”

I hear myself talking. I ask a question back, to buy time. “How large is the data volume in autumn?” Sarah answers calmly, and her answer closes off one of my three routes straight away. I nod, as if I had seen it coming. Michael follows up. “And if we run both systems in parallel for a while, who tests that?” I say something general about a clean approach and taking it step by step, and I can hear for myself how thin it sounds. My sentences get shorter. Between two of them a pause opens up that is too long. Someone clicks a ballpoint pen.

Inwardly a second sentence is running alongside: today you are going to be found out.

My first impulse is the familiar one. Don’t let anything show. I am already thinking of postponing the topic, quietly getting hold of the answer overnight and turning up tomorrow as though I had had it all along. Or I ask Michael afterwards, in private, to build me a proposal, and then present it as my line. I know that route well. I have taken it often, and every time it just about worked.

I look around the room. Four faces, waiting. And it becomes clear to me that they have long since sensed I have no finished plan here. In this moment the hiding costs me more energy than the question itself. For three years I have been busy performing a certainty I do not always have, and I am tired of it.

So I put the pen down and say the sentence that comes hard to me. “Honestly, I don’t know the ideal route here myself yet. I can see three possibilities, and I have a doubt about each of them. Let’s look at it together.”

For a moment it is quiet. I am expecting disappointment, perhaps that brief glance people exchange when the boss wobbles.

Instead something else happens. Michael stands up, takes the pen from the whiteboard and draws the three routes side by side. Sarah immediately names a risk in the first one that I had not had on my radar, and Michael adds an arrow for it. Tobias, who usually says little, leans forward and works through the test phase out loud. Two others add what the client needed in the last project. Suddenly they are talking to each other, across the table, and I am standing beside it, listening. I go to the whiteboard and write down the open questions instead of inventing answers. The group that was waiting for my word a moment ago turns into a team that is thinking. The room is louder than before, and for the first time this morning I am calm.

After forty minutes there is no finished plan on the wall. There is a first route, with three clear tasks and a next date on Friday. That is more than I would have put together on my own overnight, and it belongs to all of us.

As the others leave, Sarah stops briefly in the doorway. “It was good that you said that so openly,” she says. “It makes it easier to think out loud yourself.” I nod and notice that my back is looser than it was an hour ago.

Later at my desk I go through the moment again. For a long time I believed my role depended on always having the answer ready. Today I admitted that I did not have it, and the team came closer to a solution than ever before on a question like this. The not-knowing was the door. I only had to open it instead of bracing my back against it.

Vulnerability does not mean standing there weak. It means naming a gap openly, so that others can fill it with me. The old sentence that a leader has to know everything kept me small for a long time. Today I know: strength also shows itself in the calm sentence that I do not know something yet.