The report came first.
Before the workshop, we had brought Darrell in to sit with our paid-on-call officers and hear what it was actually like to be led by us. The report that came back had tough feedback, and some of it was about me. I read it the night it arrived. I read it again the next morning. I read it more times than I will admit here. I did not sleep much, and more than once I cried over it. My officers saw the report. They did not see any of that.
Not long after, those same officers and I sat down together for a week-long leadership workshop, with Darrell at the front of the room. Somewhere in that week, I stopped being the Deputy Chief of Operations for a few minutes and talked to them as a person.
I told them I had read the report, and that they were right. I had not gotten everything right. I had made mistakes along the way, some of them with the people sitting in front of me, and that was not how I wanted to lead. I did not explain the mistakes away. I owned them, out loud, and I committed to do better, starting with being honest about who I am.
Then I went further. I told them I am direct to a fault, that my thinking can be rigid once I have decided something, and that I find it hard to get past the surface with some people on my team.
None of that was news to me. A DISC assessment had already named it: analytical, results first, with growth edges in receptivity, dialogue, and seeking counsel before acting. What I had not admitted, to them or to myself, was how much worse I had made it by leading as my best impression of the chief who came before me instead of as myself. A leader wearing someone else's template cannot afford to be questioned, and a leader who cannot be questioned cannot connect.
I did not say any of it as an excuse. I said it so they would know what they were dealing with, and so that the next time I got it wrong, they would have the standing to tell me. If they were going to let me lead them, they deserved to know who was asking.
It was the hardest thing I had done at work in a long time. I had spent more than a decade in a culture where the officer at the front of the room is certain, composed, and never the one who needs anything. I set that down in front of the people whose respect I depended on most, and I did not know what would be left when I finished.
What was left is the subject of this article.
What vulnerability is not
A correction first, because the word has been worn smooth. Vulnerability is not oversharing. It is not telling your crew your fears at the start of a shift so they can carry them for you. It is not confession as a performance, and it is not an excuse for not deciding.
Vulnerability at work is letting the people you lead see that you are a person. That you do not know everything. That you get things wrong. That you need them. It is a transfer of trust from you to them, and it has to be given before it can be returned.
Where it does not belong
At two in the morning on a working fire, the crew does not need my doubts. They need a clear plan, a calm voice, and a commander who owns the decision. That is not a contradiction of what I am describing. It is the price of it.
The incident is where certainty is the job. The planning meeting and the debrief are where honesty is the job. The leader who can do both earns the right to be certain when it counts, because everyone in the room has already seen what sits underneath.
If you lead in any high-consequence environment, this is the skill: knowing which room you are in.
What it looked like in practice
The workshop ended with a commitment each of us took back to the cohort, and the commitment is where vulnerability stopped being a feeling and became a set of behaviours.
The first one was the simplest to say and the hardest to do: take the template off and lead as myself. Everything else on this list followed.
I flipped our officers' meetings. For years they had been top-down information dumps: administration talking, officers listening. I rebuilt them around a pre-read package and one focus topic that we would solve with our officers rather than for them, and I accepted in advance that the solution they landed on might not be mine.
I spoke less and listened more. At one table conversation that week, an officer from one of our rural stations told me that our move to once-a-year recruiting was costing her community good people who showed up interested and were told to come back in eight months. She had probably been right for years. The difference was that I was finally listening, and within days I was in Employee Services asking to move her station to a continual intake model.
I committed to getting out to the stations more often with nothing to announce, just to sit with the crews and hear what they were dealing with.
And I started saying the three sentences I had avoided for most of my career. I do not know. I got that wrong. What do you think?
What it cost and what it bought
It cost me the armour. Once the room has seen you without it, you cannot put it back on, and there were days in the months that followed when I wanted to.
I didn't fully understand what it bought until this year. When I was passed over for the chief's job, my team reached out. When I lost the job entirely, they reached out again, and they have not stopped. Those messages did not come to a rank. Ranks do not get checked on. They came to the person those officers met in that room, and I am certain of that, because the man who stood at the front of their meetings for the previous decade would not have received them.
The people who let you lead them
Here is the lesson, and I think it holds whether you run a fire department, a project team, or a classroom.
Authority comes from above. Someone signs a letter and you have a title. Leadership comes from below. The people on your team decide, every day, whether to let you lead them, and they make that decision about the person they can see. If all they can see is the rank, that is all they will follow, and they will stop the day the rank is gone.
Show them the person. Not all at once, not on the fireground, and not as a performance. In the planning meeting, in the debrief, at the kitchen table in the station. Say I do not know. Say I got that wrong. Ask what they think, and then do something with the answer.
It will be the hardest thing you do as a leader. It is also the only part of leading that is still yours when the letter comes.
If you have a room like that in your own story, I would like to hear about it.