Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones in Harvard Business Review on Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? (emphasis mine):

We’ve yet to hear advice that tells the whole truth about leadership. Yes, everyone agrees that leaders need vision, energy, authority, and strategic direction. That goes without saying. But we've discovered that inspirational leaders also share four unexpected qualities: discovered that inspirational leaders also share four unexpected qualities:

• They selectively show their weaknesses. By exposing some vulnerability, they reveal their approachability and humanity.
• They rely heavily on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of their actions. Their ability to collect and interpret soft data helps them know just when and how to act.
• They manage employees with something we call tough empathy. Inspirational leaders empathize passionately—and realistically—with people, and they care intensely about the work employees do.
• They reveal their differences. They capitalize on what’s unique about themselves.

That first one there is a rocker. I remember a couple of years ago when I realised I trusted people better if they didn’t come off as perfect, if they made visible some shortcoming in their personality while neither glorifying nor denying it. I remember being so excited that I mailed people about how I appreciated their flaws (to their discomfiture and my sheepishness). I wrote:

We live in an age where little is taken at face value. Marketeers go all out painting their brand in the best possible light. If you listen to them, you’ll think the brand is the embodiment of perfection. In fact, you can’t help but hear them because their messages are all pervasive. You don’t need another critic singing praises that you’ve already heard.

When I go look for reviews of something, I always read the negative reviews first. They’re sometimes meaningless, like someone complaining that he wanted a smartphone that behaved like his old PDA, but this one didn’t and is therefore crap, but usually the negative reviews bring you the frustrations of real users trying to make real use of products they paid for, and that may affect you too; not of reviewers singing praises to gizmos they’re not going to be using a week later anyway. When you counter hype with criticism, you’re able to form an understanding of whether the brand actually makes sense to you.

Negative reviews bring the brand down from lofty hype to credible reality. And what applies to gizmo brands applies to people brands too.

In the months since, I’ve increasingly become convinced that having one’s weaknesses as public knowledge is good for credibility.