Successful leaders must have vulnerability—and an openness to potential pain is what energy executives need right now to manage the industry’s difficult time, according to Chuck Yates, managing partner of Kayne Anderson Capital Partners.
The private equity executive spoke at the September Leaders In Industry luncheon at Houston’s Petroleum Club, sponsored by the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association and the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
“So what is vulnerability?” Yates asked the crowd, noting with a chuckle that he was taking a philosophical approach “so that I don’t have to talk about $46 oil.”
He noted the luncheon had “a bunch of Type A personalities in here. We may think vulnerability is being a wimp or showing your emotions.”
That’s not the case, he added, quoting research by noted University of Houston professor Dr. Brené Brown, a best-selling author and researcher in the university’s Graduate School of Social Work, who has studied the emotions of vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. Her book, Rising Strong, currently is the top-selling book on Amazon.
“She is a researcher and she has conducted thousands of interviews. She would ask, ‘what is vulnerability?’” Yates explained. Surprisingly, many responses were such comments as “vulnerability is helping my wife with stage-four breast cancer, or starting my own business, or calling a friend whose child just died,” he added. “I tell you what’s interesting is, listening to that, vulnerability doesn’t sound like weakness. It’s about truth, courage and the willingness to face the uncertain.”
Yates described his own feeling of vulnerability while he helped a late employee and close friend who had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
“I bring this up because we’re all leaders and we’re in this horrible time, there’s so much uncertainty,” he said. “We don’t know what we’re facing. We don’t know what oil prices are going to do… Facing uncertainty is the definition of being vulnerable.”
But successful leadership, and weathering corporate storms, requires vulnerability because it means executives “hearing things we don’t like but are true,” Yates said.
“Are you really getting the best advice, the best ideas, the best thoughts, the best efforts from your people if you’re being anything less than vulnerable?” he asked. “If your people are not in an environment where they feel they can be vulnerable… are you getting the best out of them? Can anyone in your organization walk into your office at any given point and tell you your idea sucks?”
Given the energy industry’s difficult time, “that’s what we need,” Yates emphasized. “And people will only do that if they feel worthy.” Getting through the current downturn requires people “giving their best, and they will only give their best if they feel worthy.”
Yates described the prelude to George Washington’s epic crossing of the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. History shows Washington allowed himself to be vulnerable when, rather than giving his army a rah-rah pep talk before battle, he matter-of-factly laid out the critical state of the Continental Army and its need for a victory. “It was much about vulnerability,” Yates said of Washington’s address. By being honest and vulnerable with his troops, then putting himself in a leadership role, the army went on to win the critical Battle of Trenton on Dec. 26, 1776.
“It’s very important that we, as leaders, create that type of environment,” Yates added. “People will love you and follow you because of your imperfections, not despite them.
“We’re not all perfect. We don’t have to act perfect. It’s okay to show that other side,” he said. Such openness and vulnerability “often spawns the innovation that saves a company.”
Vulnerability doesn’t come naturally to leaders or anyone else, “it’s something we have to work at every day” but it inspires people, he added.
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