Kenworth of Pennsylvania

Brittney Kranz is an HR professional with an MBA in human resources and SHRMCP certification. She focuses on balancing employee needs, business priorities and regulatory compliance while fostering trust, transparent communication, consistent practices and a supportive workplace culture.

Redefining Vulnerability as a Leadership Strength

Vulnerability can feel like a dangerous word in the workplace. When we hear the word, we tend to associate it with weakness, inadequacy, or a type of Achilles’ heel. What if we challenged the thought that vulnerability is the antithesis of strong leadership, and instead recognized it as one of the key qualities that make strong leadership possible?

When I say vulnerability in leadership, I do not mean a passive, yielding, or even submissive leadership style. I am advocating for courageous honesty, transparency and strength. The ability to say, ‘I was wrong,’ ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I need to tell you something that you probably don’t want to hear.’

While this takes vulnerability, it builds genuine trust. If we need to trust to be vulnerable, and we need to be vulnerable in order to trust, where do we start? As leaders, we expect honesty from our employees. If leaders expect honesty, they have to model honesty. The trust has to work both ways. If we expect our employees to come forward when they have made a mistake or when they disagree with a decision, they need proof that honesty is safe. And we give that to them by modeling honesty, even in the most difficult of situations.

Creating a Culture of Transparency and Trust

We have hard conversations with customers and each other when they are needed. We are transparent with the good, the bad and the ugly. We own our mistakes, we forgive each other, and we pave the way forward together. Because when we fail to create an environment of courageous honesty, mistakes are hidden.

Departments point blame at one another. Employees tell managers what they think managers want to hear. Small operational issues become expensive operational issues. Dealership culture disintegrates. Customer relationships deteriorate.

Uniting Departments around Customer Needs

A customer’s truck is not just a vehicle in a service bay; it’s a revenue-producing asset, and every hour down matters. Dealerships are interdependent operations. Success depends on the service, parts, sales and support departments working together to reduce downtime and increase customer satisfaction.

Mistakes happen, and when they do, the customer will not care which department is at fault. They want to know what we are doing to fix it. That is where the rubber meets the road. A healthy team can say: ‘We got this wrong, this is what happened, this is how we fix it, let’s get it done.’ And that requires vulnerability. A team lacking a culture of trust and vulnerability wastes time assigning blame. Meanwhile, the truck is still down.

Choosing Accountability over Blame

A strong team will expend energy and resources solving a problem; a weak team will expend energy and resources assigning blame. At the end of the day, mistakes will happen. It’s how our team handles them that will resonate with the customer. Customers remember where they feel taken care of.  

In a dealership, trust travels. The trust our customers experience begins with us internally. The customer doesn’t trust us by accident, but because our employees trust each other and because we have built a culture internally where courageous honesty is more important than absolving oneself of fault.

When developing frontline leaders, we have to remember that a promotion changes their position, but it doesn’t change the person that they are. Strong leaders don’t need to abandon themselves in order to gain authority. A team without vulnerability can appear successful during the easy times. But in times of change, the strength of a team will be tested by its ability to be vulnerable. Vulnerability isn’t a chink in the armor. Vulnerability is the armor.