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There is a specific kind of leadership moment where transparency, offered too early, becomes the transfer of a burden your team doesn't yet have the context to hold.
Andy Crouch, in Strong and Weak, argues that leaders are called to bear hidden vulnerability — risks and uncertainties that only they can fully see.
The alternative, he warns, is performing vulnerability: sharing fears publicly not to serve your team, but to recruit them into carrying what is yours to carry.
It feels like openness, but it functions like manipulation.
Crouch's framework also carries a warning in the other direction. Vulnerability without authority is suffering.
If you expose your team to uncertainty, you must simultaneously give them the capacity to act on it.
This means that if something is genuinely shareable, like a difficult funder conversation, a strategic pivot still in formation, or an organizational risk on the horizon, bringing your team in only works if you're also giving them real options, real input, or real roles in the response.
Transparency culture sometimes conflates the courage to be known with the wisdom to know what to share, with whom, and when — and what authority must accompany the sharing.
Knowing what is yours to carry, and what your team needs to act, is a virtue.
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