What 36 Years of Silence Taught Me About Vulnerability in Leadership

My mother Joyce died by suicide with a gun when I was 20 months old. I didn’t talk about it for 36 years.

Not because I forgot. You don’t forget a thing like that. You just learn to build a life around the gap where the story should be. You learn which questions to dodge, which rooms to smile through, which version of yourself to show up as so nobody asks the question you’re not ready to answer. I got very good at it. Too good.

For three and a half decades, I led people, built companies, managed hundreds of employees, and ran for public office without ever saying the sentence out loud: my mother killed herself. I thought silence was protecting me. It wasn’t. It was running the show.

According to a 2024 study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, leaders who practice authentic self-disclosure see a 40% increase in team trust compared to those who maintain emotional distance (Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2024). That’s not a surprise to me anymore. But it would have been news to the version of me who spent decades proving he was fine.

This is the story of how silence shaped my leadership, what happened when I finally broke it, and what I’ve learned about vulnerability that I wish I’d known 20 years earlier.

How Silence Became My Leadership Style

Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that 70% of team engagement variance ties directly to the manager (Gallup, 2025). That means who you are as a leader matters more than any system or incentive plan you put in place. And for most of my career, who I was included a massive blind spot I refused to acknowledge.

When you grow up carrying something you never talk about, you develop a specific skill set. You learn to read rooms. You learn to deflect. You learn to be the person who holds everything together because the alternative, letting anyone see the crack, feels like the most dangerous thing in the world.

I started Penebaker Enterprises in 2002. Commercial roofing and sheet metal fabrication. Took it from $1.5 million to $15 million with 50 employees. Then I joined Roofed Right America and helped scale it to over $35 million with 180 employees. Through all of that, I operated with one unspoken rule: never let them see you need anything.

That rule came from the silence. If I’d grown up in a house where we talked about Joyce, where her name came up at dinner, where the loss was something we processed together, I probably would have had a different relationship with vulnerability. But that’s not what happened. Her death was the family secret that sat in the middle of every room without anyone pointing at it.

So I became the boss who never asked for help. Never admitted when something was over my head. Never showed my team that I was figuring it out as I went. I thought that was strength. It looked like strength. But it created a culture where nobody else felt safe being honest either.

The Cost of Leading from Behind a Wall

PwC’s 2024 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey found that employees who feel they can be their authentic selves at work are 2.4 times more likely to stay and 3.2 times more likely to feel fulfilled (PwC, 2024). I was creating the opposite environment. Not because I was a bad leader on paper. By most metrics, I was a very good one. But there was a ceiling on how far my teams could go because I’d set the emotional terms of the relationship: we don’t go there.

Here’s what it looked like in practice. A foreman on one of my crews was struggling. His work was slipping, he was showing up late, his attitude was off. The old version of me pulled him aside and gave him the standard talk: I need you to get it together, here’s the timeline, here’s the consequence. Performance management. Textbook stuff.

He quit two weeks later. Found out after the fact he was going through a divorce. His kid was sick. He was drowning. And instead of feeling safe enough to tell me that, he performed worse and worse until the situation resolved itself the only way it could. I lost a good guy because he didn’t feel like he could be real with me. And why would he? I’d never been real with him.

That’s the cost of leading from behind a wall. You don’t see it in your revenue numbers until the damage is already done. You see it in the people who leave. The ones who stop bringing you problems because they’ve learned you only want solutions. The slow erosion of trust that shows up as turnover and silence in meetings where everyone should be talking.

The Moment I Stopped Hiding

Harvard Business Review research shows that leaders who share relevant personal struggles create 47% higher psychological safety on their teams (HBR, 2023). I didn’t know that statistic when I first started talking about my mother publicly. I just knew I couldn’t carry it alone anymore.

I was in my late 30s. I’d started getting involved in gun violence prevention work, not as a politician or a policy person, but as a son who’d lost his mother to a bullet. Everytown for Gun Safety gave me a fellowship. I started speaking publicly. Then I ran for Congress in Wisconsin’s 5th District in 2016. And for the first time in my life, I said the whole sentence out loud, in front of strangers, on camera: my mother killed herself with a gun when I was a baby.

The first time I said it, my hands shook. I don’t remember every word. I remember the room getting very quiet. I remember feeling lighter than I’d felt in years. And I remember thinking: why did I wait this long?

What surprised me wasn’t the public response. It was what happened back at work. People I’d managed for years started telling me things they’d never shared before. One guy told me his brother was an addict and he’d been covering extra shifts to avoid going home. A woman on my team mentioned she was caring for her aging parents alone and struggling to keep up. These weren’t excuses. They were context. And they only came because I’d shown them the door was open.

You know that thing where someone shares something real and it gives everyone else permission? That’s what happened. Not overnight. Not in some dramatic team meeting. Slowly, over months, the culture on my teams started to shift. People were more honest. Problems surfaced earlier. Conversations got more direct because the pretense was gone.

What Changed in My Leadership When I Stopped Performing

Only 23% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, according to Gallup’s 2025 global workplace data (Gallup, 2025). That number has barely moved in a decade. And I think a big reason is that most leaders are still performing a version of leadership that values control over connection. I was one of them for a long time. Here’s what shifted when I stopped.

People brought me problems sooner. When your team knows you’re a real person who has dealt with real pain, they don’t wait until a small issue becomes a crisis. In my current role as Regional GM at Great Day Improvements, overseeing four markets across the Upper Midwest, early information is everything. I inherited a region with real challenges: falsified records, staff turnover, quality gaps. The only way to fix those problems was to know about them. And people only tell you the truth when they trust you enough to be honest.

I made better hiring decisions. Once I stopped performing invulnerability, I started looking for something different in the people I hired. Not just skills and credentials, but honesty. Willingness to say “I don’t know.” That shift in what I valued changed who ended up on my teams. And it showed in the results.

Retention improved. People don’t leave jobs. They leave managers. I’ve known that intellectually for years. But when I started leading as myself, the full version, not the edited one, people stayed longer. They invested more. They brought their best because they weren’t spending energy managing appearances. Neither was I.

My own decision-making got clearer. This is the one nobody talks about. When you’re carrying a secret, it takes cognitive energy. Not a lot. But enough that it creates noise in your thinking. Releasing that, even partially, freed up bandwidth I didn’t know I was missing. I became a more present leader because I wasn’t splitting my attention between the work and the performance.

Practical Guidance for Leaders Who Carry Something Heavy

A 2023 Deloitte survey found that 82% of employees consider it important for their company to see them as a person, not just a worker (Deloitte, 2023). But being seen requires leaders to go first. If you’re carrying something, whether it’s a family loss, a mental health challenge, a personal failure, or just the weight of pretending everything’s fine, here’s what I’ve learned about when and how to stop hiding.

You don’t have to share everything. Vulnerability in leadership is not a confessional. You’re not unloading your trauma on your team. You’re selectively sharing parts of your experience that create context for who you are as a leader. I don’t tell my team every detail about my mother’s death. I tell them enough so they understand what drives me and what I value. There’s a line, and it matters.

Start with one person. I didn’t go from 36 years of silence to a podium at the DNC overnight. I told one person first. Then another. Then a small group. Then a room. The muscle builds over time. If you’ve been carrying something for years, the idea of telling 200 people is paralyzing. Telling one person is just a conversation.

Share backward, not forward. The most effective vulnerability is about things you’ve already processed, not things you’re currently in the middle of. A leader saying “I went through this, here’s what I learned” builds trust. A leader saying “I’m falling apart right now” creates anxiety. Time and distance matter. You don’t have to be healed. You just have to not be in the acute phase.

Watch what happens when you go first. This is the part that convinced me it was worth it. Every time I shared something real about my story, someone on my team reciprocated. Not with the same level of disclosure. Just with enough honesty to change the relationship. That exchange is the foundation of trust. And trust is the foundation of every team that performs at a high level.

Get professional support. I’m not a therapist. I’m a guy who runs businesses and learned hard lessons about leadership over 20 years. The work I did to get to the point where I could talk about my mother’s death didn’t happen in a boardroom. It happened with professional help. If you’re carrying something heavy and you haven’t talked to someone qualified, do that before you do anything else.

The Takeaway

Thirty-six years is a long time to carry something in silence. I lost opportunities to connect with people I led because I was too busy proving I didn’t need connection. I built companies, scaled operations, managed hundreds of people, and did it all with a wall between me and everyone around me. The wall looked like confidence. It felt like safety. It was neither.

The moment I started talking about what shaped me, about Joyce, about the gun, about the silence, my leadership got better. Not because vulnerability is a technique. It’s not a management hack. It’s just the truth: people follow leaders they trust, and trust requires honesty, not perfection.

If you’re a leader carrying something you’ve never said out loud, I’m not going to tell you it’s easy to start talking. It isn’t. But I’ll tell you this: the version of you on the other side of that silence is a better leader than the version still hiding. I know because I’ve been both.

Read more about my background, my advocacy work, or explore the blog for more on leadership and the issues that shape it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does vulnerability improve leadership effectiveness?

Research from Harvard Business Review shows that leaders who share relevant personal struggles create 47% higher psychological safety on their teams. Gallup’s 2025 data confirms that 70% of team engagement depends on the manager. When leaders model honesty about their own experiences, team members are more likely to surface problems early, communicate openly, and stay engaged. The result is better retention, faster problem-solving, and stronger team performance.

What is the difference between vulnerability and oversharing in leadership?

Effective leadership vulnerability means sharing processed experiences that provide context for who you are and how you lead. Oversharing is disclosing unprocessed emotions or details that shift the emotional burden onto your team. The key distinction is timing and purpose. Share backward, about challenges you’ve already worked through, not forward about things you’re currently in crisis over. The goal is to build trust, not to seek support from the people you lead.

Why do most employees not feel safe being honest at work?

According to a 2024 PwC Global Workforce survey, many employees still feel they can’t bring their full selves to work, with workers who feel seen as whole people being 2.4 times more likely to stay and 3.2 times more likely to feel fulfilled. The primary barrier is manager behavior. Only 23% of employees globally are engaged according to Gallup’s 2025 data, and engagement is driven primarily by whether leaders create environments where honesty is safe. Most don’t, because most were never shown how.

How do I start being more vulnerable as a leader if I’ve never been open before?

Start small. Share one relevant personal experience with one trusted colleague or team member. You don’t need to disclose your deepest pain in a team meeting. Build the muscle gradually. Focus on experiences you’ve already processed, not raw emotions. Get professional support first if the thing you’re carrying is significant. The shift from 36 years of silence to public vulnerability doesn’t happen overnight, and it shouldn’t. The goal is sustainable honesty, not a dramatic reveal.

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About Khary Penebaker

Khary Penebaker is a Regional General Manager at Great Day Improvements, overseeing operations across Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. He previously built Roofed Right America from startup to $35M+ in revenue with 180 employees and founded Penebaker Enterprises, growing it from $1.5M to $15M. A gun violence prevention advocate and former Everytown for Gun Safety Fellow, Khary brings two decades of leadership experience in construction, operations, and civic engagement.

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Last updated: March 7, 2026