What 36 Years of Silence Taught Me About Vulnerability in Leadership

My mother died by firearm suicide when I was 22 months old. I grew up knowing this, in the way children absorb facts before they have language for what those facts mean. It was part of our family story. It was not something we talked about outside the family.

I didn’t speak publicly about it until I was in my mid-thirties, running for Congress in 2016. By then I had spent the better part of my adult life building Penebaker Enterprises from a small crew into a $15 million commercial roofing operation, managing 50 employees, navigating recessions and contract losses and the ordinary chaos of running a business. I was comfortable with pressure. I was not comfortable with this.

What I discovered when I finally did speak about it changed how I lead. Not because vulnerability became a strategy. Because I learned what silence had been costing me, and the people around me, for all those years.

The silence wasn’t strength

In business, I learned early that leaders project confidence. That showing uncertainty was a liability. That the person at the front of the room was supposed to have it figured out. I internalized that model so completely that it bled into every part of my life. The things that were hard, the things that carried weight, you handled them quietly. You didn’t burden other people with them.

The problem with that model is that it’s incomplete. Projecting strength when you don’t feel it isn’t leadership. It’s performance. And people can tell the difference, even when they can’t name what they’re sensing.

When I think about the leaders I’ve respected most over the years, they weren’t the ones who seemed to have it all figured out. They were the ones who could say, clearly and without apology, “I don’t know, and here’s how we’re going to figure it out together.” That combination, honesty about the uncertainty plus confidence in the process, is harder to fake than a polished presentation. And it earns a different kind of trust.

What happened when I stopped

When I started speaking about my mother, first in the campaign, then in advocacy spaces, then more broadly, something unexpected happened. People came up to me afterward. Not to offer sympathy. To share their own stories. Stories they had been carrying alone the way I had been carrying mine.

I heard this over and over: “I’ve never told anyone that.” And every time, I thought about what it had cost that person to hold that alone, and what it might have meant to them to have someone go first.

Leadership creates permission structures. What you’re willing to say out loud, people below you in the hierarchy feel safer saying. What you keep hidden, they keep hidden too. If you never acknowledge difficulty, the people around you learn to pretend they’re fine when they’re not. That has operational consequences. Problems stay hidden. Mistakes don’t get surfaced in time. People leave instead of raising the issue that was making them want to leave.

Vulnerability in leadership is not therapy voice

I want to be precise about what I mean, because there’s a version of “bring your whole self to work” that I find both impractical and slightly dishonest.

Vulnerability in leadership is not processing your emotions in real time in front of your team. It’s not oversharing personal hardship as a bonding mechanism. It’s not performing humility while actually seeking validation.

What it is: being honest about what you don’t know. Acknowledging when you got something wrong without turning the acknowledgment into a drama about how you’re feeling about it. Telling people the truth about the difficulty of the situation they’re in, rather than pretending the difficulty isn’t there. Showing that you’re a person, not a function. That distinction matters because it lets people relate to you in a way that’s real, and real connection is what trust is actually built from.

What I’ve carried into every leadership role since

I’ve led teams through hard situations since 2016. Market downturns. Staff changes. Strategic pivots that didn’t go as planned. In all of those moments I’ve tried to apply what I learned from finally breaking the silence about my own history.

Name what’s actually happening. Don’t dress it up. Don’t minimize it. Tell your team the truth about the situation and then tell them clearly what you’re going to do about it.

Acknowledge the people who are carrying weight. Not in a performative way. In a specific, direct way. “I know this has been a hard stretch. I see how much you’ve put into this. Thank you.” That costs nothing and means more than most leaders realize.

Go first. If you want your team to be honest with you about problems, be honest with them first. Not about everything. But about the things that create context for what they’re experiencing. People follow the permission structures you create. Create the one you want them to operate in.

Why this matters beyond the personal

I think often about what it would have meant to the teams I led in my twenties if I had understood this earlier. The people who left without telling me why. The problems that compounded in silence because no one felt safe surfacing them early. The gaps in trust that could have been closed if I had been willing to be a little more honest about what I was navigating.

You can’t go back. But you can decide what kind of leader you’re going to be from here. And the research on psychological safety, on what makes teams actually perform over time, points consistently in the same direction: the leaders whose teams trust them enough to tell the truth are the ones whose teams outperform. Not because of some abstract culture principle. Because they have better information, faster.

The silence I kept for 36 years was not strength. It was a habit, and habits can change. This one was worth changing.

For more on the role of resilience in leadership, including how I think about what we carry and how it shapes the people we become, read the full pillar page.

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Last updated: June 28, 2026