BOB Special: How showing vulnerability helps build a stronger team

 If you’d like trust to develop in your office, group or team — and who wouldn’t? — the key is sharing your weaknesses.

At some level, we intuitively know that vulnerability tends to spark cooperation and trust. But we may not realize how well this process works, particularly when it comes to group interactions.

“People tend to think of vulnerability in a touchy-feely way, but that’s not what’s happening,”  “It’s about sending a really clear signal that you have weaknesses, that you could use help. And if that behavior becomes a model for others, then you can set the insecurities aside and get to work, start to trust each other and help each other. If you never have that vulnerable moment, on the other hand, then people will try to cover up their weaknesses, and every little microtask becomes a place where insecurities manifest themselves.”

Vulnerability is less about the sender than the receiver. “The second person is the key,”  “Do they pick it up and reveal their own weaknesses, or do they cover up and pretend they don’t have any? It makes a huge difference in the outcome.”

“You can actually see the people relax and connect and start to trust. The group picks up the idea and says, ‘Okay, this is the mode we’re going to be in,’ and it starts behaving along those lines, according to the norm that it’s okay to admit weakness and help each other.”

This interaction can be called a vulnerability loop. A shared exchange of openness, it’s the most basic building block of cooperation and trust. Vulnerability loops seem swift and spontaneous, but they all follow the same steps:

1. Person A sends a signal of vulnerability.

2. Person B detects this signal.

3. Person B responds by signaling their own vulnerability.

4. Person A detects this signal.

5. A norm is established; closeness and trust increase.

Each signal takes only a few seconds to deliver. But they’re vital, shifting the dynamic and allowing two people who have been separate to function as one. It’s useful to zoom in on this shift. Scientists have designed an experiment to do exactly that, called the Give-Some Game. You and another person, whom you’ve never met, each get four tokens. Each token is worth a dollar if you keep it but two dollars if you give it to the other person. The game consists of one decision: How many tokens do you give the other person?

This is not a simple decision. If you give all, you might end up with nothing. Most people give an average of 2.5 tokens to a stranger — slightly biased toward cooperation. But what’s interesting is how people tend to behave when their vulnerability levels are increased a few notches.

In one experiment, subjects were asked to deliver a short presentation to a roomful of people who were instructed by experimenters to remain silent. They played the Give-Some Game afterward. You might imagine that the subjects who endured this experience would respond by becoming less cooperative, but the opposite turned out to be true: the speakers’ cooperation levels increased by 50 percent.

That moment of vulnerability did not reduce their willingness to cooperate but boosted it. The inverse was also true: Increasing people’s sense of power — tweaking a situation to make them feel more invulnerable — dramatically diminished their willingness to cooperate.

We think about trust and vulnerability the way we think about standing on solid ground and leaping into the unknown. First we build trust, then we leap. But science is showing we’ve got it backward. Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust — it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.

Groups quickly signed up. They were a cross-section of America’s brightest minds: hackers, social media entrepreneurs, tech companies and research universities. The vast majority took a logical approach to the problem. They built tools to attack it. They constructed search engines to analyze satellite photography technology, tapped into existing social and business networks, launched publicity campaigns, built open-source intelligence software, and nurtured communities of searchers on social media.

Most of us see vulnerability as a condition to be hidden. But when it comes to creating cooperation, vulnerability is not a risk but a psychological requirement.  “Being vulnerable gets the static out of the way and lets us do the job together, without worrying or hesitating. It lets us work as one unit.”

Each loop was different yet shared a deeper pattern — an acknowledgment of limits, a keen awareness of the group nature of the endeavor. The signal being sent was the same: You have a role here. I need you.

Cooperation does not simply descend out of the blue. It is a group muscle that is built according to a specific pattern of repeated interaction, and that pattern is always the same: a circle of people engaged in the risky, occasionally painful, ultimately rewarding process of being vulnerable together.