Forced Vulnerability

One of the most persistent patterns in organisational change and dynamics is the search for a shortcut: the belief that if we can just find the right lever to pull, the right activity or artefact, we can bypass the slow, ecological and evolutionary work of building safety and performance. It begins, however, with the best of intentions.

Imagine that you’re at a company all-hands event, a new-hire orientation, or a leadership away day. The facilitator invites everyone to “get real” with one another. Perhaps you’re asked to share your biggest failure, the hardest challenge you’ve ever faced, or a personal trauma. Maybe even the last time you cried. Around the table, everyone dutifully takes turns to offer up (or very likely, fabricate) something raw and vulnerable.

This is forced vulnerability: when disclosure is less an act of choice and more of an obligation.

The allure of these exercises is compelling. They’re intended to accelerate trust, foster psychological safety, and build teams that are more cohesive and authentic. They often borrow their legitimacy from popular leadership books: Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team places “absence of trust” as the foundational dysfunction, and his recommended antidote (and anecdote) is called a “trust” exercise, where team members are asked to share weaknesses, mistakes, or childhood experiences as a way to short-circuit the long, slow process of genuine trust-building.

It’s an appealing shortcut. After all, if Brené Brown is right that “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity”, then why not engineer it directly?

Forced vulnerability flips causality

The problem is that this flips causality. Psychological safety enables disclosure, not the other way around. When people feel respected, fairly treated, and safe, they may choose to share more openly. But when they are pushed or compelled to expose personal details about themselves in a room full of colleagues, superiors, or strangers, it’s not intimacy that emerges. More often, it’s discomfort, resentment, and a hollow, anxiety-filled sense of performative vulnerability. Trying to engineer forced vulnerability as an input to psychological safety is like planting fully grown trees in a desert and expecting a rich, mature forest: instead, you end up with dead trees.

Conditions precede outcomes. Trust, respect, familiarity and interpersonal predictability are necessary preconditions for voluntary disclosure. When we try to reverse that order, we get coercion. Coercion doesn’t create safety; instead it does the opposite – it results in performative honesty: a surface appearance of openness that masks deeper anxiety, and very possibly, harm.

Many of us have been in these situations. Perhaps you felt, in the moment, that it didn’t sit right. Perhaps you convinced yourself you were the problem: that you were too guarded, too afraid, and “bad at being vulnerable.” But in reality that unease that you felt was probably a healthy signal that something was off. The recognition that authentic connection can’t be manufactured on demand.

In fact, forced vulnerability is not only ineffective: it can be incredibly harmful. It exploits power gradients, disproportionately burdens marginalised and under-represented folks, risks retraumatisation, and undermines genuine psychological safety. It promises trust but often leaves people feeling more vulnerable than before.

So why do organisations keep doing it? And if we want to build stronger, safer, more connected teams, what should we do instead?

Why Organisations Use Forced Vulnerability

Forced vulnerability survives for the same reasons as many management fads. It offers a simple solution to a complex problem. In complexity terms, this is an attempt to “seed” an attractor without first creating the requisite conditions. Unsurprisingly, the system responds with shallow compliance and, for many, harm. There are several reasons why these sort of practices persist:

The shortcut myth. Leaders want results. Asking people to share their “biggest mistake” or “deepest fear” seems like a quick way to build intimacy. It’s a simple (but wrong) answer to the complex question of “How do we quickly get people to work together effectively?”

The Lencioni effect. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has been enormously influential. The idea that teams should “get vulnerable” to overcome dysfunction has spread widely, often without nuance. Exercises where colleagues reveal traumatic childhood experiences or personal failures are recommended in too many corporate training programmes.

Misreading of vulnerability. Brené Brown’s insights have been simplified and repackaged. What often gets lost is her crucial emphasis on boundaries and consent. Vulnerability is not oversharing, nor is it a performative exercise.

Performance pressure. Facilitators and consultants sometimes feel they need to create an emotional “high” to justify the value of a workshop. Vulnerability exercises provide a moment of drama, but that doesn’t mean they actually build trust.

The Risks and Harms

While often well-intentioned, forced vulnerability carries significant risks:

Power Gradients

Power dynamics affect everything in organisations – in a system with asymmetric power (all organisations are, to varying degrees, uneven distributions of power), no invitation is neutral. When a senior leader, manager, or facilitator participates in or facilitates a vulnerability exercise, many people may feel unable to opt out. Even if the invitation is framed as voluntary, the implicit expectation is clear: if you want to be included, you’ll do it too.

Some, such as folks in higher status roles, also have the privilege of choosing what kind of “weakness” to disclose. Typically, this results in safe, flattering admissions such as “I care too much about the details”, or they might share an example from many years ago of a mistake they made that has no bearing on how their performance will be judged now, while more junior staff may feel compelled to disclose something more recent, genuinely risky or painful.

Disclosure costs more to some than others.

Inequity and Marginalisation

Disclosure doesn’t carry the same risk for everyone. For some, sharing a personal story may be mildly uncomfortable. For others, it may mean outing their gender identity, disclosing a disability, or recounting a traumatic experience. As Boettcher et al. (2024) showed in Forced Vulnerability: A Dangerous Approach, forced vulnerability places disproportionate burdens on people from marginalised groups.

Inclusion initiatives can unintentionally replicate this problem. Instructing people to share their pronouns may seem like positive modelling, but for someone not ready to disclose their identity, it can feel coercive. Share your own, but don’t force others to do the same. Similarly, asking people to “bring their whole self to work” sounds supportive, but it can pressure people into revealing aspects of themselves they may wish to keep private. It’s ok to have a work self and a home self (and a friend self, and the self you show to your grandmother – we all have multiple identities). The people for whom disclosure is most dangerous are often those whose voices most need to be heard.

Trauma and Mental Health

For people with a history of trauma, coerced disclosure can be retraumatising. Psychotherapy practice warns against conflating vulnerability with healing: without skilled support and proper boundaries, disclosure can reinforce maladaptive coping strategies such as people-pleasing or co-dependence.

Facilitators in corporate settings are rarely trained to handle the psychological consequences of unplanned disclosures. What happens if someone shares a history of serious abuse, grief, criminal behaviour, or terminal illness? Few corporate facilitators are actually equipped to respond responsibly in those moments.

The Myths of Forced Vulnerability

Boettcher et al. also identified three common myths used to justify disclosure activities:

• “Challenge by choice.” Participants are usually told they can opt out. In reality, social and career pressures make opting out risky or impossible.
• “What is said here stays here.” This is noble and well meaning, but ultimately unrealistic. Information leaks, even unintentionally.
• “We’re family.” This is plainly manipulative framing (even if it’s unintentional). Not everyone experiences family as safe, and workplaces are not families (families don’t make people redundant).

Forced Vulnerability is Not Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is not about being emotionally raw at work. Whilst the term ‘psychological safety’ first emerged in a therapeutic context, psychological safety at work is not group therapy.

Psychological safety is the belief that we can take interpersonal risks in a group: asking a question, admitting a mistake, challenging a decision. It is about voice, fairness, dissent, respect, and inclusion. Coercing people into emotional disclosure fundamentally undermines those dynamics. By flipping causality (demanding vulnerability in order to build trust), we’re inadvertently making people feel less safe, not more.

“We establish trust first; then the sharing follows — not the other way around.”

Photo by Kyle Zheng

What to Do Instead

Even when used appropriately and voluntarily, self-disclosure should be used sparingly. And if forced vulnerability is harmful, what can we do instead?

1. Model voluntary vulnerability. Set the tone by admitting fallibility, sharing mistakes, and asking for help; but always without expecting reciprocation. Vulnerability is an invitation, never a demand.
2. Start with low-stakes risks. Encourage behaviours that build safety and confidence iteratively: asking questions, raising ideas, acknowledging small errors. These are safer and actually far more relevant to work contexts than deep and personal traumas.
3. Make participation opt-in. Ensure people can decline without penalty. Respect and encourage people to have boundaries. The choice to share or stay silent must be genuinely free, and avoid exercises that put people on the spot. 
4. Focus on system change rather than theatrics. The organisational substrate of psychological safety is cultivated over time through repeated, consistent demonstrations of positive behaviours and inclusive, power-sharing practices, not manufactured in a single artificial moment.

We can’t force a flower to bloom by pulling its petals open, and we can’t manufacture intimacy or accelerate psychological safety by demanding vulnerability. At best, we build a performative facade of psychological safety theatre, and at worst, we cause genuine and lasting harm.

Vulnerability only matters when it is voluntary: when it is chosen, bounded, and authentic, vulnerability can strengthen relationships and deepen trust. But when it is compelled, it corrodes the psychological safety it claims to build. So we shouldn’t script moments of disclosure, but instead create the conditions in which people may choose to share if, when, and how they wish. 

Further Reading:

• Boettcher, M. L., Filling, M., Powers, M., & McKenzie, R. (2024). Forced Vulnerability: A Dangerous Approach. About Campus, 29(2), 54-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/10864822241238161 
• Dave Snowden – Start a journey with a sense of direction … https://thecynefin.co/start-a-journey-with-a-sense-of-direction/ 
• Psychological safety vs trust: https://psychsafety.com/the-difference-between-trust-and-psychological-safety/

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