Anu Mandapati, Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Magic Leap - Show Your Humanness

On a recent episode of Reimagining Company Culture, the conversation turned to leading DEI from a place of vulnerability and humanness. The guest, Anu Mandapati, brought direct experience to the topic from their day-to-day work, and the conversation moved past the talking points most People teams have heard a hundred times. This recap pulls the practical thread of the discussion together and translates it into the workflows HR leaders are running today.

Anu's background sets the context for how Anu thinks about this work. Anu Mandapati is an award-winning global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and leadership development executive. She was selected as one of the top 100 DEI. Leaders of 2021 by Mogul, serves as the Head of DEI at Magic Leap and DEI Coaching Center Faculty for The Forum on Workplace Inclusion, and has previously served as VP, Head of DEI at Talking Talent and US D&I Coachi. That experience shapes the perspective the episode brings to leading DEI from a place of vulnerability and humanness, and the recap below stays grounded in the workflows leaders are running, not abstractions.

The conversation touches on the basics any People team is already managing, including psychological safety practices and transformational leadership practices. The recap below assumes that grounding and focuses on the operating moves leaders make on top of it.

Most of the framework below holds up across industries and company stages. The specifics vary; the underlying mechanics rarely do.

Why vulnerability is a leadership skill, not a weakness

DEI work that comes from a posture of expertise rarely lands. People can tell when the leader is performing rather than learning. Anu's framing is that the DEI leader who shows their own learning curve in public earns the room faster than the one who arrives with certainty.

Harvard Business School research on psychological safety research finds that leaders who model vulnerability, admitting what they do not know, naming their own missteps, drive higher psychological safety on their teams, which in turn predicts learning behavior and team performance. The data is consistent across industries.

How leaders work through leading DEI from a place of vulnerability and humanness

What does vulnerability look like for a senior DEI leader?

Naming the things you got wrong, the things you are still figuring out, and the questions you are bringing to the team. Not as humility theater. As a working operating mode. Leaders who do this generate participation; leaders who arrive with all the answers generate compliance.

The line is in specificity. Generic vulnerability ('this is hard') is cheap. Specific vulnerability ('I missed this signal six months ago and here is what I learned') is the version that builds trust.

How do you avoid vulnerability becoming performative?

Pair it with action. Vulnerability without follow-through is theater. Vulnerability with named decisions and visible changes is leadership. Most DEI work that gets cynical does so because the vulnerability was the whole offer.

The audit is simple, for every public moment of vulnerability, is there a corresponding decision the team can point to. If not, the vulnerability was performance.

What actually works in practice

The pattern across companies that handle leading DEI from a place of vulnerability and humanness well comes down to three operational habits.

• Name what you got wrong, specifically. Specific is honest; general is theater.
• Pair every vulnerable disclosure with a decision. Acknowledgement without action erodes trust faster than silence.
• Practice before the high-stakes moment. Vulnerability is a skill. Practice it on small things so you have it available for the big things.

None of these are aspirational. They are checklists the strongest People teams run on a cadence, and the consistency is what makes the difference.

What looks like a culture decision from the outside is usually the cumulative effect of those three habits, applied without theatrics.

This pattern shows up alongside familiar tools like soft skills frameworks. The combination is what makes the operating model durable.

Where Employee Relations fits

AllVoices DEI solution programs that scale humanness need infrastructure. AllVoices data and insights dashboard surfaces the patterns that match the leader's intuition. AllVoices anonymous reporting tool captures the signals that named conversations cannot.

The companies pulling this off rarely run it on memory. They run it on infrastructure. AllVoices HR case management platform centralizes the case data; AllVoices data and insights dashboard surfaces the patterns nobody catches manually; AllVoices Vera AI co-pilot for ER teams accelerates the response time so the work is finishable. Together they cover the operating layer that this episode keeps pointing at.

How does ER protect leaders who lead with vulnerability?

By providing the structure that turns disclosure into action. AllVoices Vera AI co-pilot drafts the response, routes the case, and tracks the resolution. Leaders who can move from disclosure to decision in days instead of months earn the trust that humanness alone cannot.

The supporting research is consistent. Independent analysis from Catalyst guidance on genuine inclusion policies points the same direction the episode does. The combination of operating discipline and outside data is what gets People leaders past the slogan stage.

The takeaway holds across companies of different sizes and industries. The teams that turn this episode's lesson into operating practice are the ones that name a target metric, run it on a cadence, and refuse to let activity stand in for outcomes. The metric does not have to be elaborate. It has to be visible to the people who can move it, and reviewed often enough that nothing falls off the radar for a quarter.

The other consistent pattern is that the work compounds. Year one of any of these practices feels like overhead. Year three is when the retention, engagement, and case-data signals start telling a clearly different story. People leaders who hold the line through the early part of the curve tend to be the ones who have the receipts when leadership asks for evidence later.

One more pattern worth naming: the People teams that scale this work fast share a common move. They put the operating habit on the same dashboard as the business metric it supports. Retention sits next to revenue. Case cycle time sits next to pipeline health. Engagement sits next to product velocity. The dashboards reinforce that this work is operations, not enrichment, and the cross-functional partners who see those side-by-side numbers stop questioning the spend within a quarter.

That dashboard discipline is also what survives leadership change. Whoever inherits the function inherits the dashboard, and the metrics keep reporting whether the new leader champions them or not. The work that lives only in personal commitment dies when the personal commitment moves on; the work that lives in shared operating systems keeps reporting itself.

Frequently Asked Questions About Leading Dei From A Place Of Vulnerability And Humanness

Does vulnerability undermine authority?

No. The research is consistent that vulnerability paired with competence increases trust. Vulnerability without competence undermines it. The pairing matters.

How do you teach vulnerability to leaders who default to certainty?

Through structured practice. Coaching cohorts, public reflection in safe settings, and feedback from peers. Most leaders cannot self-teach this skill.

Should HR leaders share their own DEI learning publicly?

Yes, when it is honest and specific. Generic statements of solidarity have aged poorly. Specific reflections about real work hold up.

How do you balance vulnerability with confidentiality?

By keeping the cases generic and the lessons specific. 'I missed this kind of signal' is safe; 'I missed this signal from this person' is not.

What's the most common DEI leadership mistake?

Leading from a posture of expertise instead of learning. Expertise sounds reassuring and produces compliance. Learning sounds vulnerable and produces engagement.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Anu's work at Magic Leap and beyond keeps surfacing the same lesson. The leaders who earn DEI credibility are the ones who let people see the work in progress. The ones who try to perform certainty lose the room within a year.

Humanness is not a soft skill. It is a leadership requirement.

See how AllVoices supports the kind of culture work this episode is about.