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On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Femi Olu Lafe, Senior Vice President of Culture and Inclusion for IPG's Acxiom, Kinesso, and Matterkind. Femi has spent her career partnering with organizations to build DEI roadmaps that survive past the launch press release. Her belief is simple: the leaders who do this work well share two qualities that are often missing in the executive pipeline. They show vulnerability and they practice humility.
The conversation traced what those qualities look like in real meetings, on real teams, and inside the daily friction of executive decision-making. Femi was sharp on a point that often gets lost: vulnerability is not a soft skill. It is the structural condition that lets a team tell the truth fast enough to do something about it.
Why Vulnerability and Humility Are Operational, Not Performative
Most leadership content treats vulnerability as a TED talk moment. Femi's experience says it is more boring and more powerful than that. Vulnerability shows up in the weekly leadership meeting when a senior leader says they were wrong about a hiring decision. Humility shows up when an executive asks for help instead of pretending they had the answer all along. Those two moves change how the rest of the team behaves.
The research backs the operational view. Harvard Business Review's coverage of psychological safety shows that teams whose leaders model uncertainty outperform teams whose leaders pretend to have it figured out. The performance gap compounds over time. Humble leaders attract candor. Candor catches problems early. Early-caught problems cost less to fix.
For DEI work specifically, the connection is even tighter. DEI programs that depend on a single executive's willingness to be wrong publicly tend to last longer than ones built on slogans. Femi's work has been about turning that personal capability into a systemic one.
What Equity-Driven Leadership Actually Requires
How does an executive demonstrate vulnerability without losing authority?
By showing the work, not just the decision. Femi's leaders narrate the trade-offs out loud. They name the assumptions they made, the data they did not have, and the parts of the call they are uncertain about. That style invites pushback in time to matter, which is the opposite of losing authority.
Why is humility a DEI skill?
Because DEI is fundamentally about listening to people whose experience is different from your own. Humility is the operating system that lets a leader hear feedback that contradicts their preferred view of the company. Without it, the listening becomes performative and the program stalls.
What Actually Works When Building These Capabilities
Pair leaders with feedback they cannot ignore
Real-time, anonymous employee feedback is the gym for executive humility. When the data shows up in the dashboard the next morning, leaders cannot wait for the next offsite to deal with it. The cycle gets faster and the muscle gets stronger.
Build vulnerability into manager rituals
Femi's teams build small habits like starting one-on-ones with what is hard right now and ending them with what the manager owes back. Tiny rituals like that are what carries the value from the executive layer to the team layer.
Connect DEI work to outcomes the business already cares about
Equity work that lives only in the people function is fragile. Connect it to retention, productivity, and customer outcomes and it stops being optional. SHRM's Global Workplace Culture Report reinforces this connection across hundreds of organizations.
Where Employee Relations Fits in Vulnerable Cultures
Vulnerability without operational follow-through becomes a liability. Leaders who invite hard feedback and then mishandle it are worse than leaders who never invited the feedback at all. ER teams are the operational backbone that protects the invitation. They turn raw concerns into structured cases with consistent investigation workflows, which is what makes the executive's vulnerability safe for the employee.
That is why HR case management belongs in this conversation. The platform sits between an executive's promise and the employee's experience. If it works, the promise holds. If it breaks down, the entire vulnerability strategy turns into a credibility loss the team will remember for years.
How do ER teams support equity-driven leadership?
By giving leaders pattern data they cannot get any other way. When the cases get aggregated by team, manager, and case type, the patterns either confirm or contradict the leadership narrative. Femi's argument is that humble leaders welcome that data because it sharpens their own judgment.
Frequently Asked Questions About Vulnerability and Humility in Leadership
What does vulnerability look like at the executive level?
It looks like saying I do not know, naming a mistake, and asking for help in front of people who report to you. It is uncomfortable and it works.
Is humility the same as low confidence?
No. Humble leaders can be very confident. The difference is that their confidence is calibrated to their actual track record, not their preferred self-image. That distinction matters enormously when the team is watching how the leader handles bad news.
How does this connect to DEI work?
DEI requires hearing feedback that contradicts the leader's experience of the company. Without humility, that feedback gets dismissed. Without vulnerability, employees stop offering it. The two together are the operating condition for any serious equity work.
What is the role of feedback systems in this culture?
They make the practice repeatable. Survey tools and structured intake channels turn one-off conversations into a steady stream of signal. The signal is what makes the leader's humility productive instead of theatrical.
What is the biggest mistake leaders make here?
Performing vulnerability without practicing it. Employees can tell within a quarter whether the leader actually changes their behavior in response to feedback. The performative version is worse than nothing because it teaches employees to stop bothering.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Femi's framing turns vulnerability and humility from leadership-book vocabulary into operating practices that compound across a team's behavior. The leaders she has worked with are not natural experts in this. They built the capability the same way people build any other professional skill: by getting reps and getting feedback.
For HR leaders, the practical move is to make those reps cheap and frequent. Build feedback channels that surface the hard signal. Coach executives through the moments when the signal hits. Track the patterns and connect them to the business outcomes the leadership team already cares about. The companies that do this end up with executive teams that are unusually clear-eyed about their own organization, and that clarity is what every DEI program eventually depends on.
Femi also pointed to the way a humble executive bench changes hiring. Candidates who sit through a final-round interview where leaders openly discuss the things they got wrong leave with a different read on the company. They join because they trust the operating model, not because they were oversold on the brand. That kind of hire stays longer and contributes earlier, which is the kind of compound benefit a People function is supposed to design for. Building vulnerability into the executive style ends up shaping every part of the talent funnel.
That is the durable version of the practice. The companies that get there make humility part of how leaders are selected, not just how they are coached after the fact.
See how AllVoices supports leaders who want feedback they can actually act on.
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