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Early in my career, a few years into managing my first teams, I went through my first 360-degree feedback review. Small team, seven or eight people. The workload was not crushing. And yet I came home wrecked every single day, in a way the hours did not explain.
One question asked my colleagues to describe me with an analogy. More than a third of them, independently, chose the same one. Mr. Perfect. For a second, reading it, I felt almost proud. And then my coach helped me see it was not a compliment. It was a diagnosis. And it explained exactly why I was so tired. This essay is about what that performance was costing me, and why dropping it made me both a better leader and a less exhausted man.
The mask was a second full-time job
Here is what Mr. Perfect actually meant. My team experienced me as someone performing a flawless version of a leader. Always composed, always with the answer. But it went deeper than that. I never let myself show an emotion. I never admitted a doubt. I never said that something was hard. I thought that was the job.
What I did not see was the cost. Maintaining that performance was a second full-time job stacked on top of the first.
And the research is clear that it was the wrong job. Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability, watched tens of millions of times, shows that what people actually connect to in a leader is not certainty, it is the willingness to be seen. And Google’s Project Aristotle, studying more than a hundred and eighty teams, found the single strongest predictor of team performance was psychological safety, the sense that you can admit a mistake or show you do not know without being punished. A leader performing perfection makes that impossible. The team learns that here, you hide what is hard, because the boss never shows that anything is.
Authenticity costs less to sustain
So here is what I finally understood. Authentic leadership is not only better for your team. It costs you far less to sustain. Every hour I spent performing the perfect, composed, all-knowing manager was an hour of emotional energy spent on a performance instead of on the work, and instead of on my life outside work. The mask was not free. I was paying for it in the currency that matters most to people like us, energy, every single day.
And here is the deeper thing. The performance was not just expensive, it was isolating. When you never show a doubt, no one can actually help you, because no one knows you need it. You carry it all alone, by design. The day I let myself be a real leader instead of a perfect one, the load got lighter, not because there was less of it, but because I was finally allowed to share it.
The system: four concrete moves
Dropping the mask is not a personality transplant. It is four concrete moves, and none of them are about being soft.
One. Say I do not know when you do not know, then say how you will find out. It does not weaken your authority. It models that not-knowing is survivable, which is the ground psychological safety grows from.
Two. Ask for input before you give your answer. The perfect leader arrives with the solution. The authentic one draws out the room first. Better decisions, and a team that owns them.
Three. Name your own mistakes out loud when they happen. Just: I got that wrong, here is what I learned. Watch how fast your team starts surfacing problems early instead of hiding them until they detonate.
Four, and this is the one that took me longest. Ask your team for help. Openly. I am struggling with this, I need your help. Asking for help is not a confession of weakness, it is the single clearest signal that it is safe for them to do the same. It feels exposing for about a week. Then it feels like breathing, and you will wonder how you ever afforded the alternative.
When the mask follows you home
Why a leadership style is a four-life decision. The emotional energy you stop burning on performance at work is the same energy available for every other life. And I want to be honest about the timeline here. When I learned this, I did not yet have children, and although I had met Maria, our relationship had not yet begun. The coaching that taught me to drop the mask came first. And I am convinced it is not a coincidence that my story with Maria truly began after that, not before.
Because the same wall that exhausts you in front of a team is the wall that keeps a partner out.
Someone who has trained themselves, for more than ten hours a day, to never show emotion, never admit doubt, never say something is hard, does not simply switch that off at their own front door. They bring the mask home. With your children, it does quiet damage: a father who never shows a doubt is teaching their kids, without a word, that they must hide theirs too. And with your partner it goes deeper still, because vulnerability is not a nice-to-have in a marriage, it is the foundation of one. There is no real intimacy with someone who cannot be seen. The capacity to say I am struggling, I need you to your partner is the very same capacity I first had to learn in front of a team.
Don’t balance. Architect.
So your one action this week is the smallest and the hardest: the next time you do not know, or the next time something is genuinely hard, say so, out loud, to your team. One sentence. Watch what it does to the room, and watch what you have left in the tank that evening.
Don’t balance. Architect.
I am Philippe. I will see you in the next one.
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Sources
• Brené Brown, The Power of Vulnerability, TED 2010.
• Google Project Aristotle, psychological safety as top predictor.