The competitive advantage championship teams and fast-growing companies share
I’ve spent much of my life around high performers. I’ve been a member of a national championship tennis team, coached middle school, high school, and college teams to winning seasons, and built a company recognized three times by Inc. 5000 as one of America’s fastest-growing companies. Throughout those experiences, I’ve learned something that surprises many leaders: Talent rarely determines who wins. The strongest teams aren’t always the smartest, most experienced, or most skilled. They are the teams that trust one another.
Trust is the foundation of teamwork, and teamwork remains one of the greatest competitive advantages any organization can have. But trust is widely misunderstood. Rather than trust being a byproduct of good performance, trust is something that has to be built deliberately, and it starts with something most leaders instinctively avoid: vulnerability.
Organizational trust researchers Roger Mayer, James Davis, and F. David Schoorman define trust as “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party.” Vulnerability is one of trust’s defining characteristics, not a side effect. You cannot have one without the other.
And yet many leaders spend the bulk of their time focused on skills, processes, and performance metrics while overlooking the very thing that makes those elements work together. I understand why. Vulnerability is uncomfortable. It means acknowledging shortcomings, admitting mistakes, surfacing skill gaps, and asking for help. None of those things feels natural in a leadership role.
But here is what I have come to believe after years of building teams: No one comes to work wanting to do a bad job. When leaders genuinely believe their people’s intentions are good, and model that for others, something shifts.
What vulnerability looks like
I tapped into the perspectives of our executive leadership team at Luma Brighter Learning to find out how they intentionally model vulnerability for their team. I found this theme: Modeling vulnerability is about consistently signaling to your team that, in this environment, honesty is safe.
The most important of those behaviors is admitting when you’re wrong. Our cofounder and chief technology officer, Scott Anderson, PhD, has watched leaders resist mistakes because they fear it will make them appear weak. His experience has been the opposite: Admitting a mistake as a leader strengthens trust rather than undermining it. He recalls when a team member accidentally sent an email to thousands of users. The client was upset, the support queue was flooded, and the team member was very upset. Scott said something simple: “Look, I fail all the time.” He watched her expression shift from rejection to acceptance. His admission didn’t undermine his authority. It changed the tone of the conversation.
Bill Condo, our engineering manager, shares that he has made just about every technical mistake imaginable—from taking down websites to misconfiguring network rules. Those experiences taught him that the instinct to ask who failed misses the point. “The better question is, where did the system let us down, and how do we close that gap before next time?” he said. “The shift from blame to learning is what strengthens trust.”
Our director of operations, Julie Decker, sees vulnerability through the accountability lens. In her experience, some of the best solutions arise when leaders are open to input and work through challenges together. “If I commit to something, I do my best to follow through, and if something changes, I communicate it. I think people are more willing to be open when they see that same openness from their leader,” she shared. People don’t expect perfection from their leaders, but they do expect honesty, and they respect leaders who own their mistakes.
When mistakes happen
Every team makes mistakes. How leaders respond shapes the culture around them.
Julie’s approach is to understand before responding. What happened? Was it a process gap, communication breakdown, unclear expectations? When leaders respond with curiosity rather than blame, they can distinguish an honest mistake from a careless one. And when team members see that, they are more willing to raise problems early.
As Scott put it, the ultimate goal for any leader is to allow their team to take ownership over their work. When team members feel safe openly talking about what went wrong, it creates the foundation for real coaching and real growth.
Trust is a competitive advantage
Championship teams and fast-growing companies make mistakes. They succeed because their people trust one another enough to learn from them.
When leaders model vulnerability—admitting what they don’t know, owning what went wrong, following through on what they promised—they create a culture where people feel safe to contribute, take ownership, and grow. If you want to know your team’s health, start by asking your leaders how they show vulnerability.
Trust is a competitive advantage. Talent might indicate potential. But trust transforms a group of individuals into a team capable of doing something extraordinary together.
Article originally published on July 17, 2026 on FleetOwner.