The moment CVS CEO Karen Lynch realized she had to tell her personal story to change how her business worked

In her early days as the then president of Aetna, Karen S. Lynch surprised herself by talking about her mom’s suicide. Karen was leading a company town hall with 50,000-employee watching when the words just started coming out of her. They weren’t in her prepared remarks. She hadn’t told her team to expect the story. She wasn't even confident she wanted to talk about it. But at this moment, she felt it was important to open up.

Karen’s mom had struggled with mental health issues her whole life. And Karen had struggled to keep the fact — and her mom’s death by suicide when Karen was 12 — from everyone in her life: friends, managers, colleagues. She built a wall around the memory and established a career persona beyond that wall as someone who got things done but was never approachable. She was friendly but focused, ambitious but anonymous.

Until that town hall when the dam broke. And what did it was her push to get the company to focus on mental health — and her realization that this was deeply personal as well as professional. "I have a passion about mental health, and physical health, and bringing total health to the whole person," she told me. "And I decided if I wanted to get people behind me to support my mission of how we can change healthcare, I had to share my story."

In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I talked to Karen — now the CEO of retail giant CVS Health , which acquired Aetna in 2018 — about how her personal experiences with trauma and anxiety have informed her leadership style. She details a lot of it in her new book, Taking Up Space. In our This is Working chat, we went deeper into some of her discoveries, including the strategies she’s employing to integrate empathy into CVS’s culture and why she’s now a massive proponent of leaders being authentic with their teams.

Here are 5 points that stood out to me in our conversation:

1. How what it means to lead has evolved:

Karen talked about how the definition of leadership has changed dramatically over the course of her career. The image of an unshakeable, infallible leader is outdated. Today’s workforce requires a very different approach: “It's not about who you're leading. It's really more about who's following you," she said. She often asks her leaders how they are creating “followership,” which was a new concept for me — that you have to have a real way of measuring how well people are running with your vision, without you setting the pace. "A lot of times you don't lead from the front, you lead from the side and you lead from behind," she said. "And those are signs of really great leaders."

2. Vulnerability is key, but there's a time and place for it:

We've heard for years that vulnerability is now a key part of being a leader. But Karen is more nuanced about it. Vulnerability isn’t a free pass to share everything; there is a line between oversharing and making people uncomfortable —?and strategically sharing to help build a collective movement.

“You're not going to share, ‘I had a fight with my husband last night,' or whatever. But there's things that you can talk about that can make a difference… The sign of leadership is not how you're leading, it's, 'Are people following you to support your mission'? If they don't really know you, they may not follow you. And then that's a challenge if you're trying to get something done… As leaders, you need to use your voice when appropriate, and that's where the vulnerability will come in.”

3. Building an empathetic workforce requires structure:

Karen wants her team to walk in the shoes of her customers. But she doesn’t just tell her teams to show empathy, she’s implemented training practices that include things like executives simulating a day in the life of a Medicaid patient, in which they have to experience the whole process of interacting with CVS as a customer. Karen said that exercise, in particular, was enlightening for everyone: “As much as you think you know how a certain population will interact with your company, as much as you think you put the processes together, they may not always be right.”

She also has made it a habit to always ask, in every meeting, "How would our customer interact with that process? How will our customers feel?" Over time, her managers realized they needed that piece of information available at all times, because the boss was going to ask. And so empathy became built into how they worked.

4. One of the best questions you can ask is, "What do you think?"

Karen hates when people don't make decisions. As a leader, it's a key to enabling your team to work with clarity — but it's hard, particularly if you're someone who wants to be right (and who doesn't?).

"One of the things I often find with leaders and with managers is they have a difficult time making decisions, and you oftentimes get into this analysis-paralysis thing," she said. "People are going to follow people that are decisive... If you're going to lead, you've got to know what direction you're going in.

The way she forces her employees to get comfortable making decisions? She asks them a combination of three questions: "What do you think? What do you think we should do? If you had to make a decision today, what would it be?" You can't weasel out; you've got to make a call. "A lot of times the Socratic method works," she said. And it couldn't be more simple to put into practice.

5. The town hall taught her to embrace what had scared her

"I can put myself right in that standing on stage and talking about our strategy, and talking about the importance of changing the landscape of healthcare, and talking about how I'm passionate about holistic health," she said. "And I stood there and said, 'As a leader, you're not going to get people to follow you if you are not authentic and you're not real.' And it was in that moment, I said, 'I have to share my story.' And I just remember feeling like, OK, it's coming out and let's see what happens."

"Afterwards, there was a woman who reached out, lots of people reached out, but there was this one woman in particular that she just lost her son to suicide. And she said she didn't want to tell people and she was anxious about that. And she said, 'You made it okay. And I feel so much better now that I'm talking about it because maybe my story can help some other mom.' And I felt like a big weight was off my shoulder, too."

??? So... what do you think? I'd love to hear from you in the comments on how you've become a more vulnerable manager — how you walk the line between sharing enough and sharing too much. Or, if you think that's the wrong approach, let me know that, too!

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And be sure to tune into the latest This is Working podcast for an extended cut of this conversation. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

On LinkedIn’s video series This is Working, I sit down with top figures from the world of business and beyond to surface what they've learned about solving difficult problems. See more from PwC Global Chair Bob Moritz, Merck Group CEO Belén Garijo, J&J CEO Joaquin Duato, former US President Barack Obama, top executive coach Mark C. Thompson, Kellogg’s Francesca Cornelli, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva, cosmetics legend Bobbi Brown, F1’s Toto Wolff, and many more.