Your best hire has something to hide.
I knew a man who went to church every Sunday. Coached Little League. Sat on nonprofit boards. Volunteered his time and his smile to anyone who was watching.
He was a hollow bunny.
You know the ones. The chocolate Easter bunnies that look impressive in the display case — solid, substantial, worth something. But bite into them and there’s nothing there. All shell. The outside is the entire product.
I watched this man insult his wife when he thought no one important was listening. I saw how he treated people who couldn’t do anything for him. The performance was flawless. The interior was vacant. And yet — institutions trusted him. Communities elevated him. His clean record was his currency.
We were conned.
I know a man who keeps getting passed over for promotion. As part of the interview process, candidates must attend a happy hour. Two days of evaluation, and the cocktail party is the thing that keeps undoing him.
He’s sweet. He’s wickedly smart. He’s also awkward in staged social settings — which is to say, he’s human in a room designed to reward performance.
The feedback he keeps getting? He has trouble connecting with people.
He thinks that’s code for not being liked.
He’s right.
And we’re losing him. Slowly. Promotion by promotion. Because he can’t work a room the way the hollow bunny can.
These are the systems we’ve built. And the hollow bunny keeps getting rewarded.
Nassim Taleb wrote that the person who has never sinned is less reliable than the person who has sinned only once. And the person who has made plenty of errors — though never the same error twice — is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
Read that again slowly.
We have spent generations building institutions, hiring committees, leadership pipelines, and social hierarchies designed to select for the unblemished. The clean record. The spotless resume. The person who has never publicly failed, stumbled, or confessed to anything that costs them something.
What we’ve actually done is hand power to people who are either very lucky, very sheltered, or very good at hiding. A clean record isn’t virtue. It’s evidence of never being tested.
A young man came to see me when I was Chief. He sat across from me and told me he wanted to be a police officer. Then he told me something he didn’t have to tell me — something he was terrified might disqualify him before he ever got started.
He’d attempted suicide as a teenager.
He confessed it like a man handing over a weapon. Here. I know what this might cost me. Take it anyway.
I knew immediately that I wanted him on my team.
Not in spite of what he’d survived. Because of it. Every single day, my officers encountered people in their darkest moments — people contemplating the same thing this young man had already lived through. He wouldn’t just understand that darkness academically. He’d been inside it. He’d found a way out.
His wound was his credential.
The hollow bunny — with his perfect record and his Sunday best — could never give those people what this young man could.
I stand on stages and I tell people that my father killed himself. I tell them about the times I was sabotaged by people who felt threatened by my ambition. I tell them about the moments I finally allowed myself to say three sentences I had spent years avoiding:
I’m scared.
I don’t know.
Help me.
Every time I say those words, something happens in the room. Not polite applause. Not sympathy. Connection. Real, visceral, recognition. Because every person sitting in those seats has been carrying those same sentences around privately, not saying them out loud, performing invulnerability for an audience that is also performing invulnerability.
I’m not immune to this. I know what it’s like to curate the version of yourself you want the world to see. I chase the stage. I want to matter. The performance is seductive — I understand why people choose it.
But I’ve learned that the audience never connects with my strength. They connect with my permission. Permission to be unfinished. Permission to still be figuring it out. Permission to walk into the room and lead with the wound instead of hiding it.
The hollow bunny will never give you that.
He’ll give you the appearance of solidity. The resume, the references, the image carefully constructed over decades. But when the moment comes — the real moment, the hard one, the one that requires a leader to say I don’t have the answer or I was wrong or I’m afraid — he will have nothing to draw from.
Because he’s never been there. And if he has, he buried it so deep that it’s no longer useful to anyone, including himself.
The most dangerous leaders aren’t the ones who have failed. They’re the ones who have failed and never admitted it — to themselves or to anyone else.
They’ve learned to manage the image instead of doing the work.
So here’s what I want you to think about the next time you’re deciding who to trust, who to follow, who to put in front of people who need real leadership:
Ask them what they’ve gotten wrong. Ask them what broke them. Ask them about the thing they’re not proud of.
Watch what happens.
The hollow bunny will give you a polished answer about a “challenge” that turned into a “learning opportunity.” He’ll reframe the failure before he’s even finished describing it. He’ll make sure you know he came out on top.
The person worth following will pause. And in that pause, you’ll see it — the actual cost of the actual thing. They won’t perform the lesson. They’ll just tell you what happened.
I will take the messy, the disheveled, the raw and real over the performative and polished any day.
🖤 Onward and upward,
Kristen
P.S. I wrote this for you. Tell me if I’m hitting the mark — or missing it entirely. kristen@kristenziman.com
