Insights from Mersina Mouhtaris on strength, vulnerability, and the discipline of dialling it up and down.
Author Maud Lindley
Some leaders build their credibility in environments that leave little room for error. Mersina Mouhtaris has spent close to thirty years in investment banking compliance, most recently as Head of Compliance Australia at RBC Capital Markets. In a recent conversation I shared with Mersina on the Mentoring Unlocked podcast, she offered a candid account of what it actually takes to lead well in a high-pressure, high-stakes environment, and why the answer is more nuanced than simply being tough enough to survive it.
Her insight challenges a long-standing assumption in corporate leadership: that strength and vulnerability sit on opposite ends of a spectrum, and that good leaders should aim to master one at the expense of the other.
The Armour Is Real, and It Has a Cost
Mersina describes her early career in investment banking plainly. It was, in her words, a combative environment. Confidence had to be worn, not just felt, and resilience was not optional. For a long time, she treated these as fixed requirements of the job, a persona to put on each morning.
But she also identified the point where that approach stopped working. Early in a leadership role, she leaned fully into being “harsh and strong”, the qualities she believed the organisation needed from her.
However, it did not bring about the high-performing team she had anticipated. In fact, it lost her the confidence of the people she was leading.
Mersina realised that the solution was not to abandon her strength. It was to stop hiding everything else that sat alongside it. A leader’s greatest strength and greatest liability are often the same trait, expressed at the wrong volume.
Mersina keeps a strengths profile with her, one she returns to when she wants to understand her own reactions in the moment. Not to diagnose herself after the fact, but to recognise, in real time, when a trait that usually serves her is working against her in a particular room, with a particular team, on a particular day.
This is a meaningfully different model of leadership development than the one many organisations still run on. It is not about identifying strengths once and deploying them consistently. It is about building the judgement to dial a trait up when the situation calls for conviction, and dial it down when the same conviction reads as inflexibility or intimidation. That judgement does not appear automatically with seniority. It is built through repeated, honest self-observation, and it is a capability that leadership development programs can prepare leaders for.
Vulnerability as a Performance Discipline, Not a Soft Skill
The word vulnerability carries baggage in corporate settings, particularly in industries built on projecting certainty. Mersina admits it did not come naturally to her, and she had to work at it deliberately over many years.
What changed her view was watching the outcomes. Telling her team plainly that she did not have all the answers, that she was working through something difficult herself, did not weaken her standing, it strengthened it. People engaged more, not less. Trust in her judgement, rather than her invincibility, is what actually held the team together during hard periods.
This is a distinction worth sitting with for anyone designing leadership capability programs. Vulnerability, framed correctly, is not about comfort. It is a mechanism for building the kind of trust that drives accountability and sustained performance, because people commit more fully to leaders they believe are being honest with them.
Authenticity Means Holding Both, Not Choosing One
One of the most interesting reflections was that Mersina did not resolve the tension between her assertive, results-driven side and her reflective, open side by picking one. She learned to hold both, and to move between them with intention.
This has practical implications for how organisations talk about leadership authenticity. It is not a single fixed personality to uncover and then perform consistently. It is the ongoing discipline of bringing the right tone to the room, and being honest enough with yourself to notice when you have got it wrong.
That honesty extends to accountability in the moment. Mersina points to a simple, repeatable behaviour that has done more for her relationships than almost anything else: naming when an interaction did not go the way she intended, taking responsibility for it, and revisiting it. Some of her strongest professional relationships today were built through the repair that followed it.
What This Means for Leadership Development
For senior HR and L&D leaders building leadership pipelines, Mersina’s experience points to a specific, trainable capability. It is the discipline of reading a situation accurately, recognising which version of yourself it calls for, and being willing to show your team the effort behind your decisions rather than only the outcome.
At Serendis and MentorKey, we see this dynamic repeatedly in the leaders we work with. The capability to dial strength up and down thoughtfully and to be genuinely open to admit when it does not land right, is rarely innate. It is developed through structured reflection, honest feedback, and mentoring relationships that give leaders the space to notice their own patterns before those patterns cost them their team.
The leaders who outperform over the long term are the ones who know precisely when to take off their armour.
Watch or listen to the full episode of Mentoring Unlocked with Mersina Mouhtaris and Maud Lindley.
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Serendis Leadership partners with organisations to design and facilitate mentoring and leadership development programs that build capability and support strategic goals. MentorKey, our leadership enablement platform, provides the structure, prompts and rhythm to sustain meaningful workplace conversations.
