Understand Fear
The 3rd article in the 10 Steps to a Healthier Culture series.
Drive fear from the workplace. ~ Deming.
Fear impedes the creation of value. Fear stifles creativity. Fear hides in the safest of places. Even if you are a wonderful leader, there is still fear built-in to your position.
We would like to drive fear out of the workplace. Fear is counter-productive and leads to rapid turnover. The mark of any good manager or leader is staff retention. When deliberate change is happening, you can have some understandable turnover, but you shouldn’t see people leaving every week over time.
Elements in the workplace that escalate fear are: lack of clarity from leadership, changing or confusing messaging, belligerent behavior, lack of an ability to listen, being the source of all decisions, not providing actionable direction, or the inability to create an environment in which people can focus and work.
One particular fear-inducing CEO we worked with asked, “Aren’t you just coddling people?” Not hardly. Fear isn’t something that “weak people” have, it is something that arises naturally in people to ensure we don’t die. There are two general reactions to fear: lashing out or withdrawal (aka fight or flight). This comes directly from the amygdala. Many poorly performing CEOs stay in their roles a long time because they are good at engaging people’s amygdala. A scared staff person will either leave or stick around. Sticking around doesn’t mean they are loyal, it means they are too scared to leave. (Hostile working environments have the same markers as domestic abuse.)
The CEO’s question above is even deeper, though. It could only be asked through the lens of a CEO who is already afraid. For his part, the CEO induces fear because they personally are scared of having open conversations that might show weakness in their original assertions or that someone’s idea may indeed be better than theirs. In keeping with this, outwardly fear-inducing CEOs tend to yell, force decisions through, and threaten others when there is dissention. This creates organizations that do not respond well to change, do not think, but routinely engage in negative behaviors (work-to-rule, look busy without production, never bring up improvement opportunities, look for others to scare). None of those behaviors produce value.
If you’d like to promote an organization that thinks, looks for new opportunities, and produces — you will want the people in that organization to have clarity, trust in the information in the organization, and know (not feel) that they and their peers are part of the decision making / value generating structure. The brave and successful CEO creates a working organization, not an army to carry out the CEO’s orders.
Jim Benson is the creator and co-author of Personal Kanban. His other books include Why Limit WIP, Why Plans Fail, and Beyond Agile. He is a winner of the Shingo Award for Excellence in Lean Thinking and the Brickell Key Award. He teaches online at Modus Institute and consults regularly, helping clients in all verticals create working system. He regularly keynotes Agile and Lean conferences, focusing on the future of work.
