Fear of being replaced
Without noticing, our job security is one of the most important things on our minds. While this can be based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it is also easy to relate to when we understand we spend most of our awake time at work. Feeling safe at work is important in the life of every employee and even more so when we think about managers.
Managers and leaders, are often placed in charge of a scope where success is more complex to measure, and are in charge of team members that see themselves as growing to replace them. These managers unknowingly face their fear of being replaced, the fear that one of the their team members will become better than them and will replace them when they fail, or following a random decision made by a higher level manager. This fear might have a slight chance of becoming the reality, but in a healthy and growing company 99% of the times hiring managers and leaders will benefit from hiring team members that their skills threatens them, making this fear just an old evolutionary survival fear.
While many different organizations try to face this issue by building complex hierarchies and a ladder that managers can slowly climb, this can easily affect the manager’s daily work, their way of thought and how they work with their team members.
Symptoms (Some or all):
- Micromanagement in order to feel involved in the details.
- Hiring only junior team members.
- Requiring themselves to be the last approval step, creating an organization bottleneck.
- Avoiding facing the personal growth plans of their team members
- Avoiding days off to feel crucial to the organization.
Prescription:
Like many other personal issues, managers should be aware of this fear in them and face it. This is a normal feeling, especially for new managers. While the answer for this fear is that a manager succeeds when their team works perfectly without them, and that there are many different ways to measure managerial success (business KPIs, efficiency and quality, members satisfaction, etc), the simple truth is that fear itself doesn’t help us be better managers, but the opposite.
Being aware of the fear will allow managers to get better by avoiding the symptoms above, and send them on the journey to find how to measure their success, and eventually make them better managers.
Remedy Patterns:
- Hire people who are better than you
- Set objective KPIs to your team to measure yours and the team’s success
- Shift to be a reviewer and feedback giver roles and not a process blocker
- List all your current responsibilities and help your team members grow into doing them
- Make sure your team works perfectly and use the same process when you take time off.
