Fear is bad for business. It lowers morale, engagement, and ultimately performance. Consider these striking facts:
- According to Human Resource Executive magazine, one-third of U.S. workers waste at least twenty hours of time each month complaining about their bosses.
- According to a Gallup poll, lost productivity from U.S. workers who are dissatisfied with their bosses results in losses of $360 billion yearly.
- A study detailed in Orthopedic Nursing found that ninety-one percent of the 461 nurses surveyed reported being victims of verbal abuse and mistreatment. Physicians were identified as the most frequent source of the nastiness.
- A study presented in the Journal of Managerial Psychology found that people experiencing job mistreatment were twice as likely to suffer a depressed mood at work. They also reported exhaustion levels that were 33 percent higher than the rest of the workforce and had 33 percent more sleep disorders. All of these factors are associated with declines in productivity.
- A UK study on workplace bullying found that 25 percent of all bullied victims and about 20 percent of those who witness someone being bullied quit their jobs. The cost of replacing these workers is substantial.
Despite the overwhelming evidence about fear’s debilitating impacts on performance, many leaders still resort to stoking people’s fears to get work done. Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science, says, “Fear has become the primary motivator at work.”
Given how damaging fear is in the workplace, it is useful to know whether the organization you work for might be in need of more courage. In my courage-building facilitator guide, Courageous Leadership, I offer these five telltale signs that you can use to assess whether your organization is working under fear’s grip.
CYA Rules the Day: Workers spend an inordinate amount of time covering their tails and generating “proof” that they are doing their jobs. CYA often shows up in how many people are cc’d on email exchanges, when even mundane emails include a long list of cc’d recipients.
The Emperors Are Naked: Leaders are insulated from employee feedback and dangerously blind to themselves. Often the higher you go up the organizational food chain, the less performance feedback is given. Feedback almost always flows downward, keeping leaders blithely and dangerously oblivious.
Bean-Counters Rule: Financial acumen is valued more than creativity or innovation, causing decisions to be driven solely by “the numbers” versus what is in the long-term best interests of the organization. In fear-based organizations, the educational backgrounds of senior executives often disproportionately favor accounting or finance, often causing the organization to be hyper-analytical, rationalistic, and risk-averse.
People Are Hung for Making Smart Mistakes: Mistakes are punished swiftly and harshly, creating a “play it safe at all costs” environment. Workers end up hiding mistakes or, worse, blaming others for their own mistakes. When mistakes are made, the first question isn’t “How did this happen?” but “Who caused this to happen?”
Everything Is Perpetually Urgent: The work environment in fear-based organizations is fraught with urgency and anxiety. In such places, regardless of their roles, everyone seems to have the same job: firefighter! With no relative sense of prioritization, the organization loses focus and performance suffers.
Fortunately, fear, for all its badness, does have one redeeming quality. Fear is an invitation to courage. As such, fear, or more precisely the courage that fear often prompts, can help you encounter your better self. I once attended a talk given by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. During the talk, Giuliani reflected on the lessons that his father had taught him about courage and how those lessons helped him in the weeks after 9/11. Giuliani described the interwoven relationship that fear and courage have well when he said, “If you don’t have a fear, you’d better go get one. Dealing with fear is how you find your courage.”
Bill Treasurer is the author of Leaders Open Doors, which focuses on how leaders create growth through opportunity. Bill is also the author of Courage Goes to Work, an international bestselling book that introduces the concept of courage-building. He is also the author of Courageous Leadership: A Program for Using Courage to Transform the Workplace, an off-the-shelf training toolkit that organizations can use to build workplace courage. Bill’s first book, Right Risk, draws on his experiences as a professional high diver. Bill has led courage-building workshops for, among others, NASA, Accenture, CNN, PNC Bank, SPANX, Hugo Boss, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. To learn more, contact info@giantleapconsulting.com
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