9 Ways to Break Through a Culture of Fear
If you and your team are finding it hard to feel secure at work - especially when the pressure to innovate, sell, and prove your worth has never been higher! Here are nine ways to break through a culture of fear inside your organization and elevate your team’s performance.
1. Get Quiet
High-performing leaders understand the importance of quiet reflection. In our fast-paced, hyper-connected world, allocating 20 minutes of your day to silent, unplugged reflection may sound impossible, but when you deliberately power down, your brain shifts from alert alpha and beta brain waves to theta waves, where relaxation, intuition, and integration of seemingly unrelated ideas can occur naturally.
2. Get Curious
Curiosity is the antidote to a fight-or-flight-or-freeze response. Leaders who meet anxious energy with genuine curiosity ask more open-ended questions and build stronger social bonds with their colleagues. They are also significantly less likely to make snap decisions based on biased assumptions. Try replacing "That won't work because..." with "What are we learning?” or “What else can we try?” and see what happens.
3. Get Candid
Teams perform better when their members feel safe to speak inconvenient truths without fear of blame, shame or retaliation. Thanks to Google’s Project Aristotle, we know that psychological safety is actually far more important than individual talent or experience. Three ways leaders can foster it are: publicly acknowledge your own mistakes, talk openly about things you are (re)thinking, and invite more structured feedback more often.
4. Demand Civility
Civility on a team of high-performers is less about exaggerated politeness and more about making sure everyone is clear on the standards of excellence and the conduct that won’t be tolerated. Leaders who address threatening communications or exclusionary behaviors directly and expeditiously not only amplify psychological safety for those on their team, they also raise the bar inside their organization.
5. Teach Perspective
When teams are more concerned with keeping their leaders happy than finding solutions to the real problems they came to work on in the first place, their performance inevitably suffers. Leaders who regularly help their teams zoom out and connect the dots between daily tasks, company values, and successful impact tend to manage less office drama and see higher levels of intrinsic motivation.
6. Normalize Fear
There is a common misconception that fear is a bad thing, but that’s not entirely true. Fear is a natural part of any development process and can also be a performance enhancer. When leaders directly acknowledge and validate their team’s fears, they create space for more nuanced conversations about it. The insight gathered can inform new rituals for moderating or channeling it into even better performance.
7. Run Experiments
Teams tasked with innovating, selling, or fundraising, are inevitably challenged to “take some risks!” Unfortunately, this phrase primes the subconscious mind to brace for danger. A more effective way to challenge your team is to request they run some well-defined experiments. Teams that chase continuous improvement never fail and they are more likely to stay focused on winning the bigger game.
8. Go Celebrate
Leaders who jump from one goal to the next without pausing to celebrate key milestones or recognize individual achievements erode team performance faster than any pay raise will get approved. (Read that twice if you need to!) Leaders who prioritize and emphasize the celebration of others - in any magnitude! - report more sustainable levels of team cohesion, commitment, and collaboration, even when pressure increases!
9. Model Recovery
Performance psychology research shows that sustainable high performance depends not on working longer and increasing rewards, but on oscillating between intense work and genuine recovery. Leaders who talk openly about the conditions they need to keep upping their game and invite their team to do the same not only support their teams more effectively, but also receive more effective support themselves.
